James C. Rose

James C. Rose (1913–1991) was a prominent landscape architect and author of the twentieth century. Born in rural Pennsylvania he, his mother and older sister moved to New York after his father’s death. Rose was a high school dropout, but this didn’t stop him from being accepted into Cornell University as an architecture student. Later he transferred to Harvard University as a landscape architecture major. In 1937, he was expelled because his design style didn't fit into Harvard's program. In 1938 and 1939 Rose published a series of articles containing the design experiment ideas that led to his expulsion from Harvard. He later published numerous articles and books which heavily impacted design theory and practice in the twentieth century. In 1941, Rose worked for Tuttle, Seelye, Place and Raymond in New York where he became discouraged by the limitations of large public works, and decided that working on private gardens was more suiting to his style. Despite his dislike of the institution of school, Rose would often make appearances as a guest lecturer at schools of landscape architecture and architecture. Before his death he was able to fulfill his lifelong dream of establishing a design study and landscape research center, The James Rose Center. After Rose's death from cancer in 1991, he bequeathed his home in Ridgewood to the James Rose Center.

One of Rose’s first major works while employed at Tuttle, Seelye, Place and Raymond was to design a staging area to house 30,000 men at Camp Kilmer in New Jersey. After this experience, Rose turned his focus to working on private gardens that created an intimate relationship between human beings, nature, and architecture. His designs also created a fusion of indoor and outdoor space. Most of Rose’s later works were greatly influenced by the Japanese garden style; he even adopted the religion of Zen Buddhism. The time Rose spent in Okinawa during World War II and his many subsequent visits to Japan, nurtured his fondness for Japanese gardens. Except for his home in Ridgewood not much of Rose’s later works were documented because of his spontaneous design method. His designs were always open to improvisations; they were never finished and continuously transforming form one stage to another. His designs, like his home in Ridgewood, were works in progress. Rose applied a common theory to his designs and described them as “neither landscape nor architecture, but both; neither indoors, nor outdoors, but both.” Ridgewood is Rose's most documented design and is a clear example of his theories and how he applied them to his designs.

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