Journal of the Society of Architectural

Walking through Dumbarton Oaks Early Twentieth-century Bourgeois Bodily Techniques and Kinesthetic Experience of Landscape Author(syf 5 R E L Q 9 H G H r Source: Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Vol. 72, No. 1 (March 2013yf S S . 5-27 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society of Architectural Historians Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jsah.2013.72.1.5 Accessed: 30-08-2017 00:25 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms Society of Architectural Historians, University of California Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms r o b i n v e d e rPennsylvania State University, Harrisburg Walking through Dumbarton Oaks Early Twentieth-centur y Bourgeois Bodily Techniques and K inesthetic Experience of Landscape D umbarton Oaks is known today as a rare surviving masterpiece of early twentieth-century American country-estate landscape architecture. It has been documented and continuously maintained since the 1920s (Figure 1).

1 It is proposed here that when seen in the contexts of kinesthetic practices, physiological psychology, and related design theories, the history of the garden’s concep- tion, construction, and use elucidates period aesthetics of bodily movement in the built environment. Of broader sig- nificance for the fields of landscape and architectural history, this study demonstrates approaches for investigating kines- thetic experience in designed environments in this period and beyond. Conventional approaches to understanding movement through landscapes, namely choreography (the designer’s intention) and performance (the user’s reception), are supplemented here with the history of the body, revealing period kinesthetic concepts in landscape design and use. Located in Washington, D.C., the land and the nineteenth-century brick mansion that comprise Dumbar- t on Oaks were purchased in 1920 by Robert Woods Bliss (1875–1962) and his wife Mildred Barnes Bliss (1879–1969).

Her inherited wealth, traceable to her father’s investments in pharmaceuticals, made their lives comfortable, and his career in foreign diplomacy made it peripatetic. The estate was to be their “country house in the city,” a place for retire- ment. 2 Set on a knoll in upper Georgetown, the site and its wooded acreage offered the promise of seclusion and refreshment for the Blisses and their guests. They altered the existing house to expand its entertainment capacities and emphasize its Georgian-style features, but it was landscape gardener Beatrix Farrand’s transformation of the farm grounds, spreading out north and east of the house, that was truly spectacular. Despite being abroad throughout the first decade of construction, the garden became Mildred Bliss’s lifelong project and she remained an interested partner to Farrand, working with her on the initial design and later alterations from 1922 until the late 1940s. Other later con- tributors include Ruth Havey, Robert Patterson, Alden Hopkins, and Ralph Griswold. The garden combines ele- ments from the Italian Renaissance and eighteenth-century British Georgian naturalistic landscapes, as revised accord- ing to late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century aesthet- ics. Together, Bliss and Farrand planned the Dumbarton Oaks gardens with elements taken from the Arts and Crafts designs of Gertrude Jekyll and William Robinson, and the Italianate principles described by Charles Platt and Edith Wharton. Previous historians have documented these ante- cedents quite thoroughly. 3 In contrast, this study of the Dumbarton Oaks landscape concerns conditions for Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 72, no. 1 (March 2013), 5–27. ISSN 0037-9808, electronic ISSN 2150-5926. © 2013 by the Society of Architectural Histo r ians.

All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce a rticle content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions web- site, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jsah.2013.72.1.5.

This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 6 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 designed environments, and in the first half of this article I l ook through them at the design and use of steps and landings at Dumbarton Oaks. In the second half of the arti- cle, I consider the additional meanings that can be discerned when the history of the body brings focus to analyses of landscape phenomenology. Returning first to the question of how specific users (owners, gardeners, and private and public guests) perform movement through space, I offer a third category of analysis, the early twentieth-century American “bodily techniques” for walking in Dumbarton Oaks and similar spaces. Here clothing, shoes, posture, and specific ways of moving legs and placing feet provide a snapshot of practices and beliefs about socially constructed walks and walkers. Then, keeping the period’s interest in kinesthetic awareness in mind, I discuss the “physiological walking in the garden, and argues that its design and use demonstrate period concerns with the muscular kinesthetics of landscape experience.

This article explores four frames for understanding the kinesthetic experience of walking through landscape: cho- reography, performance, bodily techniques, and physiologi- cal aesthetics. The first category, choreography, appeared in landscape architecture discourse in the mid-twentieth cen- tury and is used today to signify the designer’s script for how users will move through space. The second, performance, is taken here from the intersection of the fields of cultural geography and dance history, where it refers to the contin- gent and individualized reception of such scripts by bodies that may refuse to behave. These are useful conceptual frames for thinking about the experience of moving through Figure 1 Ernest Clegg, Dumbarton Oaks, Topographical Map, 1935 (digitally recolorized in 2007; HC.P.1935.01 [W.C.], © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, House Collection, Washington, D.C.) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 7 aesthetics” that inform and explain Farrand’s choreographic concern with the “rhythm of climbing” stairs in the garden.

Here my methodological argument—that the history of the body is a necessary component for an historical under - s tanding of human movement in designed landscapes— reveals its payload. “Physiological aesthetics,” when considered as a conceptual frame like the other three terms outlined here, suggests attention to how bodily experience is aestheticized in ways that vary by time, place, and culture.

But, in the early 1900s, this term also referred to a field of inquiry where physiological psychology and philosophical aesthetics joined forces, and significantly contributed to for- mal concerns in several areas of artistic activity. The histori- cal argument comes to the fore in this final section of the e ssay: kinesthetic-awareness techniques informed the production and consumption of early twentieth-century American landscape architecture.

The Methodological Field Landscape architecture historians are increasingly paying attention to movement in the garden, both as intended by the designer and as modified by users. Findings have focused on the personal or (presumed) universal responses invoked by the space itself, specifically by the physical elements that direct movement and shape visual experience, as they fit into the semiotics of the culture that produced the designed space. At the “Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion” colloquium, hosted by Harvard University’s Gar- den and Landscape Studies program at Dumbarton Oaks in 2 000, contributors paid attention to how movement through a garden facilitates sensory, emotional, and intel- lectual feelings, and what those might mean in various cul- tures. John Dixon Hunt, for instance, offered the procession, stroll, and ramble as three different ways of experiencing landscape, and argued that these modes are as much deter- mined by the visitor’s intentions as by the physical charac- teristics of a place. 4 Taking another approach, Michel Conan described how garden users move through designed spaces, narrow and wide, dark and light, rough and smooth topo - graphies, encountering expected and unexpected views that create, confirm, or alter cultural narratives. 5 In these con- texts, the “feeling” of movement is malleable. The term may include direction and pace, but predominantly signifies emotional and intellectual responses to changing views of the environment. If understanding motion is the target, it is useful to begin by acknowledging that bodily experience is not l imited to the classical western five senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, and furthermore, that sensory experience is historically constructed. 6 Małgorzata Szafra ska brings to o ur attention Renaissance gardens designed to support the beliefs that walking in the shade was healthy, whereas “walking in the sun is bad for the brain and is the cause of many ailments” (in the words of Vincenzo Scamozzi, 1615). 7 This presents an opportunity, I contend, to investigate shaded walkways in tandem with period theories and descriptions of how direct exposure to or protection from light and heat feels on the skin or in the body’s internal tem- perature. A study of walking meditations in Japanese Zen Buddhist shrine gardens might consider monks’ techniques for walking over uneven surfaces in voluminous robes.

“Viewing in repose” and “viewing in motion,” a central dis- tinction in medieval Chinese gardens, invites consideration of what constitutes physical repose and motion as well as how they facilitate viewing. Eugene Y. Wang also approaches this topic in his essay “Watching the Steps” by noting the relative “torpor” of sitting and “arous[al]” of walking medi- tations.

