Robert Royston

Robert N. Royston (1918 – September 19, 2008) was one of America's most distinguished landscape architects, based in the San Francisco Bay Area of California in the United States. His design work and university teaching in the years following World War II helped define and establish the California modernism style in the post-war period. During his sixty years of professional practice Royston completed an array of award-winning projects that ranged from residential gardens to regional land use plans. He is perhaps best known for his important innovations in park design. A recent book, Modern Public Gardens: Robert Royston and the Suburban Park, details this area of his professional creativity and philosophy.

Royston was born in San Francisco, California. He grew up on a farm in the Santa Clara Valley of Northern California. As a high school student he demonstrated a talent for drawing, dramatic performance, and athletics. One teacher advised him to be either an attorney or a ballet dancer. He pursued instead his interest in design and the outdoors and upon graduation in 1936 enrolled in the program for "Landscape Design" in the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Royston's mentor, H. Leland Vaughan, allowed him to experiment on his own with the new design perspectives emerging in the innovative work of Thomas Church and the more avant-garde explorations of Daniel Kiley, Garrett Eckbo, and James Rose. Royston's interest in painting, which he continued to pursue in order to explore aesthetic principles applicable to his design work, can be traced to the studio art classes that were a part of his early education.

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