Eckbo would convey a sense of movement in his designs by the layering and massing of plants as inspired by the artists' paintings. Professional work and philosophy After receiving his MLA degree from Harvard in 1938, Eckbo returned to California where he worked in the San Francisco Office of the Farm Security Administration. He designed camps for the migrant agricultural workers in California's Central Valley. He applied his modernist ideas to these camps attempting to improve the workers living environments. "'The Grapes of Wrath' was our bible," he said of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel about farmers dislocated by the dust bowl. "The F.S.A. was a remarkable experience because it had the really creative atmosphere a public agency can have if it's not inhibited by some frustrating force." Those major organizational plantings of Chinese elms, cottonwoods, mulberries, sycamores and other hardy species were softened with magnolias, oaks and olives for shade and almond and plum trees for color. The landscape architect sees nothing extraordinary about going to such trouble for the dispossessed. "You were conscious of social problems that existed, and you tried to think of ways to improve them," he said. During World War II, the agency shifted its focus to housing for defense workers. Mr. Eckbo designed site plans for 50 such settlements on the West Coast. But peace brought a different public attitude. "There were products we wanted to buy, things we wanted to do, a great outflow of energy, demand and desire. Prosperity is bad for morale," he said. "It makes us greedy." Mr. Eckbo had a leading hand in planning what many scholars consider the postwar period's finest subdivision scheme, the 256-acre Ladera Housing Cooperative near Palo Alto. But the project was never fully realized without Federal Housing Authority financing, which was probably withheld because the community was racially integrated. In 1940 Eckbo joined with his brother–in-law, Edward Williams to form the firm Eckbo and Williams. Five years later Robert Royston joined the firm. In 1946 Eckbo resettled in Los Angeles to take advantage of its growing opportunities for private practice. Never a puritan, he threw himself with gusto into defining the landscape of a new American dream. "L.A. is larger, looser, a place of freer movement socially than the Bay Area," he said. "The years I spent there were the best of my professional life." Mr. Eckbo's eagerness to experiment during the 1950s was epitomized