8 We are left to wonder: what were the physical p ostures, gestures, and identifying sensations of “torpor” and “arousal”; how would one recognize it if represented in an image or a text? Historians may be less likely to analyze such elements when meditation or visual stimulation were the goals stated by a garden’s producers tending to see the former as merely the means to the latter, rather than a cen- tral concern worthy of attention. The stated optical, mental, or spiritual goals of the culture under investigation do not make such questions of somatic experience irrelevant to the historian’s process of discovery. Bodily experience is, as Timothy O’Sullivan has said of walking in particular, “aggressively naturalized” in retrospect, and thus a ripe sub- ject for deconstruction. 9 In his 2006 call for a “poetics of landscape,” Conan fur- ther explores the possibilities of analyzing landscape in phe- nomenological terms, that is: the embodied encounter with gardens as physically and sensually stimulating spaces. Doing so, he believed, did not mean sacrificing historic specificity or awareness of social constructions of identity or strategies of power. 10 As it stands, the field of landscape studies pre- dominantly divides between phenomenologists and post- structural historians and theorists. The former argue for subjective experience and against Marxist cultural-studies interpretations of landscape and the attendant interest in social systems of power articulated through vision. The latter analyze motion through landscapes in terms of historically situated systems of representation and ideology. They see the phenomenological approach as too invested in individual agency, romantic nostalgia for pre-modern and non-Western “primitivism,” and essentialist narratives that are insuffi- ciently attentive to political, social, and economic conditions This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 8 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 and systems of meaning. Cultural geographer John Wylie shares Conan’s position that this tension need not be irrec- oncilable. “Perhaps the defining feature of recent landscape writing by UK cultural geographers,” Wylie asserts, “is that it is very much written in the light of both phenomenological understanding of the self as embodied and of-the-world and poststructural understandings of selfhood as contingent, fractured, multiple and in various ways historically and cul- turally constituted.” 11 This essay joins with Conan’s and Wiley’s mission of approaching landscape studies with a critical and historicized phenomenology. Looking closely at the history of the body in relation to the history of landscape can open up more closely historicized analyses of bodily experience of designed spaces. Consequently, the reasons for focusing on kinesthesia in this essay are both historical and methodological. Kines- thesia garnered particular attention in early twentieth- c entury transatlantic culture and aesthetic theory. The history of how its meanings have changed over time facili- tates a critique of ahistoric phenomenological approaches to landscape architecture and by extension, other designed and natural environments as well. In today’s common parlance, kinesthesia is understood to signal how motion through three-dimensional space alters one’s physiological sense of position and orientation. Aware- ness of interior and invisible physiological movement, ten- sion, and relaxation is as much a part of kinesthesia as is awareness of externally measurable factors such as speed and direction. According to Edwin G. Boring, the first authorita- tive historian of (experimental) physiological psychology, between 1850 and 1920 kinesthesia was central to the field’s research. The term “kinaesthetic” was introduced in 1880 to d escribe the muscular “sense of movement,” understood to include tendons and joints as well. In 1906, English neuro - l ogist Charles Sherrington coined the term “proprioception,” clarifying that it included the function and awareness of body position, equilibrium, tension, and movement, experienced through neuro-muscular and vestibular systems. 12 While “introspective” experimental psychologists in Germany and the United States believed kinesthesia united the five tradi- tional exterior senses into perception, Sherrington’s explana- tion of proprioception constrained its function to a localized sense of cell communication between nerve and muscle receptors. Conceptually, this was a major demotion, and con- tributed, along with the rise of behavioral psychology, to the decline of introspective kinesthestic research. 13 In the late 1970s, James J. Gibson, a perceptual psychologist, resur- rected discussions of kinesthesia by describing movement as a n interaction between the physical characteristics of a space and the possible human actions therein. Whether or not individuals perceive or perform such actions, he argued, physical environments do not determine movement. Rather, they provide interactive opportunities: affordances. While these ideas remain current in medical contexts, they are less widely recognized in histories of art, architecture, and design. 14 Cultural geographers have engaged with such ideas since the 1960s, notably considering the experience of m ovement in road and sidewalk culture. Following pheno - m enological philosophers Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who each in their own way articulated modes through which humans experience the self’s relation to the environment primarily through movement in space, landscape architects, theorists, and historians have also paid attention to how landscapes afford action, and how visual and tactile clues communicate such affordances to users, leading to discussions of “dynamic” landscapes. Even so, in the last forty years, the visual experience of movement—the “view from the road”—has received more attention than the kin- esthetic sensation and perception of movement—the pro- prioceptive feel of the road, which may include sensations like the passive tactile sense of gravel underfoot and the active muscular strain of resisting gravitational pull while driving a car around a corner. 15 Choreography In current landscape design, choreography refers to the designer’s program for how users will move through space.

This usage can be traced to Lawrence Halprin’s 1949 essay “The Choreography of Gardens.” 16 His original context was modern dance’s engagement with theories of kines- thetic empathy. 17 As applied within landscape studies today, the term choreography is a location’s assembly of affordances.

Affordances such as circulation paths, points of access, viewing platforms, paving materials, and the alternation between sunny or shaded, colorful or austere, and open or enclosed spaces all participate in a garden’s choreography by inviting, or in Gibson’s term affording, particular direc- tions, speeds, and types of bodily movement. For instance, for historian John Beardsley, in Halprin’s urban fountains “choreographed movement can enhance perception.” Forecourt Fountain in Portland, Oregon “is designed to provide compelling experiences of exploration, shelter, and danger: . . . stairs to climb, waterfalls to hide behind, grot- toes to enter, ledges to perch on, pools to wade in. It encourages physical participation and, through that, an intensified emotional and psychological experience.” 18 These are the affordances of Halprin’s extant landscape choreography, as perceived and articulated in 2009. This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 9 Topographically, the terraces broke up the climb, but the climb also broke up the terraces (Figure 4). In September 1922, Farrand realized that the stairs from the Orangery to the Rose Garden had to divide the upper terrace in two, or else the projecting steps would “cut off the base of the pilas- ters and shorten them far too much for beauty . . . the more the height of the pilasters can be emphasized the better they are going to look.” Making this aesthetic improvement pre- sented a kinesthetic problem. “You and I are both agreed,” Farrand wrote, “that the steps must be easy and dignified, and for out of doors one cannot skimp on scale; therefore a tread 14 or 15 inches wide and a rise of not more than 6 or 6½ inches is desirable. A skimpy tread of 12 in which might serve inside a house looks very inadequate and mean in com- parison with the outdoor scale.” 25 The final design, as it sur- vives today, is a flight of ten limestone steps from the Orangery to the Box and Urn Terraces, a landing of 9 feet 8 i nches, followed by a flight of 20 steps to the Rose Garden. It appears that while these stairs worked topographically and visually, Farrand deemed the kinesthetics of climbing or descending the steps to be unsatisfying, according to com- ments in the Plant Book, a combination of design manifesto and maintenance plan she prepared between 1941 and 1944.

There she commented on the importance of easy riser-tread proportions, and of well-spaced landings in order to avoid “one wearisome continuous climb.” 26 In the chapter “The Stairway East of the Orangery,” she apologetically recites the reasons already given for the “conspicuously narrow terraces and their accompanying flights of steps,” and the “high walls” that separate the levels, as unavoidable compromises. 27 Then, without acknowledging the number of steps on this stairway—ten, a landing, then twenty—she gives the follow- ing direction: It was also established as a general principle that, where pos- sible, no flights of more than six steps should be built without a landing between the first and the next run of another six or eight steps. These landings have been made longer than three feet wherever possible, in order to give rest to the climber by a change and a pace between the series of rising runs. The runs have been constructed either of odd or even numbers. In other words, a flight of steps which starts out with an even-number of steps in its runs, is continued throughout with even- n umbered steps. This makes the rhythm of climbing less wearisome than if added paces have to be made on each landing in order to start the new set of steps keeping the same rhythm of right or left foot used on the first step of the first flight. 28 An extant manuscript shows that Farrand significantly edited the final sentence in order to emphasize the importance of An analysis of how specific affordances at Dumbarton Oaks might have been perceived during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s shows that bodily responses to choreography can be historicized. Working in collaboration with owner Mil- dred Bliss, designer Beatrix Farrand choreographed where and how they, their guests, and their gardeners walked through Dumbarton Oaks. Farrand’s aunt, Edith Wharton, identified in her Italian Villas and Their Gardens that one of the secrets of the Italian garden is a harmonious integration of buildings, gardens, and landscape. 19 Farrand had assisted Wharton with the design of her estate, The Mount, which demonstrated these principles and Wharton helped to launch her niece’s career by introducing her to wealthy cli- ents, such as her friend Mildred Bliss. Farrand later wrote to her aunt of Bliss’s pleasure from knowing that Wharton approved of Dumbarton Oaks, even though she saw it only through photographs. 20 Accomplishing such environmental design harmony at Dumbarton Oaks was particularly chal- lenging because of the substantial slopes from the north and east sides of the house. Bliss referred to it as “the lay of the incurable land.” 21 The topography made the garden more Italianate in character, but also presented some circulation challenges. In Farrand’s initial June 1922 proposal to Mil- dred Bliss, she considered the grading from the Orangery at the east end of the house down to the pool below to be the “hardest problem.” 22 With the intention of developing gar- den rooms, they agreed on a series of terraces, but after receiving the topographical survey in early July, Farrand wrote: “The fall of the land between the end of the Orangery and the water level of the pool is incredible. There is a drop of over forty feet which makes our terraces quite an amusing study” (Figure 2). 23 Providing access while creating an aes- thetically pleasing environment would entail a number of compromises for the garden choreography. Building the large and level Rose Garden without dis- turbing the existing adjacent beech and elm trees was their first priority. To do this on the steep slope, they established four levels of terracing between the house and Lovers’ Lane Pool below (Figure 3). On either side of the Rose Garden were narrow terraces that transitioned to less formal spaces.

A formal box garden offered a quieting intermezzo between the vine-covered Orangery and Beech Terrace above and the elaborate Rose Garden below. Another set of terraces to the east, now known as the Fountain and Arbor Terraces, were first filled with beds for flowers and herbs, and then altered to combine grassy areas with more controlled planting bor- ders. This overlooked the pool, which pedestrians reached most easily by the brick path leading from the south end of the Fountain Terrace toward the Lovers’ Lane Pool, trans- formed into a woodland amphitheater. 24 This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 10 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 rhythm and clarify the choreographic detail that users should ascend or descend each set of stairs with the same starting foot. 29 It is hard to say at what point in the 1920s Farrand decided on this formula, but it was certainly after the first steep staircase was built and before the majestic and gradual Box Walk, which provides the complementary north-south axis, was completed. 30 A detailed examination of the draw- ings and installation of the Dumbarton Oaks steps and land- ings reveals how the architectural choreography evolved and how it fit into period design discourse. As the built elements exist today, the original formal gardens contain only three staircases that conform to F arrand’s recommendations for consistently odd- or even- n umbered flights, and no more than eight risers between landings. S urviving blueline prints by civil engineer James Berrall show that two of these staircases—the Box Walk and the stairs between Cherry Hill and the Prunus Walk—were designed by 1931 (Figure 5). Farrand’s efforts to create this structuring environment are most evident in her design process for the B ox Walk. Disregarding the set of seven concrete steps that properly belongs to the Urn Terrace, the Box Walk, which extends down the slope northeast of the house, now exists as seven sets of stairs, four steps to each set, alternating with patterned brick ramps. Originally, it had brick risers with grass treads and ramps (Figure 6). Through the mid- 1920s Farrand sketched out at least three other solutions.

In A pril 1923 she suggested a sequence of four, eight, four, four, and eight steps, going downhill south to north, with landings between each run (Figure 7). In March 1925 it was six, ten, six, six, ten. A year later she drew a plan that divided the steps into four, seven, four, four, and eight steps. Berrall’s plan shows that by November 1931, they had settled on the Figure 2 J ames Berrall, “Topographical Map of Property Belonging to Robert Woods Bliss, Esq.,” 5 July 1922 (cropped reverse polarity image from a microfilm copy of the cyanotype; LA.GD.A1.01, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C., as reproduced in the Dumbarton Oaks Cultural Landscape Report [© Copyright—Trustees for Harvard University—2002], Figure 2.5) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 1 1 Figure 3 B eatrix Farrand, “Terraced Garden,” 23 Nov. 1922; rev. ed. 6 Mar. 1923, blueprint (digitally enhanced for reverse polarity 2012; LA.GD.N 3.01, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) Figure 4 Photographer unknown, Axial view of the stone walk and stairs leading west from Rose Garden to Orangery, 1923 (LA.

