Daniel Urban Kiley, Another Legend Dies

Kiley helped design part of the campus at Colorado State University at Lamar.

CHARLOTTE, Vt. (AP) Daniel Urban Kiley, who garnered praise around the world for his work in landscape architecture, died Saturday. He was 91.

Kiley worked with the world's best architects, including I.M. Pei, Louis Kahn and Philip Johnson. He was honored by President Clinton, who awarded Kiley the National Medal of Arts in 1997, a prize that honors those who have made outstanding contributions to the arts.

Kiley's body of work is extensive.

Kiley had landmark commissions for the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, the East Wing of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and worked to convert the Nuremberg Palace of Justice into courtrooms for the Nazi war trials.

Kiley, who was born in Boston, founded his architecture firm the Office of Dan Kiley in Washington, D.C., in 1940. Yearning for the peace of the countryside, he moved to Charlotte in 1950.

Practicing since the 1930's, Kiley never finished Harvard, but was influenced by an architect at Harvard - Walter Gropius. Kiley designed a landmark landscape in Columbus Indiana for Irwin Miller (Cummins Engine). The Miller Garden (1957) is a highly publicized and early modern landscape design - form as pure art, the organization of classical devices such as allees and bosques do not reflect a classical order. Order at the Miller Garden is based on a modern spatial sensibility and relates to the spatial order of the house.

Kiley is often referred to as a "Neo-classicist." He attempted to relate scale to human experience so that spatial clarity, structure, unity, and elegance of forms are evident. A strong geometry and in some cases reference to mathematical theory is expressed in his work - fibonacci series.

Story by Associated Press