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`Dan Kiley,' says Santiago Calatrava, the celebrated Spanish architect and engineer, `caresses the landscape with his visionary pencil and the landscape smiles gratefully with satisfaction.' Enough said? Almost, but not quite. Kiley is one of the greatest landscape gardeners, of this and every other century.
Born in Boston, in 1912, he has done something that virtually no other architect or gardener has managed to do: he has reconciled modern architecture - the machine for living - with nature, creating landscapes in the hearts of titanic industrial cities that are at once rational and deeply poetic. If the most rational yet poetic of modern-movement buildings was Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion, then Kiley has designed the equivalent in gardens. In fact, he achieved this in the very first of his mature projects, the landscaping of the Miller House, Columbus, Indiana (in collaboration with Eero Saarinen and Kevin Roche) of 1955.
Here, you experience a garden both classical and modern, a magnificent progression of planes shaded by a canopy of trees that appears to extend the house infinitely into the landscape. It is at once comforting and the stuff of fantasy. Might this earthly paradise extend forever? Here, perhaps for the first time, modern sculpture - Henry Moore features here - seemed at home in a natural outcrop of a garden that, although owing much to classical tradition, could only belong to our century.
So could Kiley. For, although his sensibilities are rooted in Ralph Waldo Emerson's philosophy of nature and the visionary poetry of William Blake, and his hero is Andre Le Notre, the grandest of French landscape artists, his experience has him planted firmly in the modern world of van der Rohe and Le Corbusier, and, equally significantly, of Adolf Hitler and the second world war.
As with so many American artists and architects who saw the liberation of occupied Europe, Kiley's eyes were opened by what he saw in France and Germany and...