How can we read and interpret the Danish lawn over the last century? In this article I investigate, as a landscape architect, various cases during the past hundred years. The period offers a wide va- riety of informative cases, mostly from the field of landscape architecture, providing a solid basis for general discussion.
The investigation aims to explore the Danish lawn from an international perspective, discuss- ing attitudes of various generations, and their forms of expression via the role of the lawn and nature in society. Lawns and nature have been central to landscape architecture since the 1920s, and lawns in landscape architecture, or lawns as symbols, are crucial for our under- standing of society.
The article explores the lawn as a central component in select case studies from 1915 to
the present, in conjunction with articles and opinion pieces found in contemporaneous mag- azines and books.
In the 1920s, the breakthrough of modern Danish landscape architecture revitalised the lawn, with further artistic input in the 1950s presenting delicate poetic variations. Just a few years later, in the 1960s, the lawn came to sig- nify the inhuman, industrialised suburb. Colour television in the 1980s made the lawn synony- mous with commercial football and technology. Since then, the lawn has formed a backdrop for people longing for nature. By 2019 the lawn has now become an everyday phenomenon, a paral- lel antonym to the ecological flower meadow – which some consider to be the “true” form of urban nature.