The Office of Dan Kiley Oral History

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Dan Kiley (1912-2004) was one of the nation’s most important post-War landscape architects. During his prolific career, which spanned more than half a century, he worked with equally significant architects, including Eero Saarinen, Louis Kahn, and I.M. Pei, to create internationally recognized icons of Modernist design. Like many great design firms, The Office of Dan Kiley was home to a team of tremendously talented individuals who would eventually go on to enjoy significant careers of their own. Designers such as Joe Karr, Peter Ker Walker, Ian Tyndall, and Peter Schaudt (1959-2015) worked in Kiley’s office for years and were instrumental in some of the firm’s most notable projects, including the Oakland Museum, the Ford Foundation, and Fountain Place, to name but a few.

The fifteenth installment of TCLF’s award-winning Pioneers of American Landscape Design Oral History Project will examine the extraordinary talent and vision of the Office of Dan Kiley through three of the firm’s employees who subsequently formed important practices: Joe Karr, Ian Tyndall, and Peter Ker Walker. This oral history project will thus be a departure from others in the series, which focus on the life and career of a single practitioner. Instead, it will triangulate the perspectives of these three designers to further illuminate Kiley’s innovative firm while also highlighting their own careers and work, which has had a significant impact on the American landscape.

The oral history will include ten video clips for each of the three landscape architects, illuminating their lives, design philosophies, and built projects (both those undertaken while with Kiley and those subsequently completed). The videos not only reveal each designer’s ideas and passions but also their relationships with Kiley and how his firm came to revolutionize roof gardens, urban plazas, and interior landscapes during the post-War period.