Exhibition on Landscape Architect Dan Kiley Opens for Palm Springs Modernism Week

Since 2013, audiences nationwide have been introduced to or reacquainted with seminal Modernist landscape architect Dan Kiley (1912-2004), thanks to The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley. This traveling exhibition, first held in Kiley’s hometown of Boston, comprises 45 photographs that capture 27 Kiley projects in their current condition. After visiting 16 venues, the collection comes this month to the UC Riverside’s Palm Desert Center (located in Palm Desert, California, near Palm Springs). While Kiley’s colleagues and collaborators included figures such as Garrett Eckbo, Louis Kahn, Eero Saarinen, and I.M. Pei, today much of his oeuvre is in a vulnerable state.

“Kiley was among the most important, influential, and idiosyncratic landscape architects of the 20th century and the designer of more than 1,100 projects,” says Charles Birnbaum, exhibition organizer and president and CEO of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. “Yet today his work is not well known outside of the field of landscape architecture and, to a lesser extent, the architecture profession. Despite his renown and importance, his legacy remains fragile.” For example, one now-threatened Kiley design is the landscape at the Marcus Center in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—a project that included frequent Kiley collaborator Harry Weese.