GP 35.11, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 12 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 Figure 5 J ames Berrall, “Map of Property Belonging to Robert Woods Bliss, Esq.,” 14 April 1930, rev. 2 Nov.1931 (cropped re verse polarity image of original blueprint 2012; AR.AP. GG.SP.006, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Archives, Washington, D.C.) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 13 Figure 6 B ox Walk looking south, July 1924 or 1925, photograph (LA.GP.15.5, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) Figure 7 B eatrix Farrand, “Box Walk leading north from Terrace ‘B’,” 16 April 1923, drawing (digitally enhanced, 2012; LA.GD. K3.02, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 14 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 cadence now in place that punctuates the Box Walk’s long, stepped ramp with six sets of four steps (see Figure 5). 31 Stairs are the most hazardous of all architectural fea- tures, and consequently can make bodies conform or risk injury. Architectural historians James Marston Fitch, John Templer, and Paul Corcoran found that “[t]he pedestrian encounters stairs that are distinctly uncomfortable if not dangerous—not because they are inadequately maintained or badly eroded but because the geometry of their design does not match the natural human gait.” Writing for Scientific American in 1974, Fitch and his co-authors reviewed earlier stair-design theories and provided their own metrics for how speed, length of stride, and energy expenditure vary accord- ing to angle of pitch, riser-to-tread ratio, ascent or descent, sex, and footwear. Stair safety was their primary concern.

Like others before them, they tried to estimate standard affordances that could in turn facilitate and limit architec- ture’s choreographic possibilities, so that visually pleasing stairs could be kinesthetically comfortable as well. Their concern with biological variation and “cultural restraint[s]” introduce issues I address in the upcoming sections on kin- esthetic performance and bodily techniques. 32 Performance In setting out her rules for stairs, Farrand was attending to what she believed would be a comfortable rhythm of exer- tion and rest for the garden walker, and she was asserting choreographic control. Her perspective puts great faith in t he designer’s ability to pace the walker, not unlike how a trainer paces a horse, by creating conditions that direct the l ength of the walker’s stride and facilitate a pattern of initiating movement with the same foot. The concept of choreography provided this essay’s first frame for under- standing the kinesthetic experience of walking at Dumbar- ton Oaks; this section contrasts designers’ (Farrand and others) attention to how stairs, as climbing affordances, will dictate and be received by walkers, sometimes unpredict- ably. In the same way that each dancer may perform chore- ography differently, each garden pedestrian would not follow the landscape architect’s plan precisely. Cultural geographers describe this discrepancy as the difference between choreography and performance, taking “perfor- mance” to be a single act (not the “performance” of a reified social identity as theorized by Judith Butler). 33 Despite designers’ intentions, few humans conform to a predictable stride, and most of us walk differently when we are in a hurry or in conversation, tired, sight-seeing, injured, or fragile. The affordances—the physical characteristics of a s pace that determine the range of possible actions—are neither universal nor consistent for a single person. Just as visual and verbal representations can be consumed with dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings, performers within a scripted space may perform their reception with or a gainst the designer’s choreography. 34 Going off-path is an oppositional act, in response to which owners/designers may revise and redirect movement. Dumbarton Oaks offers a case study of this tension between the designer’s attention to the kinesthesia of movement and walkers’ performed reception. In the Plant Book , Farrand suggested that within a long ascent, a minimum distance of 3 feet was necessary for each landing “to give rest to the climber by a change and a pace between the series of rising runs.” When combined with a consistently odd or even number of risers, these features “mak[e] the rhythm of climbing less wearisome than if added paces have to be made on each landing in order to start the new set of steps keeping the same rhythm of right or left foot used on the first step of the first flight.” 35 Stairs, like stepping stones, tend to be taken one at a time, thus establishing a standard length of tread that can also set walking rhythm.

Most of the stairs at Dumbarton Oaks have 6-inch risers and 15-inch treads, with the exception of the Box Walk’s more generously paced 20-inch tread, but the landings are irregu- lar and do not obviously conform to period standards of an average 24-inch stride for smaller adults, a 30-inch military stride, and a yard or more for the long-legged. 36 Landings, particularly those that are curved or at right angles or that provide a bench or overlook, will alter pacing, as will sloped surfaces, because one’s paces are generally shorter ascending a ramp than descending. It becomes a bit more plausible to see how Farrand’s ideas about rhythmic walking may have shaped design when the landings occur in straight corridors such as the Box Walk or the staircase between Prunus Walk and Cherry Hill (see Figures 5, 6, 7). 37 Even with a regular- ized landing length, pedestrians’ strides also would have to be uniform in order for the designer to determine number of paces per landing and thus guarantee that they would step up or down every time with their dominant starting foot, whether right or left. Farrand’s interest in how hardscaping relates to stride length and kinesthetic comfort was not unusual. In the 1910s and 1920s, the journal Landscape Architecture, which repre- sented the standards of the American Society of Landscape Architects, published a number of essays on the best propor- tions for stairs and stepped ramps. The writers agreed that most people preferred ramps over stairs and, in an early nod to disability accommodations, suggested that ramps should be employed unless there was a distinct disincentive such as “the necessities of the design or as a frank barrier to keep This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 15 to respond to landscape design by refusing to follow direc- tion. Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., co-director of the period’s dominant landscape architecture firm, offered an alternate explanation for ramp-preference that stressed variations in gait. He noted that step-climbers were more likely to accept imposed rhythms on size of stride when stairs were obvi- ously necessary because the grading was relatively steep.

The milder the grade, the less tolerant pedestrians were likely to be: “On stairs of very gentle slope the inconve- nience both to short-steppers and to long-steppers of mak- ing this accommodation becomes very irksome” because where it is not evident that the stairs are necessary, the “interference with the individual’s normal length of stride in baby carriages from certain paths.” 38 In 1915, Robert Wheel- wright argued that most people prefer ramps over stairs, particularly if the length of each ramp is spaced to accom- modate a comfortable number of strides. Contrary to Far- rand’s position, Wheelwright felt that it was easier to alternate legs on stair risers. To accomplish that, he recom- mended spacing ramps (and by implication, landings) so that the pedestrian takes either one or three approximately 26-inch strides between stairs (Figure 8). 39 Others saw such choreography as a Procrustean bed that forced uncomfortable compliance to one-size- ( d oes- not)-fit-all architecture. 40 In such circumstances, pedestri- ans exerted the live performer’s option to alter choreography, Figure 8 R obert Wheelwright, “Notes on Stepped Ramps in Italy” (from Landscape Architecture 5, no. 3 [April 1915], 135) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 16 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 walking becomes more noticeable.” 41 Olmsted’s protest was first published in 1911, and had a lasting effect on the field, evidenced by prominent citations and a sequel essay. In 1928 he elaborated on the individual physiological and psycho- logical conditions that could alter stride: “the build of the individuals, their vigor, their accidentally acquired habits, and their momentary impulses toward haste and effort or toward leisureliness and ease.” These elements shape walk- ers’ kinesthetic performances within landscapes. Olmsted also noted that if the choreography was too uncomfortable, then visitors were likely to go off-path: “they will be tempted to turn aside from the steps and walk, or run, up or down the smooth earth bank alongside, if there be one, on which they are free to stride as long or as short as they choose. Many of them do so to the great annoyance of the maintenance men.” 42 Such oppositional “readings” that walkers perform with their feet can reciprocally shape choreography by establishing desire lines worn into the lawn or requiring revised affordances. After Dumbarton Oaks opened to the public in 1941, discrepancies between the choreography and the garden visitors’ performances appeared quickly. 43 The number of guests, their tendency to veer off paths, and the variable needs of their bodies became a concern that necessitated physical alterations. Between 1922 and 1932, Bliss and Far- rand planned the garden for private use. After that, the Blisses knew they wanted to give the estate to Harvard, to become a center for Byzantine studies where scholars could think great thoughts while gazing out at the garden. But the garden wasn’t to be an empty vessel for scholars’ imagina- tions. Rather: “training in understanding outdoor beauty should be recognized as a vital part of the student’s life at Dumbarton Oaks. The compositions seen from the win- dows at which they may study, and the quiet infiltration and daily familiarity with garden scenes must be important.” 44 For the general public, garden clubs, birders, art students, and landscape architects, the gardens were of immediate interest. Several times in the early 1940s, the Administra- tive Committee allowed groups to come in by special arrangement for guided tours; by the end of 1944, the num- ber of guests clamoring to see the gardens, house, and col- lection called for action. 45 In the beginning, tours were guided and by appointment only. The guide book that Far- rand prepared in 1944 sketched out a few routes, including a progression down the east terraces, into the Lovers’ Lane amphitheater and north through Mélissande’s Allée. 46 Throughout she alerts readers about the stairs, but this wasn’t enough to protect the unsupervised public guests who wandered off on their own, too often taking the steep Goat Trail (Figure 9). Precisely because the existing choreography could not contain the oppositional performances of wayward walkers, in 1946 Farrand collaborated with the director John Thacher on a plan to protect the garden and its guests. They agreed that the Goat Trail did not provide “safe and comfortable steps” and that such a path was necessary to facilitate access between the Rose Garden and the Herbaceous Border down the steep hill to the north. 47 With a quick little sketch, Mil- dred Bliss scripted a new Goat Trail that would be “safe for elderly knees and careless ankles” (Figure 10). Soon after, a n ew stepped path was installed, providing a slow, curved descent with plenty of landings. As accessibility standards Figure 9 Ste wart Brothers, Goat Trail, ca. 1931–32 (LA.GP. 21.10, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) Figure 10 Mildred Bliss, Sketch for new Goat Trail (from “Notes by Mrs.

