Fred Tschopp Jnr and the 2013 Fred Tschopp Snr. Scholarship winner, Grace He.
It is with great sadness that we have
learnt of the death of Fred Tschopp Jnr. Many of the people who met Fred in New
Zealand will remember an energetic character, forceful, clear-sighted, with a fondness
for practical jokes; the memory of drinking hallucinogenic apple martinis at
the Tam O Shanter in Los Feliz still lingers. But very few of us realised his extraordinary
career in America, he was an attorney at law, a successful businessman working with a
number of defence corporations and a colonel in the U.S. Marines.
In
New Zealand he is best known as the founder of the Fred Tschopp Snr. Scholarship
for the Masters of Landscape Architecture at Unitec. Fred’s father, Fred Tschopp Snr, had
practiced landscape architecture in New Zealand during the late 1920's but had disappeared
from history. Then in 2001 the distinguisher historian John Adam, was asked by
past president of the NZILA Michael Jones to decipher the signature on a landscape
plan for the Prime Minister garden in Wellington. The deciphered name, Fred
Tschopp, was the beginning of an extraordinary detective story that took 18
months for John to track down Fred Tschopps son, Fred Tschopp Jnr. at his
holiday cabin at Big Bear, Los Angeles County.
Fred Jnr. had assiduously preserved his fathers archive, enabling John
and the author to piece together a record of early 20th century
landscape architectural practice in New Zealand. Fred Snrs work in Auckland,
Wellington and Rotorua, from 1928-1931, prefigured many of the tropes that landscape
architects in New Zealand still work with; the multifunctional park, the uses
of native horticulture to signal national identify and the acknowledgment of
Maori culture in the urban realm. When John Adam and the author wished to visit
America to research Fred Tschopp’s Snrs post war landscape practice, Fred Jnr. was
extremely supportive. And in 2003, John and the author were awarded the
Fulbright Senior Scholarship to visit Los Angeles to investigate Fred Tschopp Snrs landscape practice with the giant Californian utility, Los Angeles Water
and Power. Fred Jnr. was extremely hospitably, both entertained us at his house in a Thousand Oaks, at his dad’s favorite places in the Valley and providing us with the missing pieces in our research of his father California practice. As a result of our work in Los Angeles, we established Fred Snr role in the establishment of modernist landscape practice in large scale infrastructure projects in post war America.
Fred Jnr. was fascinated and energised by
the rediscovery of his fathers work. Early in 2002 he began to discuss with
Unitec the possibility of establishing a postgraduate scholarship for a Masters
of Landscape Architecture student. This
resulted in the establishment of the Fred Tschopp Snr. Scholarship in 2003. The
scholarship has been awarded to a number of high achieving graduates, enabling them carry out important research work. The award was made jointly with the first
head of the MLA programme, Dr. Rod Barnett and then Dr. Peter Connolly. Fred Jnr. played a very hands on role with the endowment, carefully looking at
all the applicant’s portfolios, and visiting New Zealand to personally
interview the applicants and to award the winning scholarship.
Fred Jnr. had a deep love of the New Zealand
landscape; he was born here, he was avid trout fisherman in New Zealand rivers
and an honouree member of Arawa iwi. He
very much enjoyed working with us at Unitec, meeting the graduates in the MLA
programme and with senior management at Unitec where he advocated
for the landscape programme. His Unitec family will miss him but the legacy of
his fathers work lives on.
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