Karl Linn, Architect of Urban Landscapes
deb...@comcast.net
By MARGALIT FOX
Published: February 13, 2005
Karl Linn, a prominent landscape designer who created opulent spaces
for some of the country's best-known architects but abandoned the work
to spend the rest of his career building community gardens in
devastated urban neighborhoods, died on Feb. 3 at his home in Berkeley,
Calif. He was 81.
The cause was acute myelogenous leukemia, his wife, Nicole Milner,
said.
The landscape architect for Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building
in New York, Mr. Linn also designed the interior landscaping for the
Four Seasons Restaurant. But in the late 1950's he turned to making
community gardens in depressed neighborhoods around the country.
Trained as a psychoanalyst, Mr. Linn came to believe that architecture
should reflect a deep commitment to social justice. In New York,
Washington, Philadelphia, the Bay Area and elsewhere, he helped
inner-city residents transform vacant lots into "neighborhood commons,"
urban variations on the traditional village green that brought
neighbors, and strangers, together.
He was in the business, quite literally, of creating rootedness: where
a garden flourished, Mr. Linn believed, so, too, would a community. His
gardens are noted for their use of native plants, bubbling fountains,
colorful mosaics, benches positioned to encourage face-to-face contact
and, above all, their involvement of neighborhood residents. Mr. Linn's
work on one Bay Area garden was the subject of a documentary, "A Lot in
Common," broadcast on PBS stations last year.
Karl Linn was born on March 11, 1923, in Dessow, later part of East
Germany. He grew up on a 15-acre farm filled with fruit trees: his
mother had founded the place in 1910 to train mental-health
professionals in the art of "horticultural therapy." The only Jews in
their village, the Linns fled Germany for Palestine in 1934. They
established a farm near Haifa, and after his parents became too ill to
run it, Karl left school at 14 to work the land full time. He graduated
from the Kadoorie Agricultural School in Palestine and later helped
found a kibbutz, Maagan Michael.
In 1946, Mr. Linn went to Switzerland to train as a psychoanalyst. He
eventually settled in New York, where he helped found a school for
emotionally disturbed children and maintained a private practice as a
child psychotherapist. He took up landscape architecture again in the
early 1950's, seeking to integrate his belief in the restorative power
of nature with his psychotherapeutic work.
But in those years, as Mr. Linn discovered to his increasing
discomfort, landscape architecture meant fattening the land of
well-heeled suburbanites. "When I practiced landscape architecture in
the 50's," he told Sierra magazine in 2001, "those who were affluent
liked to show off - the model of success being a huge lawn or a big
tree that stood alone, looking like a king with a poochy belly, taking
up all the nutrients in the soil."
He came to reject what he called "landscapes of affluence," and in 1961
founded the Neighborhood Renewal Corps, based in Philadelphia, which
assisted members of disadvantaged communities in reclaiming, designing
and rebuilding blighted urban spaces. Similar programs followed in
Washington, Chicago, Boston and other cities. Mr. Linn was also a
co-founder, in 1989, of the Urban Habitat Program, a project of the
Earth Island Institute.
"The garden touches a core of humanness," he told The Jewish Bulletin
of Northern California in 2003. "Because of all the war and terrorist
activities and means of mass destruction, people think human nature at
its core is warring. But there is a lot of evidence that human beings
are really wonderfully put-together cosmic creatures. When I see all
this volunteerism, it gives me confidence that a peaceful society is
possible."
A fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Mr. Linn was
also a founder of Architects/Designers/Planners for Social
Responsibility. Until his retirement in 1986, he was a faculty member
of the New Jersey Institute of Technology; he previously taught at the
University of Pennsylvania's School of Fine Arts and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
Mr. Linn's first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his
third wife, Ms. Milner; a brother, Henry, of Forest Hills, N.Y.; a son
from an earlier marriage, Mark, of Haddonfield, N.J.; three
stepchildren, Joel Ginsberg of San Francisco, Nomi Wanag of Oakland and
Daniel Ginsberg of Gig Harbor, Wash.; and three grandchildren.