Bliss,” 27–29 May 1946 Bliss-Farrand Correspondence, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 1 7 have changed, there have been other alterations to the Dumbarton Oaks landscape, each an accommodation to the v ariety of walking performances that visitors trace despite the design choreography. The alterations are also signs of the times, because our body cultures—our ideas about how bodies should look, work, move, and feel—have changed over time. 48 The Goat Trail’s history shows that Farrand’s formula for non-tiring stair climbing applied to leisure paths only.

She described the original Goat Trail as a “utility path” that offered a “steep but convenient communication” between the east terraces. In contrast to the tiered grading within the east terraces, the Goat Trail ran straight down from the north end of the Urn Terrace alongside the northern retain- ing wall until it connected with the Arbor Terrace. True to its name, the Goat Trail was irregular and unpaved. With- out it, gardeners would have to loop through the east ter- races whenever they wanted to cut across the north-south axis. With it, their shortcut was veiled from the leisure areas, as were other service paths. The hidden stairs and paths concealed garden labor while revealing that the rules for kinesthetically sensitive—and fundamentally safe— design did not apply to work areas. While this is not sur- prising in the history of built environments, it is a telling clue that the estate refused modern labor efficiency while embracing the class-inflected bodily techniques of bour- geois leisure. 49 Bodily Techniques Choreography speaks to the physical design as intended and to some degree, as extant, while performance concerns the individual response to a landscape’s affordances, including the ease or difficulty with which each of us moves through the space. Farrand’s desire for rhythmically pleasing and non-wearying walks may or may not succeed today, but in contrast to Christopher Tilley, who imagines one may access prehistoric phenomenology by walking ancient trails, visitors to Dumbarton Oaks should not imagine that they can recre- ate how Robert and Mildred Bliss, their gardeners, and guests felt while walking the paths and climbing the stairs.

Many factors contribute to each individual’s kinesthetic memory and receptivity, and some are historically specific conditions and concerns shared by others in the same cul- ture. The contingencies of place, time, and economics—such as the habits of diet, type and amount of physical activity, access to varied clothing and conveyances, strengths and dis- abilities, and previous experiences of built and natural e nvironments—all contribute to identifiable physical pos- tures, gestures, and modes of comportment. In addition to material factors, the early twentieth-century kinesthetic experience of walking through gardens is also subject to and a generator of social semiotics. Socially constructed subjec- tivities, whether determined by ideological institutional power or by reified representations of identity performance, are also part of the genealogy of the modern body. The his- tory of kinesthesia need not be a turn toward an essentialist phenomenology; bodily techniques are an element in Judith Butler’s sense of the performance of social roles, in which subjects cultivate postures until they become “second nature,” and are consequently mistaken for inherent styles of carriage, often differentiated by gender, class, and race or ethnicity. 50 What one wears in the garden is determined by the fash- ions specific to social position, activities, and responsibilities.

Our clothing contributes to and conversely, is designed and selected according to our culturally specific bodily tech- niques. This term, bodily techniques, was introduced in 1934 by anthropologist Marcel Mauss, who explained that body- movement habits such as styles of swimming and walking are learned and specific to time, place, and culture. This may happen unconsciously through imitation, through enforced discipline, or by cultivating self-awareness about how both basic and highly specialized movements feel on a neuro - muscular level and how they look to others. On the streets o f P aris, Mauss spotted young women who walked with an American gait that he surmised was popularized through cin- ema.

51 The quality of that gait can be at least partially revealed through period sources that directly commented on the rela- tionship between clothing, posture, and walking styles. Shoes are rarely considered as a sartorial affordance but they significantly determine the kinesthetic characteristics of garden walks. In 1938, the Blisses sent out a Christmas card featuring a photograph of themselves walking in the herba- ceous border. 52 Their clothing—his checked jacket and her checked skirt—pairs them and signals that they are dressed for the country, according to the etiquette of their elite American peers. Her skirt, seen from the side in another shot taken the same day, had an A-line cut and kick pleat, a sports- wear style made popular with Lord and Taylor’s introduction of the “American look” in 1932 (Figure 11). 53 Her strap- pump shoes, however, while also belonging to the style of the moment, marked her generationally. This was the year of the Blisses’ thirtieth wedding anniversary, for which they had commissioned Igor Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, premiered on site in 1938, with Nadia Boulanger conduct- ing. During Boulanger’s visit, she was “often to be seen in the depths of the gardens—a splendid walker with head erect and flat heeled shoes.” 54 Bliss may have had flat sports shoes as well, because she exercised in the garden on a regular basis, assisted by her personal trainer, Emery Siposs. Nevertheless, This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 18 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 for their portrait in the garden, flat shoes would have been too casual for a woman of her age and social position. 55 Age- graded variations in outdoor footwear are more apparent in a n April 1937 photograph of the Blisses’ friends Edith Wharton and Betsy Tyler, taken at Wharton’s estate in Hyères, France (Figure 12). Seventy-five-year-old Wharton wears a strap-pump while the twenty-six-year-old Tyler wears a sporting oxford. The society pages of Country Life from 1937 and 1938 confirm that the Blisses, Wharton, and Tyler fit the sartorial expectations for the American leisure class, as appropriate to the wearer’s age. 56 After a long wait, athletic shoes finally had become acceptable in women’s fashion. Signs of this reform appeared at the same time that Farrand and Bliss were planning the stairs and walks of Dumbarton Oaks, and are illustrated in a 1922 Country Life article featuring variations on the sporting oxford with and without heel (Figure 13): on the left, “white canvas sports oxfords with patent trim” and on the right, low-heeled “semi-sports shoes.” The “real sports oxford” w as only acceptable if one were actually playing golf or tennis, otherwise “there is the strap pump, with a sensible heel.” 57 These new shoes went with new sporting costumes such as shorter “walking” skirts that had crept up to a few inches below the knee by the mid-1930s. Sartorial options are types of affordances that answered the demands of and facilitated new postures, activities, lifestyles, and opportunities for women. 58 Between the 1880s and 1940s, several American and transatlantic body cultures focused on increasing awareness, ease, and efficiency of posture, breathing, and fundamental movements such as walking, bending, sitting, and lifting. In the 1920s and 1930s, walkers like the Blisses, Harvard schol- ars, and most visitors to Dumbarton Oaks had ample oppor- tunity to learn the rhythmic walking of the period.

Techniques for kinesthetic improvement were offered in multiple venues including public elementary schools, college Figure 11 Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss in the Rose Garden at Dumbarton Oaks, ca. 1 938 (LA.GP.6.21, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 1 9 campuses, elite beauty salons, and self-help texts; all drew participants’ attention to what they were wearing, how they maintained balance, and what muscles propelled them through movement sequences. Conscientious walking was considered a cultivated skill, potentially ameliorating or empowering, according to differing circumstantial agendas.

In the context of these bodily techniques for rhythmic walk- ing, Farrand’s recommendations for stair-climbing rhythm gain historical specificity. Attending to the body in this way was an acquired marker of the bourgeoisie.

In Thomas Robert Gaines’s exercise manual, published in seven editions between 1921 and 1929, he recommended that women remember their muscular and skeletal structure and “wear common sense, practical walking shoes” during daily walks (Figure 14). For men, Gaines recommended walking exclusively on the toes, so that with each step the leg t hat receives the weight should fully straighten, thus cre- ating a step with “spring” and “elasticity” (Figure 15). 59 Bess Mensendieck’s 1931 text “It’s Up to You” criticized the “many people [who] delude themselves with the idea that they are walking, when in reality they are shuffling, stamping, daw- dling, waddling, or hobbling.” 60 Clothing altered posture and the wearer’s ability to sense and adjust alignment and movement. Climbing stairs particularly tested one’s muscular habits, specifically the ability to propel forward and up grace- fully (Figure 16). A rhythmically consistent stride, either the y outhful “springy” step or the “dignified Rhythm” of the “legato” step were preferable, both for appearance and health. The first stage in developing these bodily techniques was increased sensory awareness of how one walks. Mensen - d ieck felt that a toe-first style, like Gaines’s, was more “flow- ing and beautiful” to see and more effective in strengthening and toning the leg muscles. She called this manner of coor- dination, in which walkers activated muscles sequentially, “Physiological Rhythm.” 61 The bodily techniques described here varied in their details, but self-conscious attention to posture, movement, and coordinated breath was central to the early twentieth- century project of cultivating kinesthetic awareness. In some Figure 12 Edith Wharton (holding Pekinese “Linky”) and Bettine “Betsy” Tyler (holding Royall Tyler) in Hyères, France, April 1937 (LA.

GP.6.1, © Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C.) Figure 13 Sport and dress shoes (from Judith Smith, “Clothes for the Country,” Country Life in America 42 [June 1922], 114) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 20 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 educational, industrial, and military situations, the bodily techniques were purely disciplinary and were employed only temporarily, in order to teach and train bodies into new hab- its. Once the muscles were re-educated, the job was done.

In o ther settings, such as the health spas frequented by elites l ike the Blisses, continued kinesthetic awareness facili- tated the thrill of flâneurship experienced by watching and analyzing others’ posture, or alternately, the possibility of constructing a malleable personality premised on different styles of movement. 62 Social identification was communicated not only in what one wore, but in how one’s body moved with consciously cultivated or sub-consciously imitated bodily techniques. Like the more obvious examples of knowing how to play golf or tennis, the ability to walk with the carriage, rhythm, and breathing patterns favored by a sociological group contributed to identity construction, maintenance, and boundary-policing. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu connected the structuring environment for class distinction, the “habi- tus,” to specific physical behaviors and motor patterns, the “hexis.” 63 When Dumbarton Oaks opened to the public, it offered access to visitors who were outside the peer groups of the Harvard scholars or the Blisses’ circle of acquaintance.

