Of Gardens. Paula Deitz
in New Hampshire left impressions of fragrant pine woods in summer and stark maple tree trunks above strewn leaves in the fall. As a golf caddy, Kiley retained images of modeled green courses, and as a skier, the clean ski tracks across an expanse of white snow.
When Kiley entered Harvard, he was already employed by the landscape architect Warren H. Manning, known for his grand estate gardens. Manning had been a young associate of Olmsted and was one of the founders in 1899 of the American Society of Landscape Architects. When Manning died in 1938, Kiley left Harvard to work on housing projects in Washington, D.C., with the architect Louis Kahn. During World War II, Kiley joined the new Office of Strategic Services, where he replaced Eero Saarinen as chief of design. In this capacity, he was sent to Germany in 1945 to transform the Nuremberg Palace of Justice into a court to try Nazi war criminals. It was his first trip to Europe, and it changed his life.
Reminiscing in the sunroom of his farmhouse-cum-office in East Charlotte, Vermont, he described those days “when France became my first love.” With his limited free time, he visited Versailles and the Château de Sceaux and discovered that those boring slides he had seen at Harvard had nothing to do with the breathtaking reality of André Le Nôtre's creations: the formal geometry, the allées of trees, the axial views, the terraces and fountains. He was smitten. Later, he recalls, on a more extensive European tour: “I would simply go to a railroad station in Paris and board the first train going anywhere. I felt so free spirited and connected to France, and crazy things would happen to me. I would often end up dancing with young people in a bar somewhere.”
While other young American landscape architects were seeking fresh designs in abstract land formations, Kiley immediately grasped the grids of Le Nôtre's classicism and applied them, as he says, “to the open-ended, dynamic simplicity of Modernism.” As the sleek, axial interiors of International Style buildings like Mies van der Rohe's 1929 Barcelona Pavilion merged with the landscape through glass walls, Kiley saw a harmonious way to continue the architecture through ordered plantings in private gardens and public plazas. In brief, he wanted to express the classicism in Modernism without losing the mysterious dynamics of nature—perpetual growth, seasonal transitions, flow of water, and, crucially, the effects of light and shadow.
His first modernist garden was for J. Irwin Miller of Columbus, Indiana, the manufacturer who commissioned a whole group of contemporary architects to build in Columbus, making the city a veritable museum of twentieth-century public architecture. The Miller garden reflected the same geometric grid of the 1955 house designed by Eero Saarinen, and the honey-locust allée, with the Henry Moore sculpture at its end, has become an iconic landscape in American garden history. Kiley despairs of landscape architects like Olmsted who mixed varieties of trees in clumps in the picturesque tradition, and with a wave of his hand to his own woods he demonstrates how maple trees are massed along a boardwalk path. Though he seeks to plant grids of trees close together—“the better to squeeze between them as in nature”—he has conceded to spacing them farther apart for his public work.
While Kiley has collaborated with almost every major contemporary architect in America, each landscape has been individually conceived to suit the spirit of the site. In Tampa, Florida, Harry Wolf's 1988 tower for the North Carolina National Bank, for example, is complemented by squares of the perennial grass zoysia between paved strips, a grid of Sabal palmetto and swaths of Lagerstroemia indica with brilliant pink blooms. Over the garage, a glass-bottomed canal (illuminated at night) feeds nine rills that terminate in bubbling fountains. Versailles with a difference.
For the two-acre plaza of I. M. Pei's 1986 First Interstate Bank Tower in Dallas, Texas, Kiley envisioned the cooling effects of a swamplike water forest. The geometric waterfalls of Fountain Place, as it is called, are enlivened by 263 bubbler fountains and 440 native bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) in planters. He describes landscapes like these as “dancing in space.”
In New York City, the towering trees and fountains of Rockefeller University on the East River are an urban oasis, as are the interior gardens of the Ford Foundation and the grid of trees in planters behind Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. He has traveled worldwide to design his award-winning landscapes—but best of all, he returned to his beloved Paris to add his minimalist touch to the public spaces around La Défense.
Among the many modernists in the field who have trained with Kiley is Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, the Canadian landscape architect. She can remember his Vermont office within the family house also occupied by Kiley and his wife, Anne, and their eight children in the 1950s. Kiley once told her: “Through the woods, walk softly, feel the ground.” One of Kiley's oft repeated principles is that man is nature, that design and the environment are inseparable. As he told a New York audience a decade ago: “One sets the design in motion, and it makes its own growth—an organism continually in a state of dynamic equilibrium trying to find its place in the universe.”
Gardens Illustrated, September 2001
Grounded in History: Deborah Nevins's Landscapes
BACK IN THE summer of 1988, just after the crest of the boom years, a columnist for the Independent in London conjured up the ultimate fantasy of a new stately home and pleasure ground for a figure he called the Thatcher-era millionaire. For the house design he turned to a young British architect who drew on “ancient values,” alluding to classicism without imitating it. For a garden plan, however, he tapped an American, Deborah Nevins, the New York landscape designer who during the past decade has earned a solid reputation creating lush gardens and timeless landscapes, mostly for families of the Fortune 500.
Thoroughly grounded in art history, Nevins emerged in 1976 as a curator of the exhibition “200 Years of American Architectural Drawing” at New York's Cooper-Hewitt Museum. One of the most illuminating offshoots of the Bicentennial, the show and catalogue established Nevins as a perceptive historian of architecture—a field that soon led her to the related area of landscape architecture. After stints as an adjunct professor in landscape history at Barnard College and a museum lecturer, she decided, she says, “to create landscapes rather than write about them.”
Her classic survey lecture, a grand tour of landscape history, is still part of her repertoire, though now it helps her to brief potential clients as well as architects, with whom she often collaborates. One recent afternoon Nevins set up her slides for architects at a SoHo firm near her own office. “History,” she began, “is a source, not a pattern book.” With that, she launched into a stream of images—fields divided by hedgerows, circular clearings in woodland, groves of trees, orchards, and allées—to explain a vocabulary she appropriated for her designs without ever making direct quotations. “Some of our strongest forms in landscape design,” she says, “are references to primary forms that evolved from agriculture and from community or religious practices.” As examples of plantings harking back to traditional configurations she shows a single majestic tree positioned above stone steps at Hidcote in the Cotswolds and a grove of chestnut trees in the Place Dauphine in Paris.
Nevins describes the gardens she designs, often suites of intimate open-air enclosures, as “private territories within the exterior world.” Her sensibility to regional character—both in plant selection and in formal composition—binds the private realm to its context. Proposals for new commissions are presented as a mix of site plans, relevant historic views, and photographs of indigenous flora—all mounted on fine paper in bound volumes that rival Humphry Repton's “Red Books” for sheer beauty and clarity of organization. The idea of the garden becomes as exciting as the garden itself.
By defining a progression through a series of spaces, Nevins can make even a small property appear filled with visual incident. In one Long Island garden, for example, a buttressed brick wall separates a geometric arrangement of square parterres of herbs and standard roses from an apple orchard underplanted with spring bulbs and summer wildflowers. On a New England estate, the lawn between luxuriant yet muted herbaceous borders in the Arts and Crafts manner becomes a green corridor to a simple hedge-ringed circle. At a new town in Florida, the repeated verticals of cypress trees unite several townhouse gardens by a single skyline. On a working farm in the Midwest, Nevins will plant clumps of full-grown trees in the middle of vast corn fields as confidently as “Capability” Brown deployed