Beatrix Farrand served as Consulting Landscape Gardener to Vassar College from 1925-1929. Although she is well known for her institutional designs—an unusual practice for a woman at the time—her important campus work has received scant study, beyond her designs for Princeton and Yale. Drawing on Farrand’s archives at Berkeley and a rich trove of surviving materials at Vassar, this talk presents her working processes and projects for the Vassar campus. Most significantly, she established the Vassar arboretum, conceiving it to comprise the entire campus: she mixed formal and informal design elements, and native and foreign species, to create a beautiful setting that would serve the instructional needs of students and faculty—a notion that has come to be central to Vassar’s identity.
Vassar was Farrand’s one opportunity to work at a women’s college, and she came to campus during a significant period for women and landscape, on the grounds and in the curriculum. Chair of Botany and pioneering ecologist Edith Roberts was fostering progressive programs in native plant ecology and landscape architecture—efforts that reformed young women’s training and career prospects, and made Vassar an early center for women and landscape. But all these projects also encountered resistance, so this narrative is one of progressive ideas, both realized and thwarted.
Yvonne Elet is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at Vassar. Her research and publications focus on integrated designs for architecture and landscape, from Italian Renaissance villas to twentieth century American estates, and on designers from Raphael to Farrand.
Her research has been has published in several books and numerous scholarly articles, and she has received grants for her research from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Mellon Foundation at the Frick Collection, the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Washington, DC, the Getty Research Institute in the History of Art and Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
At Vassar, she teaches courses on Italian art, architecture, landscape, and urbanism of the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, as well as the Vassar Campus and Springside, where she currently serves on the Board of Directors. She also serves as the faculty co-chair of Vassar’s Arboretum Committee. Together with students, she created the website Vassar Campus History, a digital repository for ongoing research on the history of the college’s architecture, landscape, and soundscape.
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