Among those likely to be interested in visiting the garden would be people who indulged in the tourist fantasy of vicari- ous ownership. Such aspirations also correspond to the tenor of Mensendieck and Gaines’s texts, both framed as self-help for the upwardly mobile. Thus, with proper dress and car- riage, the public could walk the grounds while imagining that they were taking possession of Dumbarton Oaks by imitating the class hexis of its owners. Figure 14 Shoes that counteract the health benefits of walking (from Thomas Robert Gaines, Vitalic Breathing [New York: Thomas Robert Gaines, 1929; 7th ed.], 51) Figure 15 Breathing patterns while walking (from Thomas Robert Gaines, Vitalic Breathing [New York: Thomas Robert Gaines, 1929; 7th ed.], 35) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 21 Physiological Aesthetics In addition to these representational functions, psycho - logists, philosophers, and body culturists at the time articu- lated another interpretation. Proprioceptive sensitivity contributed to a strong sense of individual subjectivity, and potentially enhanced aesthetic receptivity. Early twentieth- century body cultures and artistic communities correlated kinesthetic-awareness training with aesthetic theories of kinesthetic response. Seen as an intersecting context, they illuminate period discourse about the aesthetics of the built environment. I have saved the earliest, most foreign, and most subjective and interior kinesthetic frame for walking for last. Here the historical and methodological arguments pursued throughout this essay come together. The fourth way of understanding walking is framed by physiological aesthetics, a term specific to this period but also a reminder that sensory experience of the aesthetic is culturally diverse and socially constructed. This context will further elucidate why Farrand twice used the term “rhythm” when arguing that the stairs at Dumbarton Oaks should be numbered and spaced so a pedestrian could begin each new climb consistently with his or her dominant leg. 64 Kinesthetic awareness of physiologi- cal rhythm, like that pursued by Gaines and Mensendieck, was a particular scientific and aesthetic concern during the period under investigation. In the 1910s through the 1930s, landscape writing and landscape architecture instruction were among the areas of artistic production that built upon t heories originated from experimental psychology and aesthetic philosophy, and merged in “physiological aes- thetics,” also called “psychological aesthetics.” Formulated in Germany in the 1860s, beginning in the 1890s scientists at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, and other American university laboratories tested and expanded these theories. To do so, they measured and evaluated bodily response to aesthetic stimuli, and used the data to explain the r eception experience of the viewer or listener. They gath- ered test results based primarily on the subject’s reported kinesthetic sense of muscular tension, alignment, balance, speed and direction of movement, and affiliated metrics such a s the rate of heartbeat, respiration, and walking stride.

The implications for aesthetic design theory and criticism became widespread and lingered far later, and according to Mark Jarzombek, underlie ongoing tensions between the pedagogical approaches of studio education and history of the arts. 65 Walking had a special place in the discourse of physio- logical aesthetics, wherein the activity facilitated perception of rhythm, time, and three-dimensional space. “Conscious- ness is rhythmically disposed, because the whole organism is rhythmically disposed. The movements of the heart, of breathing, of walking, take place rhythmically,” wrote Wil- helm Wundt, the German scientist who first combined physiology and psychology in his Grundzüge (1874): “Above all, the movements of walking form a very clear and recog- nisable background to our consciousness.” 66 This English translation appeared in Christian Ruckmich’s 1913 “The Role of Kinaesthesis in the Perception of Rhythm,” as did Carl Stumpf ’s similar observation, made in 1883: “It looks, Figure 16 M ensendieck instructor Gerta Ries-Wiener demonstrating bad and good postures for climbing stairs (photograph by Nikolas Muray, from Bess M. Mensendieck, “ It’s Up to You!” [New York: J. J. Little & Ives, 1931], 158–59) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 22 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 indeed, as if our sense of rhythm and time was essentially developed in connection with the movements of locomo- tion.” 67 In 1895 Edward Wheeler Scripture, director of Yale’s psychological laboratory, explained to his intended general audience: “you have been executing rhythmic actions ever since you began to walk. By rhythmic action we understand an act repeated at intervals which the doer believes to be regular.” 68 Ruckmich’s survey of transatlantic scholarship found that “by far the greater number of investigators and systematic writers on the subject of rhythm emphasise the primary importance of kinaesthesis and of motor response in rhythmical perceptions.” Early twentieth-century landscape architects drew upon such ideas when constructing spaces for human movement, considering how to harmonize spatial rhythms with those of the inhabiting bodies. 69 These theories offer an explanatory cultural context for Farrand’s choreographic designs for rhythmic stair climbing.

Bliss and Farrand did not explicitly discuss physiological aes- thetics, but it is possible to situate the landscape gardener’s likely exposure to these ideas during a formative moment in her career. In late spring and early summer of 1903, she was recovering from appendicitis, resting at Wharton’s home while the author worked on her Italian Villas and Their G ardens . Wharton’s understanding of and access to Italian gardens depended on the insights and contacts of her friend, the English writer Vernon Lee, to whom she dedicated the text.

70 Lee’s articulation of kinesthetic responses to landscape provides the starting point of an arc that puts Farrand’s ideas about walking rhythm and step design firmly within Ameri- can mainstream landscape architecture design theory of the 1920s and 1930s, and moreover shows the latter’s engage- ment with physiological aesthetics. In her 1897 essay, “The Lie of the Land,” Vernon Lee set out a theory of landscape experience premised on mus- cular memories of walking. In paintings, she asserted, color and light are pleasant reminders of how a landscape changes over time, but only the “lie of the land,” by which she meant the line of the land—its topography—awakens the pedes- trian’s kinesthetic memory. “We praise color, but we actually live in the indescribable thing which I must call the lie of the land . . . [It] means walking or climbing, shelter or bleakness; it means the corner where we dread a boring neighbor, the bend round which we have watched some one depart, the stretch of road which seemed to lead us away out of captiv- ity.” We live in line, she argued, because repeatedly walking any path deposits and reinforces muscular memories that can be a wakened by similar affordances elsewhere. “It is extraordinary,” Lee wrote, “how much of my soul seems to cling to certain peculiarities of what I have called lie of the land , undulations, bends of rivers, straightenings and snakings of road.” Paintings that captured the same topographical qualities invited the viewer to imaginatively enter and to entertain “the suggestion of the possibility of a delightful walk.” 71 This was in the mid-1890s, and while Lee was writing this and other evocative essays on landscape perception, she was also at work on a tract more explicitly engaged with physiological aesthetics. The 1897 study she co-authored with Kit Anstruther-Thomson, called “Beauty and Ugli- ness,” builds upon William James’s theory of embodied emo- tion. James posited that one recognizes one’s own emotions because of physical sensations such as muscular tension or watering eyes; such physical feelings are the basis of emotion.

Explicitly building on James, Lee and Anstruther-Thomson argued that we know when we are experiencing beauty or ugliness through the same kind of kinesthetic clues, in this case initiated by the “perception of Form.” 72 Consequently, a viewer’s somatic awareness of walking and breathing rhythms facilitated perceptive aesthetic responses to art objects and designed and natural environments. In “Beauty and Ugliness,” Anstruther-Thomson wrote that one can sense a kinesthetic response to a painted land- scape, but aesthetic perception is activated fully only when one is in motion in a three-dimensional landscape because “our visual memory of things is gained during our moments of movement.” Standing still, the vista flattens out like a pic- ture, such that distance visually translates into height and “it i s only when we walk forward that this appearance of height is replaced by that of distance as such. We have thus, when standing still, partially lost one sense of dimension.” This may seem to be a comment on choreography or perfor- mance, but bodily techniques of kinesthetic awareness were also at play in their interpretation. Standing caused the uncomfortable feeling of body weight, head pressing on neck on torso, on feet, all drilling into the floor. Starting to walk again through a surrounding (not pictorial) environment could immediately lighten and re-animate the body: “No sooner do we make a step into the outer world than we are relieved of half our weight by swinging from one foot to the other.” 73 In a later edition, Lee broke with some of her partner’s specific conclusions but continued to testify to her own kin- esthetic responses to buildings and designed landscapes, offering details that suggest introspective and heightened proprioceptive answers to physical affordances. For instance, Anstruther-Thomson noted that visible patterns such as p aving stones and brick set the pace of movement across s urfaces and through space; even if the response is purely ocular, they “have a power akin to that of march music, for they compel our organism to a regular rhythmical mode of This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 23 being.” 74 Walking through a church interior gave Anstruther- T homson the sensations of seeing with a wider angle of vision and of breathing with lungs that expanded more hori- zontally and that lengthened the torso upward because of empathetic responses to the aisles and ceiling. Lee didn’t feel the exact same physiological response: “but of some localised respiratory change I am conscious. I may add that the high carriage of the head, answering to the higher lighting and the strongly felt perspective [within a church], brings about in myself a feeling of being tall and having no weight to carry and of having well-fitting shoes (as distinguished from shuffling), such as I have lately remarked while walking at large on days of unusual physical energy, which are usually also days ( caeteris paribus ) of spontaneous aesthetic responsiveness.” 75 Their interpretations might seem idiosyncratic today, but their ideas about the aesthetic benefits of non-visual kines- thetic sensations fit perfectly into emerging theories of rhythmic physiological aesthetics. Within two decades, that idea also appeared within the profession of landscape architecture.

In the same short period when Wharton researched, wrote, and published Italian Villas and Their Gardens , Lee was preparing and publishing several essays on psychology and aesthetics and expanding “Beauty and Ugliness.” 76 After its original publication, she deepened her study of physiological psychology and aesthetic philosophy, evaluating how her own ideas compared and contrasted to Theodor Lipps’ non- physiological version of empathy theory. This branch of a esthetics was articulated first by Robert Vischer with the German term einfühlung (feeling-into), expanded by The- odor Lipps, and then translated by American psychologist Edward Titchener into “empathy.” Here, it did not have the current meaning of fellow-feeling for other humans. Instead, empathy meant identification with objects, which was theo- rized both in terms of physical imitation of objects and p sychological projection from self onto object.

