Revisiting Russel Wright’s Manitoga

Industrial designer Russel Wright’s final gesamtkunstwerk, Manitoga, has received scant attention from landscape theorists or historians. Constructed during the 1950s, Manitoga comprises Wright’s house, studio, and a 75-acre woodland garden in the Hudson River Valley near Garrison, New York. The project was the culmination of a design practice that extended from Wright’s initial work as a theater and industrial designer, to encompass a complete lifestyle and unique proto-ecological vision. In addition to Wright’s holistic approach to design, encompassing product, interior, architectural, and landscape design, Manitoga’s idiosyncratic yet provocative blend of picturesque and Japanese garden traditions dramatizes the fundamental and ongoing relationship between culture and nature, and make it a site worth revisiting from a landscape design perspective.