Ruth Shellhorn, Landscape Architect For Disneyland, 97
DGH
Ruth Shellhorn, died November 3, 2006, at Torrance [California]
Memorial Medical Center, at the age of 97.
No cause of death was announced, but her friend and fellow landscape
architect Kelly Comras said Shellhorn had suffered a stroke a few days
earlier.
After studying landscape architecture at Cornell University in the
1930s, Ruth Shellhorn traveled home to South Pasadena on a mail boat
through the Panama Canal. On her journey, she kept a meticulous diary
of the exotic plants she encountered in Central and South America:
bougainvillea, palm trees, birds of paradise.
With her rigorous training and new data on tropical plants, combined
with the gardening experiences of her youth in the mild,
Mediterranean-like climate of the San Gabriel Valley, Shellhorn
embarked on a 57-year career as a landscape architect.
By the time she retired in 1990, she was recognized for helping define
the Southern California look of midcentury modern architecture for the
now-defunct Bullock's department store chain and planning some of the
central landscaping elements of the Disneyland theme park.
"She was a landscape architect's landscape architect," said Comras, who
is writing a biography of Shellhorn. "She was a terrific site planner,
she had exquisite planting skills, she wrote well.... When she designed
something, she had complete command of construction details. She didn't
just rely on employees and contractors to fill in the gaps."
A modest, unassuming woman, Shellhorn enjoyed collaborating with
architects and engineers and adapted her designs to fit the particular
needs of her clients and their sites. Besides Bullock's and Walt Disney
Co., they included UC Riverside and individual homeowners.
Shellhorn was hired by Bullock's in 1945 as consulting landscape
architect for the Pasadena, California, store, designed by prominent
Los Angeles architect Welton Becket. Housed in a sleek, modernist
structure, it was one of the first department stores to offer a
relaxing, enjoyable experience to the sophisticated shopper who arrived
by car.
"She was very actively involved in creating the whole setting and
ambience of modern shopping," said Kathryn Gleason, associate professor
and chairwoman of the Landscape Architecture Department at Cornell.
"That transition that one made from getting out of the car and into the
mood for the shopping experience was very different."
Shellhorn's design encompassed a bold combination of plants, textures
and colors with a minimum of fussy details that matched the
architecture, Comras said. "The minute you crossed the property line,
you entered a Shellhorn landscape."
Bullock's was so pleased with her work that the company hired her to
design the landscaping at most of its future stores and manage the
maintenance of the chain's landscaping, which she did through 1978. She
also was responsible for landscaping the Fashion Square shopping
centers, anchored by Bullock's stores, at Santa Ana, Sherman Oaks, La
Habra and Del Amo in Torrance. (Macy's took over Bullock's in the late
1980s and eventually renamed all of the stores.)
Becket, who worked with Shellhorn on several of those projects,
recommended her to Walt Disney in 1955, only a few months before his
new amusement park was to open in Anaheim. Disney was looking for a
liaison between chief landscape architects Jack and Bill Evans and the
other designers.
"He had five different art directors, and he was concerned that the
five 'lands' wouldn't hang together," Comras said, referring to the
five themed areas that made up much of the original park.
Disney wanted Shellhorn to help integrate those disparate parts into a
cohesive whole, but she recalled her uncertainty about the project last
year in an interview for a Times feature.
"I was sort of thinking it was going to be some honky-tonk like Venice
or something, and I wasn't too sure I wanted to do it," Shellhorn said.
But Disney charmed her, and she joined the design group's
pressure-filled sprint to opening day.
The art directors quickly approved her landscaping plan for Main
Street, so she continued sketching landscaping designs for the Town
Square just inside the main gate, the Plaza Hub at the center of the
park and finally the pedestrian traffic plan for the park.
By using screens and plants compatible with differing styles of
architecture, Shellhorn was able to ease the transition from the
Victorian look of the plaza to western-themed Frontierland, for
instance.
In looking back at the era, Comras noted, "It was unusual for a woman
to have the responsibilities she did.... She was not a feminist, she
was just extremely competent."
Gleason, from Cornell, called Shellhorn a "modern professional woman"
who maintained that she experienced no discrimination.
"I think a lot of it's in your own attitude," Shellhorn told an
interviewer in 2001 for the Pasadena Heritage Oral History Project. "If
you go at it as a person, you're not a woman or a man. It doesn't make
any difference. You have a problem to solve. So you cooperate and you
work on that problem."
LA Times -- Claire Noland