77 Between 1901 and 1904, Lee conducted a series of experiments on empathetic response, minutely documenting her own physi- ological rhythms and their impact on her aesthetic percep- tion, testing conscientiously what she had more poetically proposed in her essay “The Lie of the Land.” She suspended work between February and April 1903, while escorting Wharton on her research tour for Italian Villas and Their G ardens . Literary historian Suzanne Jones credits Lee, above philosopher George Santayana and connoisseur B ernard Berenson, for Wharton’s subtle, perhaps unconscious, engagement with empathy aesthetics in descriptions of her o wn and her characters’ sensitivities to physical environ- ments. 78 If a transmission of influence from Lee through Wharton to Farrand existed, it would have been focused in 1903 and codified in the compositional rules that Wharton lays out in Italian Villas , because when Wharton returned home at the end of April, notes in hand and ready to finish the manuscript, her niece Farrand joined her for an e xtended stay. 79 In the text, Wharton describes and Maxfield Parrish illustrates several Italian staircases, landings, and ramps, but no rules for rhythmic steps appear. Clearer links between landscape architecture design and physiological empathy theory came in the next generation of writers (Figure 17). Ultimately, the resonance between Lee’s theory of aes- thetic response and Farrand’s steps at Dumbarton Oaks indi- cates how physiological aesthetics worked as a historically specific way of kinesthetically experiencing landscapes, one that landscape architects employed elsewhere and that other visitors may have brought with them into the garden. The Harvard Graduate School of Design, which granted the first degree in landscape architecture in 1901, taught physiologi- cal aesthetics in its curriculum. Henry Vincent Hubbard was one of the program’s first professors, and in 1917, he and librarian Theodora Kimball co-authored An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design , which became the foundational text in the field in the period under discussion. 80 Hubbard and Kimball cautioned that although kinesthetic memory might seem like an insufficient explanation for the aesthetic pleasure of good design: we should remember that the emotions associated with repeti- tion, sequence, and balance [in landscape design] are associ- ated also with and automatically expressed by repeated, sequential, or balanced muscular motions and positions of the whole body, and these in turn intensify the emotion that sug- gested them. The delicately balanced ner vous and muscular machiner y of the body is thus in a way a reverberator for the increasing of the effect of these experiences. 81 Thus walking and breathing are precisely the “repeated, sequential [and] balanced muscular motions” that Hubbard Figure 17 St air rhythms (from Marjorie Sewell Cautley, Garden Design: The Principles of Abstract Design as Applied to Landscape Composition [New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935], 15) This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 24 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 and Kimball reference here. They claimed that muscles accustomed to rhythmic motions are more ready to reverber- ate in response to the physical environment. Furthermore, like Lee, they asserted that muscular sensation is the pri- mary f orm of experiencing aesthetic pleasure, and they rec- ognized that this was a version of Theodor Lipps’s empathy theory. 82 Flights of steps punctuated by landings correspond to the definition of rhythm that Hubbard and Kimball quote from design theorist Denman Ross, who h istorian Marie Frank has recently shown was h imself i nvolved with Har- vard’s physiological aesthetics community. Ross, as quoted in Landscape Design , wrote: “When any line or sequence is bro- ken repeatedly and at equal intervals, we get alternations which give us the feeling of Rhythm. Rhythm means not only a continuation merely but a continuation with regularly recurring breaks or accents.” 83 In 1935, landscape architect Marjorie Sewell Cautley made the equation between physiological aesthetics and stair design explicit. She illustrated her description of rhythm in garden design by contrasting “tiresome repetition in an unbroken flight of steps,” and “restful rhythm in terraced steps.” She explained, “to relieve the monotony of repetition, units may be arranged in groups of harmonious lines, forms, or colors. The repetition of these groups produces a certain rhythm.” Then, to metaphorically illustrate how accented repetition creates rhythm, Cautley quoted Arthur Wesley Dow, whose design manual Composition was the informing spirit for her own book on Garden Design: The Principles of Abstract Design as Applied to Landscape Composition : “this is perhaps the most common way of creating harmony, being probably the oldest form of design. It seems almost instinc- tive, perhaps derived from the rhythms of breathing and walking” (see Figure 17). 84 When designing Dumbarton Oaks’s staircases, Beatrix Farrand’s concern with the “rhythm of climbing” fit into the body-inflected aesthetics of her period, as did Mildred Bliss’s recollection of Nadia Boulanger’s walking shoes and pos- ture.

85 The kinesthetic sensation of walking was important to the design and experience of early twentieth-century American landscapes, but not only in terms that can be docu- mented by looking at the designer’s choreography drawings or by reenacting users’ performances in extant grounds. The bodily techniques of this culture and period framed pedes- trians’ kinesthetic experiences, as did notions of muscular response taken from physiological aesthetics. While more studies of walking gear and gait could historicize other moments in other built environments, the aesthetics of kin- esthetic empathy draw our attention to the possibility of excavating comparative discourses of phenomenological response to landscapes and buildings. It may be possible to understand how bodies and landscapes have met in tech- niques and with aesthetics foreign from our own, but only if w e release essentialist notions that our bodies’ experiences of nature transcend time and culture. The multiple ways of w alking at Dumbarton Oaks are not all our own. Notes 1.

This research would not have been possible without the generous support of the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, where I spent the 2011–12 academic year in the Garden and Landscape Studies fellowship program. In particular, I am indebted to the following members of that community: John Beardsley, Sarah Burke Cahalan, James N. Carder, Allen Grieco, Gail Griffin, David Haney, Walter Howell, Sheila Klos, Michael G.

Lee, Linda Lott, and Alla Vronskaya. Additional thanks go to Grey Gunda- ker, Brandy Parris, Silvia Margarita Serrano, and Alan Wallach.

2. Robert Woods Bliss, 1941, quoted in James N. Carder, “Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss: A Brief Biography” in A Home of the Humanities: The Collecting and Patronage of Mildred and Robert Woods Bliss , ed. James N.

Carder (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Col- lection, 2010), 8.

3. Robin Karson, “Beatrix Farrand’s Design for the Garden of Dumbarton Oaks,” in Carder, Home of the Humanities , 117–37; Judith B. Tankard, Bea- trix Farrand: Private Gardens, Public Landscapes (New York: The Monacelli Press, 2009), 142–57; Linda Lott, “The Arbor Terrace at Dumbarton Oaks:

History and Design,” Garden History 31, no. 2 (Winter 2003), 209–17; Linda Lott with James Carder, Garden Ornament at Dumbarton Oaks (Wash- ington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001); Diana Kostial McGuire, “Foreword,” in Beatrix Farrand, Beatrix Farrand’s Plant Book for Dumbarton Oaks , ed. Diana Kostial McGuire (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1980), xi–xix (hereafter Plant Book); Georgina Masson: Dumbarton Oaks: A Guide to the Gardens (Washington, D.C.: Trustees for Harvard University, 1968). On Farrand’s process, see: Thaïsa Way, Unbounded Practice: Women and Land- scape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century (Charlottesville, Va.: Uni- versity of Virginia Press, 2009), 32–61; Diana Balmori, “Beatrix Farrand at Dumbarton Oaks: The Design Process of a Garden,” in Beatrix Jones F arrand (1872—1959): Fifty Years of Landscape Architecture , ed. Diana K ostial McGuire and Lois Fern, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the H istory of Landscape Architecture VIII (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, 1982), 97–123; Diana Balmori, Diane Kostial McGuire, and Eleanor M. McPeck, Beatrix Farrand’s Ameri- can Landscapes: Her Gardens and Campuses (Sagaponack, N.Y.: Sagapress, Inc., 1985).

4. John Dixon Hunt, “‘Lordship of the Feet’: Toward a Poetics of Move- ment in the Garden,” in Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion , ed. Michel Conan, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Land- scape Architecture XXIV (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2003), 187–213.

5. Michel Conan, “Landscape Metaphors and Metamorphosis of Time,” in C onan, Landscape Design , 287–317.

6. On history of the senses, see Martin Jay, “In the Realm of the Senses: An Introduction,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 2011), 307–15; Mark M. Smith, Sensing the Past: Seeing, Hearing, Smelling, Tasting, and Touching in History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

7. Vincenzo Scamozzi, as quoted in Małgorzata Szafra ska, “Place, Time and Movement: A New Look at Renaissance Gardens,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 26, no. 3 ( July–Sept. 2006), 201–2. This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 25 8. Norris Brock Johnson, “Mountain, Temple, and the Design of Move- ment: Thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Buddhist Landscapes,” 157–85, and S tanislaus Fung, “Movement and Stillness in Ming Writings on Gar- dens,” 243–62, both in Conan, Landscape Design and the Experience of Motion ; Eugene Y. Wang, “Watching the Steps: Peripatetic Vision in Medieval China,” in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw , ed. Robert S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 124, 116–42.

9. Timothy M. O’Sullivan, Walking in Roman Culture (New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2011), 33.

10. See Michel Conan’s comments on the tension between cultural specific- ity and phenomenological inter-subjectivity in his “Introduction: Garden and Landscape Design, from Emotion to the Construction of the Self ” in Conan, Landscape Design , 31–33, and the later and more developed “Frag- ments of a Poetic of Gardens,” Landscape Journal 25, no. 1 (2006), 1–21.

11. John Wylie, Landscape (London: Routledge, 2007), 214, 180–85. For other discussions of this debate, see Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape: Places, Paths, and Monuments (Oxford, England: Berg, 1994), 11–26; Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, Landscape Theory (New York: Routledge, 2008).

12. Edward G. Boring, Sensation and Perception in the History of Experimental Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1942), 529; Barry C.

Stillman, “Making Sense of Proprioception: The Meaning of Propriocep- tion, Kinaesthesia and Related Terms,” Physiotherapy 88, no. 11 (Nov.

2002), 667–76; Nicholas J. Wade, “The Search for a Sixth Sense: The Cases for Vestibular, Muscle, and Temperature Senses,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 12, no. 2 (2003), 175–202.

