A Tribute to Robert B. Riley 1931–2019

A tribute to Robert B. Riley should have many distinct and diverse voices. Thinker, writer, administrator, educator, critic, mentor, editor, architect, he assumed leadership in several international academic organizations—including the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA)—and his influence was felt in many realms and extended over many years. Here however the tribute—the task to remember, record, celebrate, and inspire—is mine, and inevitably impossible. With a nod to Pericles’s Funeral Oration, I shall hope Bob Riley’s reputation will not be imperiled by my lone voice and know my account likely will not satisfy those who knew and revered Bob and that others will suspect I exaggerate his good qualities. So be it.

Robert B. Riley, born in 1931, grew up in south Chicago where his parents ran a residential hotel. He attended the University of Chicago’s Laboratory School and graduated at age 19 from the University of Chicago with a PhB in philosophy, assumedly thoroughly inculcated with the degree’s Great Books curriculum. He studied architecture for a year at Illinois Institute of Technology before enrolling at MIT and earning his B. Arch in 1954. He was a meteorologist in the Air Force from 1954–1958. He entered architectural practice in 1959, working, he would say, “as a production architect” in suburban Maryland until a fateful day when he encountered May Watts’s Reading the Landscape and J.B. Jackson’s Landscape side-by-side on the American Institute of Architects bookshelves. In 1964 he and his family moved to New Mexico where he started his own practice. He became University of New Mexico’s campus planner and a couple years later Associate Professor and Director of that University’s Center for Environmental Research and Development. His first article in Landscape magazine, “Architecture and the Sense of Wonder,” appeared in Autumn 1965 (Riley 1965). In the following issue, he was listed as Architecture and City Planning Editor, the only other editor ever to appear with Jackson on the magazine’s imprint. Bob wrote some of the magazine’s opening unsigned “Notes and Comments” over the next few years as well as articles with his byline. After Jackson’s retirement as editor in 1968, Bob continued as Associate Editor under the new editor, Blair Boyd, until 1970.

In 1970 Bob moved back to Illinois—down-state—to become Professor and Head of the University of Illinois Department of Landscape Architecture. He continued as head until 1985 and then enjoyed a joint appointment with the Department of Architecture until his retirement and appointment as Professor Emeritus in 1996. His many external service positions while at Illinois included President of CELA, Chair of the Board of Directors of the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), and Chair of the Board of Senior Fellows in Landscape Architecture at Dumbarton Oaks. CELA’s Outstanding Educator (1992) and President’s Award (1994) were among his honors. He was editor of Landscape Journal from 1987–1995. His writings appeared as a book, book chapters, and journal articles. He continued to teach part-time after his retirement and continued to publish, most significantly his book, The Camaro in the Pasture in 2015. He was a widower, and is survived by a daughter, a son, and four grandchildren. His house, usually graced by at least one cat, was filled with his art collection, mainly works by Southwestern artists, and he amassed a collection of fine wines. His yard, often overgrown despite Terry Harkness’s efforts, had native flowers and trees that Bob and his wife Nancy planted years before. Bob wanted to understand landscape and design and so he would seek out and really listen to people involved in architecture, design and planning. And then he would think about it critically … testing, weighing, questioning. (Terry Harkness, personal communication, 2019)

Bob had a discerning and tough mind; he eschewed obfuscation. He was often charming, witty, funny, even charismatic, sometimes all at once. He could be disarmingly direct; he was able and often did, cut through others’ pretensions, professional and academic posturing, jargon and general crap. He knew how to listen and was blessed with common sense. He also had a temper, could be thinskinned, stubborn, inconsistent, and sentimental. He could procrastinate to the point of unpreparedness and he sometimes (sulkily?) withdrew from colleagues and friends. He knew all these things about himself.

Although Bob could be very impatient with what he found shallow or wrong-headed—“they don’t know what they don’t know!” he would fume—he had a patient wide-ranging interest and curiosity about people and ideas. “That’s fascinating!” he so often said at presentations or in conversation. “I never thought of that!” he would respond wonderingly to a student’s observation. “But it’s so interesting!” he would exclaim about some arcane or over-long piece of writing that came our way at Landscape Journal. He conversed with geographers, anthropologists, and sociologists as well as designers and planners—and knew their work. Those who served with him on academic association boards described him as “a man who thinks outside the box,” “refreshingly different,” “a creative lateral thinker.” His curiosity and quest for understanding took him into landscapes near and far, as well as, during one period, habitually into an Urbana eatery where he could listen to local farmers’ breakfast chatter.

