About
Robert Leech is a retired landscape architect who lives in Berkeley, California. He worked for a number of landscape architecture firms in the San Francisco Bay Area for twelve years before starting his own practice in 1992, Studio LARC. He has contributed to a wide range of projects, planning and designing gardens, parks, housing developments and urban spaces. Over the past four decades, outside of this professional practice, he has been experimenting with diverse forms of landscape art, including labyrinths, fountains and topiary. This website showcases some of this landscape art.
More recently, Leech has taken up abstract landscape painting. Influenced by a mixture of abstract painting and garden design, the paintings reimagine common shapes, forms and features of gardens and landscapes. They are playful pictures based on these geometric motifs, icons and tropes, whimsical compositions bordering on surreal. Many of the paintings, topiaries and earlier projects explore curious aspects of landscape architecture, creating wide-ranging artworks that try to consolidate objects and spaces while indulging in humor and self-expression.
Leech has also written essays on the work of landscape architects Frederick Law Olmsted, Thomas Church and Garrett Eckbo, and artists Paul Klee and Jeff Koons. In 1987 he was awarded the ASLA Bradford Williams Medal for an article published in Landscape Architecture Magazine. “The First Dilemma” was an account of the historic argument between Olmsted and his partner, Calvert Vaux, over the title and terms of the profession of landscape architecture. The unpublished essays include a piece on Koons’ two spectacular topiaries, “Puppy” and “Split-Rocker.” More recently, he wrote an essay on the first garden Church designed for Jerd Suillivan, the first modernist garden built in North America. “The Diagonal Garden” is an expanded version of a term paper he wrote in 1994 while enrolled in the MLA program at UC Berkeley.
In the 1970s he attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where he majored in painting and filmmaking, and UC Berkeley, from which he graduated in 1980 with a BA degree in landscape architecture.
Contact: robertleech3@gmail.com