13. Boring, Sensation and Perception , 529; Nigel Stewart, “Re-Languaging the Body: Phenomenological Description and the Dance Image,” Perfor- mance Research 3, no. 2 (Summer 1998), 45; Kurt Danziger, Constructing the Subject: Historical Origins of Psychological Research (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

14. James J. Gibson, “The Theory of Affordances” in The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979), 143–45. Donald A.

Norman brought Gibson’s “affordance” to the discourse of design with The P sychology of Everyday Things (New York: Basic Books, 1988). On “ k inesthesia” see also Hillel Schwartz, “Torque: The New Kinaesthetic of the Twentieth Century,” in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter, Zone 6 (New York: Urzone, 1992), 70–127; Zeynip Çelik, “ K inaesthesia,” in Sensorium: Embodied Experience, Technology, and Contem- porary Art , ed. Caroline A. Jones (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 159–62; Robert Michael Brain, “The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Aesthetic Avant-Gardes circa 1900,” Studies in History of Philosophy of Science 39 (Sept. 2008), 410–13.

15. Donald Appleyard, Kevin Lynch, and John R. Myer, The View from the Road (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964); Meto J. Vroom, Lexicon of Garden and Landscape Architecture (Basel: Birkhäuser–Publishers for Architecture, 2006), 111–14, 239–41; Simon Bell, Landscape: Pattern, Perception, and Pro- cess (London: E & FN Spon, 1999), 55–58.

16. Lawrence Halprin, “The Choreography of Gardens,” Impulse Dance Magazine (1949), 34 (I am indebted to Alison Hirsch for sharing a copy of this rare article). See also Alison Bick Hirsch, “Lawrence Halprin: Choreo- graphing Urban Experience” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008), 1–59; Alison Hirsch, “Lawrence Halprin: The Choreography of Gardens,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 27, no. 4 (Oct.– D ec.

2007), 257–70; Patricia Johanson, “Beyond Choreography: Shifting Expe- riences in Uncivilized Gardens” in Conan, Landscape Design, 75–102.

17. His wife, Anna Halprin, studied with dance education pioneer Margaret H’Doubler, who employed theories of kinesthetic empathy taken directly from experimental physiological psychology, as the latter’s bibliography shows. Margaret Newell H’Doubler, A Manual of Dancing: Suggestions and Bibliography for the Teacher of Dancing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1921), 79–84. For the larger context, see Susan Leigh Foster, C horeographing Empathy: Kinesthesia in Performance (New York: Routledge, 2011).

18. John Beardsley, “Being in Space: Lawrence Halprin’s urban ecologies and the reconciliation of modernism’s ideals,” in Where the Revolution Began:

Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space , ed. Randy Gragg (Washington, D.C.: Spacemaker Press, 2009), 33. For application of “choreography” and “affordance” to landscape by scholars from outside the field of landscape architecture, see Peter Merriman, “Architecture/ Dance: Choreographing and Inhabiting Spaces with Anna and Lawrence Halprin,” Cultural Geographies 17, no. 4 (2010), 427–49.

19. Edith Wharton, Italian Villas and Their Gardens (New York: Century Co., 1905). For the Italianate revival context, see Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, “‘Grafting the Edelweiss on Cactus Plants’: The 1931 Italian Garden Exhibition and Its Legacy,” in Clio in the Italian Garden: Twenty-first Century Studies in Historical Methods and Theoretical Perspectives , ed. Mirka Beneš and Michael G. Lee, Dumbarton Oaks Colloquium on the History of Landscape Architecture XXXII (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2011), 55–77.

20. Beatrix Farrand to Edith Wharton [1935], Folder 765, Box 25, YCAL MSS 42, Edith Wharton Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

21. Mildred Bliss to Beatrix Farrand, 16 April 1923, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Archives, Washington, D.C. (hereafter DO Archives).

22. “The Oaks,” 24–25 June 1922, 5, in Beatrix Farrand to Mildred Bliss, 24 June 1922, Dumbarton Oaks Correspondence Archive (hereafter DO Correspondence), Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Rare Book Collection, Washington, D.C. (hereafter DO RBC).

23. Beatrix Farrand to Mildred Bliss, 8 July 1922, appendix to 7 July 1922 letter, DO Correspondence. Farrand later described it as a 55-foot drop in Farrand, Plant Book , 107.

24. Farrand, Plant Book, 59–60; Rose Garden, 1923, photographs, LA.GP.5.15, LA.GP.35.11, LA.GP.40.12; Fountain Terrace, 1924–25, p hotographs, LA.GP.18.5, LA.GP.18.5a, and LA.GP.18.5b, DO RBC.

25. Farrand to Bliss, 11 Sept. 1922, DO Correspondence. On Farrand’s recommendations for steps at other locations, see Balmori, McGuire, and McPeck, Farrand’s American Landscapes , 137–39.

26. Farrand, Plant Book , 47, 68. For other remarks on steps, see also 48, 53–55, 75–76, 90, 116.

27. Ibid., 53.

28. Ibid., 53–55.

29. Farrand, “Orangery” chapter in “Plant Book” manuscript, n.p., DO R BC.

30. On the steps between the Green Garden and Pool Terrace, there are four flights of stairs (three steps, landing, three steps, landing, four steps, landing, twelve steps) about which Farrand commented “Principles have been followed as faithfully as possible in designing these steps so that the rise between the lower and the upper terraces would not be taken in one wearisome climb.” In this case, “curving steps . . . lengthen the distance” to ease travel across a steep slope (Farrand, Plant Book, 47). The curved stair- case that retards and eases an abrupt change of grade is also at work in\ the steps that go from the south to north sections of Mélissande’s Allée (99) and in the Horseshoe Steps (51) by the swimming pool; see LA.GP.42.54–66, DO RBC. In each of these cases, we see efforts to break up stairs, but not examples of consistent odd or even numbering. On Farrand’s March 1923 This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 26 j s a h / 7 2 : 1 , M a r c h 2 0 1 3 drawing, the stairs between the Rose Garden and Fountain Terrace follow both the rule of multiple landings and the rule of consistent odd numbering:

she enumerates this set of sixteen steps as three landings with one step, then eleven steps, then five steps (Figure 3).

31. A seventh set was added to the north end much later. Farrand, “Box Walk leading north from Terrace ‘B’” [plan and profile], 16 April 1923, drawing, LA.GD.K 3.02; Farrand, “Box Walk Steps” [plan and profile], Mar. 1925, LA.GD.K 3.03b; Farrand, “Box Walk Steps” [plan and profile], Mar. 1926, LA.GD.K 3.03a, DO RBC.

32. James Marston Fitch, John Templer, and Paul Corcoran, “The Dimen- sions of Stairs,” Scientific American 23, no. 4 (Oct. 1974), 82, 84, 86. See also John Templer, The Staircase: History and Theories and The Staircase: Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design, 2 vols. (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).

33. Anthropology and cultural geography have an extensive literature exploring this approach, as does dance history. Merriman, “Architecture/ Dance,” 428, 441–42 fn. 3–4; Foster, Choreographing Empathy, 2–6; Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New Y ork: Rout- ledge, 1993).

34. Stuart Hall, “Encoding/Decoding,” in Culture, Media, Language: Work- ing Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–1979 , ed. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (London: Hutchinson, 1980), 128–38.

35. Farrand, Plant Book , 53–55. It is not clear if by “pace” she means one stride, as the term is most frequently used, or if she was referring to the mapping technique of “geometric pacing,” which measures from the heel of the foot to the heel the next time that same foot lands, as described by the Joint Committee of Civil Engineers, American Congress on Surveying and Mapping, and American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing, Glossary of the Mapping Sciences (New York: American Society of Civil Engineers Publications, 1994), 373. Additionally, “pace” can be syn- onymous with landing, “especially the area where the stair turns”; a half- pace is such a landing with a 180-degree change of direction, and a quarter-pace turns 90 degrees. James Stevens Curl, Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford U niversity Press, 2006), 548.

36. Frederick Law Olmsted [ Jr.], “Notes Upon the Sizes of Steps,” Landscape Architecture 1, no. 2 ( Jan. 1911), 85, 89. The extant stepping stones east and southeast of the herbaceous border are sized and placed to create an average of either a rather short 12-inch stride or a moderate stride of 20 to 22 inches.

37. Cherry Hill has four sets of stairs, each six steps, separated by three 90-inch landings. The latter is visible northeast of the Ellipse on Berrall’s 1931 plan (see Figure 5), and in the lower left corner of Clegg’s topographi- cal map (see Figure 1).

38. Charles Downing Lay, “Garden Ramps,” Landscape Architecture 11, no.

3 (April 1921), 124–25.

39. Robert Wheelwright, “Notes on Stepped Ramps,” Landscape Architecture 5, no. 3 (April 1915), 134–35.

40. Frederick Law Olmsted [ Jr.], “Some Further Notes on Steps,” Landscape Architecture 18, no. 2 ( Jan. 1928), 126, 127.

41. Olmsted, “Sizes of Steps,” 86.

42. Albert D. Taylor, “Landscape Construction Notes VIII,” Landscape Architecture 14, no. 1 (Oct. 1923), 43; Henry Vincent Hubbard and Theo- dora Kimball, An Introduction to the Study of Landscape Design (New York:

Macmillan, 1924), 201; Olmsted, “Further Notes,” 125, 127.

43. Dumbarton Oaks Memorandum, 1 March 1941, Administrative Records, 1941–49, DO Archives.

44. Walter Muir Whitehill, Dumbarton Oaks: The History of a Georgetown House and Garden, 1800–1966 (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), viii; Beatrix Farrand, “Report submitted to the chairman of the Dumbarton Oaks administrative board, on the grounds of Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection,” 24 Nov. 1941, Plant Book manuscripts, DO RBC.

45.

Minutes of the Dumbarton Oaks Administrative Committee, 26 Nov.

1944, DO Archives.

46. Beatrix Farrand, “Dumbarton Oaks Gardens,” manuscript for guide book, typescript, ca. 1944, DO RBC.

47. Beatrix Farrand to Mildred Bliss, “Suggestions discussed with Mr. Pat- terson, 27–29 May 1946; John Thacher to Beatrix Farrand, 16 Feb. 1946, DO Correspondence.

