Daniel U. Kiley, Leading Landscape Architect, 91
DGH
Daniel Urban Kiley, considered one of the world's top landscape
architects, with works ranging from the New York Botanical Gardens to
the John F. Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and a
Boston, Massachusetts, native, who lived in Vermont, died Saturday,
February 21, 2004, at the age of 91.
Mr. Kiley worked with the world's best-known building architects,
including I. M. Pei, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and Philip Johnson.
He was honored by President Clinton with the National Medal of Arts in
1997, a prize given to those who have made outstanding contributions
to the arts.
Mr. Kiley's body of work is extensive, varied, and worldwide. He
helped shape the appearances around Independence Hall in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, and the Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, and around art
centers in Detroit, Michigan, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and Chicago,
Illinois. In New York, New York, he also worked on the Lincoln Center
for the Performing Arts and Rockefeller University and created the
famous indoor atrium garden in the Ford Foundation building; in
Washington, DC, he had commissions for the East Wing of the National
Gallery and the National Academy of Sciences.
Believing that the desire to reshape the natural landscape is itself
an act of nature, Mr. Kiley sought ways to express human order on the
land, but with a touch that would reveal nature, not steal from it.
One example he cited illustrating this delicate balance between
natural forest and manmade garden was the American apple orchard. He
would often use trees and plants to accent the landscape, rather than
shape it.
"I like geometry in the country," he once said.
His work not only influenced generations of landscape designers; it
brought people closer to the land in the most urban settings.
"Kiley is the best," said Pei in 1997. Pei designed the JFK Library
and the John Hancock Tower. "He belongs to that tradition of, let's
say, the big thinkers in the field. He ... has tremendous scope and
breadth in his thinking about landscape. He treats landscape with
grand gestures." The creator of opulent atriums in buildings and the
designer of landscapes grew up in a tenement building near Elliot
Square in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
In a 1985 interview with The Boston Globe, he joked that he began to
think about the lay of the land and trees while attending high school
in Jamaica Plain. "I used to walk a girlfriend home through the Arnold
Arboretum," he said. "I learned about the plants and trees even though
what I was really trying to learn about were the birds and the bees."
After graduating from high school during the Depression, he took a job
with architect Warren Manning -- initially for no pay. What it did
provide, however, were opportunities to travel to job sites across the
East and to learn lessons in combining art, science, and craft to
accentuate the land among buildings.
In 1936, Mr. Kiley attended the School of Design at Harvard
University, but anti-Modernist teachers dropped him from the program
when he promoted Walter Gropius-inspired modernism to landscape
architecture, according to a 2000 Globe story.
Mr. Kiley moved to Washington and founded his own firm. During this
time, he designed the buildings themselves as well as the surrounding
grounds.
During World War II, he served with the Army Corps of Engineers. In
the final days of war in Europe, he was part of a group of designers
that scoured Germany for a site to hold the war crimes tribunal. For
his work designing the courtroom in Nuremburg's Palace of Justice, Mr.
Kiley was awarded the Legion of Merit, one of America's top military
honors.
After returning from the war, Mr. Kiley yearned for the peace of the
countryside. He moved first to New Hampshire, then to Burlington,
Vermont, before settling in Charlotte, Vermont.
Mr. Kiley credited his rural setting as helping inspire him in his
work. "You do your best work when you're joyful," he said during a
1997 interview with the Burlington Free Press. "For me, that's not in
a city office. That's here."