By 2016 it is obvious that midcentury modernism is the defining design influence of the decade, with slim, sculpted furniture and thin, minimalist lines now ubiquitous. But another trend has developed in parallel that revives a different aspect of the modernist aesthetic, just in time to also address newer anxieties about our looming environmental apocalypse: the use of plants as design elements. Plants today are the symbol of a modern, designed space in a way they haven?t been since the 1960s and 1970s, when architects like Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Brazilian architect Roberto Burle Marx made landscaping central to their work. The resurgence of landscaping is a significant shift; during the 1990s and 2000s, plants appeared in American public space most commonly as the odd, bland potted palm or box hedge, subordinate to harder, inorganic architectural elements. Foliage began its return to the modern design palette in the early 2010s in the form of the succulent, which in its compact aridity embodies the decade?s enthusiasm for the desert and its associated spaciousness and minimalism. The opening of the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs in 2009 presented a kind of inhabitable showcase of this emergent aesthetic, its renovated 1960s motor hotel grounds decorated with spare succulents framing a view towards the succulent-and-rock-covered San Jacinto Mountains.
Douglas Lyle Thompson
Ace Hotel Palm Springs.

From stylish Southwestern hote...