48. Mildred Bliss, “Notes by Mrs. Bliss,” [on] Farrand to Bliss, 27–29 May, 1946; Bliss to Farrand, 26 July 1946; Farrand to Bliss, 1 Oct. 1946, DO Correspondence; Ursula Pariser, Goat Trail photographs, ca. 1976–79, LA.GP.21.5–21.8, DO RBC. A low retaining wall and safety railing were added in the 1970s. I have taken the term “body culture” from Karl Eric Toepfer, Empire of Ecstasy: Nudity and Movement in German Body Culture, 1910–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and expand on the American body cultures of the early 1900s in Robin Veder, “The Expres- sive Efficiencies of American Delsarte and Mensendieck Body Cultures,” Modernism/Modernity 17, no. 4 (Nov. 2010), 819–38.

49. Farrand, Plant Book , 111–12. On physiological labor efficiency in the period, see Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1990). There is much more to be said about the social differentiation of kinesthetic experience at Dumbar- ton Oaks and other estates of the period; the requirements of such an argu- ment exceed the space allowed here.

50. Butler, Bodies that Matter. I am indebted to art historian Sarah Burns for the term “period body,” a modification of Michael Baxandall’s “period eye.” 51. Marcel Mauss, “Techniques of the Body” (1935), Ben Brewster, trans., Economy and Society 2, no. 1 (1973), 72, 70–88.

52. Robert Woods Bliss and Mildred Bliss, Christmas card, 1938, AR.OB.

Misc.021, DO Archives.

53. Richard Martin, American Ingenuity: Sportswear 1930s–1970s, exh. cat.

(New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 14; Rebecca Arnold, The American Look: Fashion, Sportswear and the Image of Women in 1930s and 1940s New York (London: I.B. Tauris, 2009).

54. This comment comes from the history of Dumbarton Oaks that Walter Whitehill wrote on Mildred Bliss’s request, with her assistance, and consent, and likely reflects her recollection of Boulanger’s comportment. Whitehill, Dumbarton Oaks 75; Jeanice Brooks, “Collecting Past and Present: Music History and Musical Performance at Dumbarton Oaks,” in Carder, Home of the Humanities, 75–91.

55. Shane Leslie, American Wonderland: Memories of Four Tours in the United States, 1911–1935 (London: Michael Joseph, 1936), 225. For more period footwear, see Dumbarton Oaks Gardens Film, n.d., Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives, Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington, D.C.

56. “Fun for the Hostess,” Country Life 71, no. 5 (March 1937), 77; “Country Gatherings,” Country Life 73, no. 2 (December 1937), 85; “Country Gather- ings: Country Folk South,” Country Life 73, no. 4 (February 1938), 52; “Coun- try Gatherings: North and South,” Country Life 73, no. 5 (March 1938), 54; “Country Gatherings: Country Folk South,” Country Life 73, no. 6 (April 1938), 51; “The Sportswoman,” Country Life 74, no. 3 ( July 1938), 55; “Spec- tator Sports Clothes for Men,” Country Life 74, no. 6 (Oct. 1938), 48.

57. Judith Smith, “Clothes for the Country,” Country Life 42, no. 2 ( June 1922), 114.

58. For more on the dress-reform movement to lower heels, raise skirt hems, and loosen corsets, see Patricia Cunningham, Reforming Women’s Fash- ion, 1850–1920: Politics, Health, and Art (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2003). This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms W a l k i n g t h r o u g h D u Mb a r t o n oa k s 27 59. Thomas Robert Gaines, Vitalic Breathing, 7th ed. (New York: Thomas Robert Gaines, 1929), 47, 91, 141.

60. Bess M. Mensendieck, “It’s Up to You” (New York: Bess M. Mensendieck, 1931), 189. She may be referring to the hobble skirt that was popular from 1908 until the 1910s.

61. Mensendieck, “It’s Up to You,” 187–90.

62. Veder, “Expressive Efficiencies,” 819–38.

63. Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1990), 74; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), 169–225.

64. Farrand, Plant Book, 53–55.

65. Danziger, Constructing the Subject ; Mark Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For descriptions of laboratory experiments conducted in the United States, see Hugo Münsterberg, The Principles of Art Education (New York: Prang Educational Company, 1905); Ethel Dench Puffer, The Psychol- ogy of Beauty (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1905); Albert R.

Chandler, Beauty and Human Nature: Elements of Psychological Aesthetics (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934); and Boring, Sensation and Perception.

66. Wundt as quoted in Christian A. Ruckmich, “The Role of Kinaesthesis in the Perception of Rhythm,” American Journal of Psychology 24, no. 3 ( July 1913), 308.

67. Stumpf as quoted in Ruckmich, “Role of Kinaesthesis,” 308.

68. Edward Wheeler Scripture, Thinking, Feeling, Doing (Meadville: Flood and Vincent, 1897), 253.

69. Ruckmich, “Role of Kinaesthesis,” 308–9. For the racial politics of such ideas in relation to literary modernism, see Michael Golston, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). For physiological psychology in architectural theory, see Harry Fran- cis Mallgrave and Eleftheriois Ikonomou, eds. Empathy, Form, and Space:

Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893 (Santa Monica: Getty Center, 1994).

70. Vivian Russell, Edith Wharton’s Italian Gardens (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1997), 17; Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Whar- ton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1994), 138; Diane Kostial McGuire, “Ser- mon on ‘The Mount’: Edith Wharton’s Influence on Beatrix Jones Farrand,” Journal of the New England Garden History Society 1, no. 1 (Fall 1991), 11–17; Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance (1934; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 129–42; Penelope Vita-Finzi, “Italian Background: Edith Wharton’s Debt to Vernon Lee,” Edith Wharton Review 13, no. 1 (Fall 1996), 14–18.

71. Vernon Lee, “The Lie of the Land: Notes about Landscapes,” in Limbo and Other Essays (London: Grant Richards, 1897), 47, 60–61, 49.

72. Vernon Lee and Catherine Anstruther-Thomson, “Beauty and Ugli- ness” (1897) in Vernon Lee, Beauty and Ugliness and Other Studies in Psycho- logical Aesthetics (London: John Lane, 1912), 157–61.

73. Ibid., 182–83, 212, 180.

74. Ibid., 185. 75.

Ibid., 191.

76. Vernon Lee’s publications in 1903 and 1904 include: Vernon Lee, “Psy- chologie d’un Écrivain sur L’art (Observation Personnelle),” Revue Phi- losophique 56 (Sept. 1903), 225–54; Vernon Lee, “Studies in Literary Psychology,” Contemporary Review 84 (Nov. 1903), 713–23; Vernon Lee, “Studies in Literary Psychology,” Contemporary Review 84 (Dec. 1903), 856–64; Vernon Lee, “Recent Aesthetics: Bibliography,” Quarterly Review 199 (April 1904), 420–23; Vernon Lee, “Travaux récents de l’esthétique allemande (K. Groos, P. Stern, Th. Lipps),” Revue Philosophique 54 (1904), 75–92, all as cited in Phyllis F. Mannocchi, “ ‘Vernon Lee’: A Reintroduction and Primary Bibliography,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 26, no. 4 (1983), 255–56.

77. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, 1912; Susan Lanzoni, “Practicing Psychology in the Art Gallery: Vernon Lee’s Aesthetics of Empathy,” Journal of the H istory of the Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 4 (Fall 2009), 330–54; Mallgrave and Ikonomou, “Introduction” in Empathy, Form, and Space, 17–29; Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity , 58–65; Juliet Koss, “On the Limits of Empa- thy,” Art Bulletin 88, no. 1 (March 2006), 139–57.

78. Lee, Beauty and Ugliness, 299, 241–350; Edith Wharton to Vernon Lee, 7 April 1903, quoted in full in Hilda M. Fife, “Letters from Edith Wharton to Vernon Lee,” Colby Quarterly 3, no. 9 (Feb. 1953), 2; Suzanne W. Jones, “Edith Wharton’s ‘Secret Sensitiveness,’ The Decoration of Houses, and Her Fiction,” Journal of Modern Literature 21, no. 2 (Winter 1997–98), 180, 196; Suzanne W. Jones, “The ‘ Beyondness of Things’ in The Bucccaneers : Vernon Lee’s Influence on Edith Wharton’s Sense of Places,” Symbiosis 8, no. 1 (April 2004), 7–30.

79. Farrand sailed for Europe on 4 July 1903. Benstock, No Gifts from Chance, 138; McGuire, “Sermon on ‘The Mount,’” 11–17.

80. Ruth D. Happel, “A Survey of Courses in Landscape Appreciation,” Landscape Architecture 23, no. 3 (April 1933), 182; Melanie Simo, The Coalesc- ing of Different Forces and Ideas: A History of Landscape Architecture at Harvard, 1900–1999 (Cambridge: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2000), 16. According to Michel Conan, Hubbard’s book was still in wide- spread use in the 1950s. Conan, “Reflections on Landscape Architecture Studies at Dumbarton Oaks,” in Twenty-five Years of Studies in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks , ed. Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Washing- ton, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 1996), 10.

81. Hubbard and Kimball, Landscape Design, 97–98.

82. Ibid., 13–14.

83. Denman Waldo Ross, On Drawing and Painting (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1912), 70, quoted in Hubbard and Kimball, Land- scape D esign, 95, fig. XI, pl. 16; Marie Frank, Denman Ross and American Design Theory (Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2011), 110–34.

84. Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition, 3rd ed. (New York: Baker and Taylor, 1900), quoted in Marjorie Sewell Cautley, Garden Design: The Principles of Abstract Design as Applied to Landscape Composition (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1935), 15, ix.

85. Whitehill, Dumbarton Oaks, 75; Farrand, Plant Book, 55. This content downloaded from 129.101.79.200 on Wed, 30 Aug 2017 00:25:05 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms