Workshop Introduces Students to the Landscape Architecture of Dan Kiley
In May 2013 students from the Gads Hill Center’s Teen Connection program participated in a photography workshop led by artist and architectural photographer Kate Joyce. Gads Hill Center serves families in the Chicago neighborhoods of Pilsen, North Lawndale, Little Village, and Back of the Yards with programming that provides learning, support and educational enrichment, early childhood development, and out-of-school care for children. The Teen Connection program helps students living in high-risk neighborhoods achieve their academic goals by creating a community of mentor and tutor supported college-bound peers.
During the two-day workshop, Joyce introduced the students, who ranged in age from thirteen to seventeen, to landscape architecture by focusing on the Art Institute of Chicago’s South Garden, designed by Dan Kiley. The students understood landscape as nature and architecture as buildings, but landscape architecture as a practice and profession was a new concept. Many of them had lived most of their lives in the presence of landscape architecture without recognizing its impact. Several students had visited the Art Institute of Chicago before. They knew there were gardens alongside the building, but never asked why or how. To provide a first-hand perspective, Joyce enlisted Joe Karr, who worked in Kiley’s studio in the 1960’s, to discuss the Art Institute’s South Garden and explain his career as a landscape architect.
For the students, landscape architecture proved a rich teaching tool. Along with their photography, the workshop included discussions about plant varieties, local and adopted ecological systems, beauty, weather and light, the integration of architecture and landscape, the emotional and social experience of the garden, engineering and infrastructure, stewardship and maintenance. Learning about Kiley's South Garden nurtured awareness in the students of landscape architecture and more broadly allowed them to identify, evaluate and relate to design decisions surrounding them on a daily basis.
Their photographic work, shared here, is in celebration of The Cultural Landscape Foundation's 2013 retrospective of the life and work of Dan Kiley.
