Leberecht Migge

Leberecht Migge (March 30, 1881 in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) – May 30, 1935 in Worpswede) was a German landscape architect, regional planner and polemical writer, best known for the incorporation of social gardening principles in the Siedlungswesen (settlement) movement during the Weimar Republic. Renewed interest in his work in recent decades bears relevance to current concerns about sustainability.

In 1904 Migge began his career with the Gartenbau firm of Jacob Ochs of Hamburg. His tenure with Ochs primarily involved designing private gardens and estates for wealthy clients, as well as outdoor furniture and the peculiarly-German style of arbors or bowers known as Lauben. Despite such commissions, Migge began expressing his social ideals in 1909 with the publication of the pamphlet Der Hamburger Stadtpark und die Neuzeit: Die heutigen öffentlichen Garten—dienen sie in Wahrheit dem Volke? (The Hamburg City Park and Modern Times: Today’s Public Garden—do they really serve the people?) It is around this time as well that he became familiar with the American public parks movement. The influential 1911 publication Amerikanische Parkanlangen by Werner Hegemann contains numerous contemporary German gardens modeled in the American style—all designed by Migge.

Feeling increasingly dissatisfied designing for the wealthy, Migge left Ochs’ employ in 1913 and began working on public parks (Volksparks). Migge viewed the prototype of the English landscape garden, a style common in Germany since its importation in the late 18th century (as evidenced by the Englischer Garten in Munich and the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm), as merely a bourgeois aesthetic ideal for urban green spaces, inadequate for the needs of the working classes inhabiting the increasingly crowded cities.

His 1913 book, Die Gartenkultur des XX.Jahrhunderts (The Garden Culture of the 20th Century), explains that all higher garden types came from utility gardens based on ancient basic geometric forms, and that the form of the naturalistic garden, like that of the contemporary public park, was the result of decadent cultural conditions arising from industrialization. Through historical development, all landscape types came from this original, geometric ur-type—a garden plot for growing food.

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