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Half a century after its creation, Dan Kiley's landmark Modernist garden in Indiana goes public By Ted Loos
Modern Garden
For more than 50 years, the country's most archetypally Modernist garden has been hidden behind a tight row of arborvitae hedges along Washington Street in Columbus, Indiana, a city of 39,000 people an hour south of Indianapolis.
Unless you knew J. Irwin and Xenia Miller, the wealthy art collectors who commissioned it, or were granted rare permission to enter, you have missed what landscaping pioneer Daniel Urban Kiley (1912-2004) considered his best work. His 1955 design for the Miller House grounds was a series of what he called "pinwheeling spaces" that spun outward from a home designed by Finnish architect Eero Saarinen. Though Kiley collaborated with Saarinen on the Gateway Arch in St. Louis and other iconic 20th-century structures, it was at Miller House that the Modernist era in landscape design was born.
In May, the Miller home opens to the public for the first time. For a $20 entry fee, design pilgrims can see how Kiley synthesized the classical 17th-century French designs of his hero André Le Nôtre with the abstraction of minimalist architect Mies van der Rohe, especially Mies's acclaimed Barcelona Pavilion.
The 13-and-a-half-acre property has an orchard, a lawn, paths, and allées-a standard list of features-but Kiley's asymmetrical arrangement of them demonstrates his interest in, as Kiley put it, "the translation of various classic elements into a modern spatial sen sibility."
Saarinen's design places four rectangular wings around an open core that contains a sunken living room, an...