Bob would self-deprecatingly say he was hired at Illinois when lack of credentials was an asset. His previous education and experience, after all, was as architect and planner, not landscape architect, and he had no graduate degrees. Yet Bob also told of realizing, within a few days of entering MIT, that he wanted to become a department head— “department head” he emphasized, “not a dean.” Of course, 1970 was a tumultuous time, and reverberations from Jackson’s Landscape, the work of Phil Lewis and Ian McHarg, and computers’ incipience had many thinking that the ground was shifting—or should shift—under landscape architecture.

In any event, Bob took on the headship with great seriousness. Department colleagues from that time characterize his leadership as intellectual, intellectual not in the sense of setting an agenda or assuming the lead on projects or papers, but rather in exercising an inquisitiveness and ability to understand, articulate, support and show confidence in the work and worth of people whose interests were very different from his own (Lewis Hopkins, personal communication, 2019). Bob was proud of the faculty he assembled, proud of the department’s recruitment of women faculty; Illinois’s four women in the early 1980s may have comprised nearly half the country’s tenured/tenure track LA female faculty in landscape architecture (Riley 1992). Bob was also adept at a department heads’ more mundane, nitty-gritty tasks such as controlling budgets and securing new funding. Even years after his headship, department colleagues, whether generally agreeing or disagreeing with him, seemed to want to identify with him.

By 1989, when I entered the program, Bob taught three graduate courses, all developed from scratch: a lecture/discussion course on the ordinary American landscape, and two seminars—one in the Architecture Department, Cultural Issues in Design, the other, in Landscape Architecture, Nature, Design and Meaning. These classes drew students from both the architecture and the landscape architecture departments as well as from other university units. The courses were rich in readings, and Bob’s knowledge, insights, and encouragement for us to discuss and reflect on our own experiences fostered a strong sense that all were in this together, that both individually and collectively we had some importance. In one-on-one discussions, Bob listened and one felt oneself heard. Rarely, when presented with an intellectual problem or concern, would he not offer a succinct illuminating comment, question or suggestion. Non-simpering male and female students expressed affection and admiration for him. He also was a valued review juror. One colleague wrote that having Bob at a review was a Zen experience; another valued how Bob related to students at their level, understanding what they were trying to do and relating it to what he saw.

Colleagues from other places, like those at Illinois, came to Bob for academic and sometimes personal advice. Apparently, the drive and ability to understand other people and respond to their ideas that Illinois colleagues saw also shaped Bob’s involvements beyond that university. They certainly served him well as editor of Landscape Journal, a role he assumed with little fanfare following the editorship of the journal’s founders, Arnold Al-anen and Darrel Morrison. Bob’s previous involvements prepared him well for choosing reviewers for submitted manuscripts with their wide-ranging subjects. He usually knew whose specialty would fit and who would take time to review a particular manuscript well. However, while a substantial part of editors’ job is to process, improve, prepare and publish others’ articles, I also think—and Bob would agree—that Landscape Journals from this period show his stamp in additional ways. He announced his ambitions when I began working with him. First, he wanted conference and exhibition reviews; among my tasks were to solicit writers for and write some of the first of these. I relished the opportunity and encouragement to analyze, contextualize and reflect—not simply report—in writing them. Bob also wanted a “Most Important Books” feature with input from a wide range of people in landscape architecture and related fields. This piece, along with our subsequent “Most Influential Landscapes” and “Most Important Questions” (although viewed by some as elitist) brought intelligent, diverse voices to the journal and still make for interesting and enlightening reading. I cannot know how Landscape Journal was received “out in the trenches” then—my view was very much from the inside—but I believe it was noticed, by some with enthusiasm, by some perhaps with consternation. This was a time when print publications still ruled.

Bob’s position as editor likely underscored his intellectual influence, especially on younger scholars. He was interested and willing to publish on controversial topics. He not only welcomed features such as “Landscape Architecture and Critical Inquiry,” and devoted most of an issue to articles from the Women Land Design symposium, he contributed to them. When developing his article, “Must Landscapes Mean?” Marc Treib remarked that he wanted to publish it under Bob’s aegis. Maybe Treib’s usage was purely figurative, but I suspect for others that aegis maintained more of the mythological overtones of its etymology. Maggie McAvin, then a professor at Rhode Island School of Design, once told me she thought Bob did not realize how much he was a mentor to younger colleagues, herself included. I think mostly what I have done is raised issues, doubts, and speculations about topics that are important to me and have often turned out to be important for other people. … As a writer and a thinker, I’d like to be remembered as somebody who injected plain language and common sense into Landscape Architectural debate without lowering intellectual standards. (Riley, 1992)

Bob’s conference and colloquium talks—I don’t remember him ever reading a conference paper— were typically engaging and popular. His wit and personality shown and he could think on his feet. His CELA presentations, like his Illinois colloquium talks, drew standing-room-only crowds.

