by his theatrical Beverly Hills swimming pool design for the owner of Cole of California, the bathing suit company. The landscape architect cantilevered a steel beam spanning the width of the pool to support a masonry wall and a series of concrete diving platforms that allowed models to swim under the backdrop unnoticed and then emerge like Esther Williams from the deep. In other projects, Mr. Eckbo advanced the quintessential California mode of indoor-outdoor living, casual recreation and the flexible use of space. "In the landscape profession," Mr. Eckbo explained, "small gardens are not seen as our highest aspiration. If you can do a 50-acre park, it must be more important. But for me the private garden has always been a laboratory for developing new ideas and concepts. Any family that has a quarter-acre backyard has got a real project. Any improvement of any space is a step forward." Many of Eckbo's gardens accompanied well known leading modernist architect housing design, including Raphael Soriano, Richard Neutra and Robert Alexander (including Orange Coast College and were photographed by Julius Shulman. In 1956, the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) asked Eckbo to create a garden containing large amounts of aluminum, for the company's publicity purposes. Aluminum had been widely used during the war years as a component in airplane manufacture, but ALCOA was interested in promoting the metal's peacetime use as well. In 1963 he returned to Berkeley to head the department of landscape architecture where he had been a student. The very successful firm of Eckbo, Royston and Williams designed hundreds of projects including residential gardens, planned community developments, urban plazas, churches and college campuses. He would eventually form the highly successful firm Eckbo, Dean, Austin and Williams in 1964, which in 1973, officially adopted the moniker, EDAW. Guided by a progressive vision of the leadership role of landscape architecture, EDAW became involved in sustainable planning at the regional scale as early as the 1960s when the firm created the California Urban Metropolitan Open Space Plan for the State. In a period in history when suburban sprawl was ascendant, EDAW's open space plan for the state of California was as innovative as it was provocative. The very idea of an "open space plan" was a novel one. The firm drew up plans to preserve open spaces in danger of encroachment on the fringes of the greater Los Angeles-San Diego, Palm Springs,