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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. ==Early life== 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. While working his way through college, Royston was employed part-time in the office of Thomas Church and upon graduation in 1940 became a full-time employee. At the time Church was expanding his practice, which had been centered primarily on residential gardens, to include the design of larger-scale planned residential communities and college campuses. Young Royston was given major responsibilities on such San Francisco projects as the Valencia Gardens Housing Project in the Mission District (by architect William Wurster), the Potrero Hill Housing project, and the large Park Merced Apartment complex near the Pacific Ocean. He also was an early member of 'Telesis', an informal group of designers concerned with environmental problems of the San Francisco Bay Area. Here he met several of the architects he was later to collaborate with on various projects as well as his future professional partner, Garrett Eckbo. With the outbreak of World War II, Royston volunteered for the Navy and served as a junior officer in the Pacific theatre. In his spare time aboard ship, Royston experimented with design ideas, building models of residential gardens and creating jewelry out of scrap materials. In 1945 Royston returned to the Bay Area and accepted Garrett Eckbo's invitation to form a partnership with him and landscape architect Edward Williams. The new firm, Eckbo, Royston, and Williams, eventually established offices in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In 1947 Royston accepted a teaching position at the University of California Berkeley while continuing his professional practice. His students included both architects and landscape architects. His teaching career at Berkeley ended in 1951 when he resigned after refusing to sign a loyalty oath. Soon after leaving Berkeley, he accepted a part-time position at Stanford University and later at North Carolina State University. Over the course of his career he taught and lectured at over twenty-five colleges and universities in the United States. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Robert Royston」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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