Dan Kiley, 91, one of the nation’s greatest landscape architects, whose international body of work included such Midwestern designs as an outdoor garden at the Art Institute of Chicago, died Saturday, Feb. 21, in his Vermont home.
Mr. Kiley’s portfolio of more than 1,000 completed projects ranged from landscapes for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston to the Oakland Museum of California to several commissions in the small-town architectural mecca of Columbus, Ind., 45 miles south of Indianapolis.
He also designed the landscape for the East Wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Henry Moore sculpture garden at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo.
President Bill Clinton awarded Mr. Kiley the National Medal of Arts in 1997, an honor that recognizes people who have made an outstanding contribution to the arts.
Beginning in the 1950s, Mr. Kiley led a challenge to conventional landscape design, which mimicked picturesque elements of nature and created static vistas meant to be seen from afar. Instead, he immersed people in a dynamic merger of architecture and landscape. A prime example was the Dallas outdoor plaza, Fountain Place, a cluster of bald cypress trees set amid cascading pools and computerized fountains.
It drew pedestrians by the score.
“He transformed landscape into modern space,” said Chicago landscape architect Peter Schaudt, who worked for Kiley in the 1980s.
With his trademark floppy hat and a mane of white hair, Mr. Kiley was himself a distinct presence, matching the star power of the distinguished architects–I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson and Chicago’s Harry Weese–with whom he worked.
In 1994, when the Pritzker Architecture Prize was awarded in Columbus, Ind., a crowd of notables spontaneously broke into applause when Mr. Kiley suddenly appeared in a house garden he designed there.
Born in Boston in 1912, Mr. Kiley attended Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in the 1930s. After opening a Washington office in 1940, he was in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He set up his firm, the Office of Dan Kiley, in Charlotte, Vt., in 1951.
In Chicago, Mr. Kiley’s finest work is the south garden of the Art Institute, which occupies the space formed by the meeting of the museum’s classical main building and its austere Morton Wing.
Screened from Michigan Avenue by honey locust trees, the garden is 18 inches below street level and has a grid layout of hawthorn trees that flank a reflecting pool. The branches of the hawthorns arch outward to create serene, intimate spaces–a respite from the monumentality of the museum’s architecture and the crush of city life.
For another 1960s project, the public park for the water filtration plant north of Navy Pier, Mr. Kiley shaped five craterlike pools and extended the lakefront bicycle path eastward with a shoreline promenade.
Mr. Kiley also designed the landscaping for a staff and classroom building at the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. It opened in 2000.
“He had a fresh perspective for Americans on landscape architecture,” said Kris Jarantoski, the Botanic Garden’s director. “His landscape was not: `Let’s not try to make it look natural like no one’s ever done anything here.’ He reorganized nature.”
Mr. Kiley is survived by his wife, Anne Sturges, and eight children.
