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(Voiceover) The Lewis Clarke Collection is a part of the North Carolina State University
Libraries' Special Collections Research Center archives. Lewis Clarke Associates was a major
landscape architecture firm in the Southeastern United States.
(Lewis Clarke) It came as quite a shock to me when I was approached to donate the collection
to the university. Uh. It kind of humbled me a little bit because I had this big collection
of forty years, which I thought everybody had. You know, its just normal work. Um…
and they said, “no, we want it” and uh… and I was very humbled that they wanted it.
And I did everything I could to help them because it covers basically almost eighteen
years of my life in that collection. The importance of this collection is its statement
that… about modernistic landscape architecture. It’s a term that is a little bit alien to
me because while we were actually practicing we called ourselves contemporary. We thought
we were doing contemporary work. ***, up-to-date! The same with architecture. The modernistic
architecture…. Matsumoto, particularly Jim Fitzgibbon, Cecil Elliot, um they broke new
fields because a house in the South preferably had to have four white columns on it. And
we shattered that illusion very strongly in modernistic. And it was there that the new
modernistic landscape architecture was laid down and our studio was the leader in it.
There was no one else doing that work. (Voiceover) One of the Associates’ major
projects was the landscape master plan and ecological engineering work for Palmetto Dunes
in South Carolina. (Lewis Clarke) Palmetto Dunes is I think very
important and was ahead of its time simply because it’s a project done a very delicate
ecological environment that could not be done today. And one that worried me a great deal
to develop the tidewaters and the coastal area in the South. The ecology is so complicated.
(Voiceover) Palmetto Dunes is only one of over 1,300 projects documented in the Lewis
Clarke Collection. Also included are Clarke’s faculty papers and materials related to the
history of the NCSU College of Design between 1952 and 1968. The Collection is currently
the third largest ever acquired by the NCSU Libraries’ Special Collections Research
Center. (Lewis Clarke) We need some really keen history
written about the modernistic field of landscape architecture and architecture in the South.
And certainly, credit should be given to the D. H. Hill Libraries for the work that they
are doing now. Hopefully my collection will be just a small contribution to this great
effort that the libraries are doing and they will continue to get collections from other
people to build up real knowledge and I hope, it is my hope that the library can foster
publication of this.