M. Paul Friedburg, obituary: making landscape architecture "urban"

Bloomberg has an obituary on M. Paul Friedburg, a landscape architect based in Minneapolis, "Remembering the Landscape Architect Who Embraced the City," which has an interesting turn of phrase that I've thought about but never so succinctly.

Friedberg, who died on Feb. 15 at 93, made landscape architecture urban, injecting new relevance into a design discipline that originated in luxurious European country estates. He saw landscapes not as isolated or self-contained patterns of green space and civic features, but as an urban gradient of exploration and discovery. For him, play was not a recreational activity taken up by very young people; it was the notion of urban socialization itself — the unexpected encounter, the surprising view corridor, the coalescing of disparate groups of people within the rhythms of the city.

Friedberg tapped into the rhythm of the city for modernist landscapes such as Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis.Photographer: KeriPickett/Cultural Landscape Foundation

Also see from the New York Times "M. Paul Friedberg, Landscape Architect Who Celebrated the City, Dies at 93," this article about the aging of Peavey Plaza, "Minneapolis Tussles Over a Faded Plaza," and this about the remaking of Pershing Plaza in DC to a World War I Memorial, "Lines Are Drawn Over Design for a National World War I Memorial."  And from the Architectural Record, "Tribute: M. Paul Friedberg (1931–2025)."

I remember a conversation I had with a planner, and he made the point that adding green infrastructure to cities, depending on how it is effected, can be seen as a suburbanization of the urban landscape.  This has bothered me for some time.  There is a place for nature and green infrastructure in cities, but it needs to be complementary to urban design.

An undated photo of Jacob Riis Plaza in New York shows that youths understood Friedberg’s vision for an urban landscape. Courtesy of the Cultural Landscape Foundation

From the article:

Friedberg’s first bit of acclaim came in 1963, when a grant from the Astor Foundation allowed him to design an expansive courtyard and playground for the Carver Houses on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. This public housing landscape offered climbing walls with offset brick footholds, jungle gyms, pavilions and an amphitheater, with sculptural arrangements of raised planter beds. Both a playground and civic plaza, it put communal assembly on equal footing with children’s recreation. ...

Subtle changes in material let visitors know when they were transitioning from one zone of the landscape to another; there were no fences. It was play stripped of prescription, intended to foster creativity, choice, self-determination and democracy. Friedberg later described it as “a happening” in the landscape, in the parlance of the times. Legendary New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved about it in 1966, saying that it “breaks every sterile mold and state convention of the city’s park, playground and open space policy for the last 30 years.” Play at Riis was meant to be a “challenging and creative process,” Friedberg wrote. “Ideally, it would be best to leave a playground unfinished, letting children bring their creative participation to it.”

The one problem with modernist urban landscape architecture is that it often doesn't wear well.  It may need constant maintenance and programming to enliven it, as it can be bare, spare and uninviting when empty or near empty.  Over time, some of Friedburg's projects were remade as a result.  Which also happened to the works of other landscape architects like Dan Kiley, where the maintenance requirements for intricate public spaces were beyond what a parks department is normally capable of providing.

Peavey Plaza