NEWS

The Camden Amphitheatre: 1st Modern Landscape in the U.s.


In 2013, The Camden Amphitheatre and Public Library was rightfully among 13 new National Historic Landmarks designated by Secretary of the Interior and Director of the National Park Service. National historic landmarks are nationally significant historic places that possess exceptional value or quality in illustrating or interpreting the heritage of the United States.

Fletcher Steele’s, the designer of the Amphitheatre, was one of America’s premier practitioners of 20th-century landscape design. His work was influential during the stylistic transition from Art Deco to Modernism and blazed the trail for the Modernists, most notably Dan Kiley, Garrett Eckbo, and James C. Rose. 

“Steele’s amphitheatre holds claim to the title of first modern landscape in the U.S.. The crisp geometry of arc, line and plane that characterizes this composition is a modernist palette…”  —Patricia O’Donnell, Library of American Landscape History 

For more information on The Amphitheatre and its landscape designer, Fletcher Steele, ‘click’ on the following buttons: