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 copses in English parks. “I love dense trees,” she allows with a smile, as if she knows her passion is self evident.
Nevins's landscapes work on several visual levels, from low rills of water and borders framed by hedges or stone walls to apple orchards with clouds of spring blossoms. Recently, Nevins has embarked on a series of garden enclosures surrounding a new Caribbean hideaway that involves an imaginative adaptation of different cultural traditions: vine-draped slat houses, a mandarin grove in continuous bloom, coral-stone paving, a lotus pond based on one in Bali, and a courtyard of citrus trees like those in Seville. Fragrance is the client's mandate, and the night air will be tinged with the scent of jasmine and stephanotis.
If a single image can sum up Nevins's landscape sensibility, it is a treasured photograph by Henri Cartier-Bresson that hangs in her dining room from a collection of photographs she has amassed by selecting one a year. Having lived in France, she senses the connotations of this 1955 park scene, Près de Juvisy, France, akin to Seurat's A Sunday on La Grande Jatte in its inherent quality of formality mixed with fantasy. On one side of a hedge, two boys play on a path leading to a river, while on the other, two girls in tutus turn toward a sunlit opening like sprites. “The photograph shows how minimal forms—a hedge or a path—can create intimate spaces within the larger landscape,” Nevins says. She could just as well be talking about one of her own gardens.
House & Garden, September 1992
Private Visions: The Gardens of Michael Van Valkenburgh
AS A CURATOR himself in the 1980s of exhibitions on American landscape architecture, Michael Van Valkenburgh has explored the private garden in the twentieth century—both real and visionary. “Like the house in architecture, the garden is a succinct design statement, offering a concise view of each designer's philosophy,” he wrote at the time. In his world, the private garden is more than a setting or an appendage to a house. It is an independent laboratory of ideas, a synthesis of art and craftsmanship. If the experiment succeeds, the forms may be applied to the larger world of parks and public spaces, but the fresh inspiration belongs to the original compressed version.
“Ideas spring from our hearts and minds and are informed by history and culture and tempered with a keen knowledge of how the world is built,” is how he describes the creative confrontation with a new space. Drawings reveal the immediacy of this experience and serve as the repository of ideas which may take years to execute. He views design on the land, even with natural materials, as an artifice tempered by the dimension of time.
Van
