"To make the modern
city livable is the
task of our times"
Jens Jensen, 1900s
Jens Jensen The Living Green
Jens Jensen - Photo courtesy Grace Richardson
The award-winning PBS documentary about America's pioneering Prairie Style landscape architect and unsung conservationist.
Jens Jensen The Living Green is an award-winning PBS documentary about the Danish immigrant who rose from street sweeper to "dean of American landscape architects" - the title the New York Times gave Jensen (1860-1951) upon his death. Arriving in Chicago in the 1880s, in one of the fastest-growing and least livable cities in human history, Jensen believed working people needed nature to survive. He went on to design over 600 landscapes and originate the Prairie Style, America's first native landscape architecture movement.
Jensen's greatest fight was against Andrew Carnegie and J.P. Morgan, whose plans to industrialize the entire Indiana shoreline he opposed for decades - a battle that eventually created the Indiana Dunes National Park. In 1914, he helped stage the Pageant of the Dunes, a 1,000-actor spectacle performed for 70,000 people, using art and entertainment as activism decades before Earth Day existed.
Featuring rare archival interviews with Jensen himself, testimony from Prairie School architect Alfred Caldwell, and the untold story of a man Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Ford, and Julius Rosenwald (Sears) all turned to - this is the story of America's unsung conservation hero, and why his fight for green, livable cities matters more today than ever.
The Landscape Architect Who Made Nature a Democratic Idea
Jensen's Ideas Today
Jens Jensen believed landscape was about more than beauty. It was about democracy, equality and our relationship to the natural world.
His council rings brought people together in a circle, with no head and no privileged seat—a physical expression of the idea that every voice matters. He believed that people needed access to nature, not as a luxury, but as an essential part of being human. And he believed that both people and nature should have the freedom to lead their own lives.
Jensen didn't stop at ideas. He organized, advocated and fought to preserve the landscapes he believed belonged to everyone. His activism helped protect natural places that generations of people continue to experience today.
His questions remain ours: Who has access to nature? What places are worth saving? What responsibility do individuals have to act? And what can each of us do to leave something better for those who come after us?
Nearly a century later, Jensen's landscapes endure. But perhaps his most important legacy is not a particular garden, park or design technique.
It is the idea that landscape can be an expression of democracy—and that one individual can make a difference.
Jensen's ideas are more modern than ever.
WATCH THIS SPACE for discussions on sustainable urbanism, preservation, landscape as democracy, philosophy to activism.
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"Jensen's...innovative designs preceded today’s green movement and whose work deserves broader recognition."
Booklist
"There is no justice in history. If there were, the name Jens Jensen would be as familiar as Aldo Leopold, Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey, icons who put their stamp on the Midwest."
Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune
"A beautifully made film about a man and his ideas about public space and its needs. His ideas perfectly fit in the context of time we live in. A man that dedicated his working life to teach people the importance of nature and the city. The spirit of Jens Jensen is strongly present in our times. You can find that in the way we discuss green space in the city today."
Piet Oudolf, Garden Designer of NY’s Highline and Chicago’s Lurie Garden, Millennium Park
