Arthur Edwin Bye

Arthur Edwin "Ed" Bye (1919-2001) was an American landscape architect born in the Netherlands.

Bye was born on August 25, 1919, in Arnhem to a Dutch mother and American father, who were both art historians. He moved to America at a young age and went on to study horticulture at Penn State University. It was as a horticulture student that Bye was first exposed to the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Bye admired how Wright’s designs reflected native prairie landscapes. Another of Bye’s contemporaries was the Danish landscape architect, Jens Jensen, who expressed local ecology in his landscapes.

After graduating in 1942, Bye worked briefly with the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service before opening his own landscape architecture firm: A. E. Bye & Associates in Greenwich, CT. As a landscape architect, Bye’s designs were comparable to the work of Wright and Jensen as they were created based on the local ecology and frequently inspired by prairies. Many of his contemporaries were not focused on local conditions and native plants, instead favoring exotic species and foreign garden types. Bye’s work is also said to have been strongly influenced by the 18th century English garden aesthetics of Humphry Repton.

Bye’s interpretation of the landscape was explored in many ways. One of his interests was photography. Bye expressed his fascination with the natural landscape in the form of photograph essays. Over the span of 40 years, he took more than 40,000 photographs of the landscape and would assign a word to describe the mood or quality that he felt it represented and/or evoked. Through these types of explorations, Bye established criteria for how to create natural landscapes. In complexity, “the calculated opposition of hard and soft, dark and light, [through which] we can imitate the complexity of a natural landscape”. He also used other words such as “humor”, “whimsy”, “serenity”, “mystery”, “brittleness”, “cleanness”, and “elegance”.

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