Risk and fun: Dan Kiley’s interior landscape for the Ford Foundation

Abstract

In December 1968, from aboard the Apollo 8 spacecraft, US astronaut Bill Anders photographed a radiant blue earth floating above the gray lunar horizon. Although the primary objective of the Apollo missions was to explore the moon, Anders’ image, NASA AS08-14-2383 (later dubbed Earthrise), would become an icon for the modern era of terrestrial environmentalism, where scientific discovery and rapid technological change led to an anxious understanding of a whole and fragile earth. Earlier that same year, Dan Kiley’s atrium garden for the Ford Foundation Headquarters in New York City opened as the first major interior landscape in the United States. It was a self-contained biosphere engineered for human occupation (in this way distinct from greenhouses and conservatories), and Kiley stated that the project ‘embodied both risk and fun... Although it may not have been what the clients expected to hear, I told them frankly that the project was an experiment’. The midtownManhattan building, designed by Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, has been thoroughly studied in relation to the Foundation’s humanitarian mandate, organizational structure, and urban design context. Between 2015 and 2018, the entire building and garden underwent significant restoration and renovation to conform to 21 century building code and better align with the rebranding of the organization as the Ford Foundation for Social Justice. However, Kiley’s garden— particularly the planting design — has received comparatively narrow consideration; it is typically presented as little more than an exotic centerpiece to the atrium. This essay examines Kiley’s consultants, reference materials, and planting palette to reposition the garden as a cosmopolitan horticultural project that synthesizes diverse frameworks of modernism and ecology of the mid-20 century. The garden was not only a revelatory environment for city-dwellers, but, like Earthrise, a cultural artifact of the environmental era wherein new technologies linked local phenomena to planetary forces. This expanded context for the garden offers new perspectives on the historic treatment of landscape design in wholly constructed environments.