One can understand a lot about Bob by reading what he wrote. He read widely and he wrote well. His voice remains—lean, straightforward, erudite, wryly observant, provocative and dense—dense in the sense of richness of ideas and depth and organization of thought. Over his career his writings included studies and recommendations for North America’s cultural landscape—New Mexico rural villages, the northern plains, Midwest grain elevators, the strip—as well as contemplations on landscapes less specific, landscapes as variously experienced and portrayed—landscapes in literature, in memory; landscapes as images, as imagined; landscapes and gender; the garden. … These more philosophical pieces include organized surveys and discussions of existing relevant literature, as well as clarifying definitions, frameworks, criticisms, speculations, questions and recommendations. Although his writing was informed by and acknowledged diverse fields, Bob never failed to bring his arguments back to landscape, landscape scholarship and design. Much of his writing is peppered with witty, occasionally scathing, bon mots, even aphorisms. “Rhetoric routs reflection once again” (Riley 1994, 160). “Sudden enthusiasm is no more valid a guide to merit than fashionable disdain” (1979: 12). “But if designers are to accept the charge of elite leadership they should look back once in a while to see if anyone is following” (1988, 143). “The scholarship that will help us is a far cry from the current deluge of picture books and from the model of garden history that delves ever more deeply into archival minutiae” (1988, 142). “… anticipation and memory are dialectic partners in our internal landscapes” (2015, 160).

The pieces in The Camaro in the Pasture, arranged without chronology, introduce and fairly represent Bob’s writing and thinking, but it is also illuminating to see where some first appeared and to trace his continuing but evolving interests and insights. One finds, for instance, even among his early work in Landscape a propensity for calling designers to account.

There are many paradoxes and ironies to Bob and his career. Trained as an architect, he headed a landscape architecture department and became President of CELA, Chair of EDRA’s board and Chair of the landscape studies Board at Dumbarton Oaks. Born and raised in Chicago, his landscape investigations focused primarily outside cities. With two baccalaureate degrees, he worked hard to launch Illinois’ PhD Program in Architecture and Landscape Architecture and was honored and pleased to hood its first graduate. However even as he worked toward it, he worried about such programs’ potential effects on scholarship and academic subculture and later was dismayed to see some of his fears manifested. I think Bob was well aware of these ironies. Sometimes they made him uncomfortable; sometimes he enjoyed them. Referring to our work on Landscape Journal he once gleefully muttered, “Not bad, for an architect and a sculptor.”

I suspect, with his abilities and talents, Bob would have left his mark in any time. It is idle speculation, but I do wonder if and how he would find his place in landscape and design studies if he was 30 today, for I also think Bob was very much of his time. He had what might be called a fortuitous entrance. He “fit” enough for acceptance, but was different—curious, analytical, reflective, articulate, and caring enough—to enrich, if not change, the field and people in it. His writings with their many frameworks, insights, questions, analyses, and criticisms, continue to be relevant and often important. I suspect, though, they will not be among the most cited, and it would take more study to ascertain whether it is even possible to say why. Maybe some of his thinking, however clear, is simply too complex, too dense; maybe some of what he recommended is just too hard to do; maybe some has been quietly integrated.

I was fortunate to speak with Bob a couple days before he died, a rather ordinary conversation that has added weight because it was the last. Epitaphs came up. Bob asked about a mutual friend and how her work ‘fit’ with those with whom she worked. “She is tolerated” I said. Bob laughed and said “now that would make a good epitaph: ‘she was tolerated’.” Bob would sometimes joke about his own epitaph, self-deprecatingly proposing something about intentions unrealized. More seriously he once wrote (Riley 1992), I don’t know that what I’ve helped students learn has made them design better. I’m not even sure if they’ve designed differently because of what we’ve explored, but I do know, because of what I’ve been told, that I’ve helped some of them look at the world differently. Not to be morbid, but I suppose that wouldn’t be a bad epitaph, would it?

No, not bad. But Bob helped others—not just his students—look at the world, or worlds, differently too—more clearly, more richly, more consciously. And he changed lives.

In that last conversation, Bob also fondly referred to the Illinois landscape where he lived for almost 50 years. He had been driven in the retirement community van—with “some blue-haired ladies … there’s an endless supply of them here” he quipped—to an appointment. The van’s route was one he had not taken in a while, past Illinois’s August cornfields. “That green,” he said, “was really nice to see.”