Harriet Pattison, a noted landscape architect whose projects included the grounds of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and the memorial to Franklin D. Roosevelt on Roosevelt Island in New York City, both of them collaborations with architect Louis Kahn, with whom she had a son, died on Monday at her home in Newtown Square, Pa. She was 94.
The death was announced by the son, filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn, her sole survivor.
Ms. Pattison’s biggest contribution to landscape architecture may be her work on the Kimbell site. In a 2015 oral history interview with Charles Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, she said it had been her idea to add a slope to the site so that the building looked like “it really belonged there, and it wasn’t sitting on a plinth, which had been Lou’s approach.” She also adjusted a water feature there so that instead of it being a “big, sort of dull reflecting pool,” water spilled from one pool to another.
“The sound of it was to be a part of the whole poetry of the building,” she said.
“I brought a sense of nature, and of the site, to Lou’s work,” Ms. Pattison said in “My Architect,” a 2003 documentary film by Nathaniel Kahn about his father.
The Roosevelt memorial, at the southern tip of Roosevelt Island in the East River, was commissioned in 1973. Louis Kahn envisioned it not as a building but as a landscape — a triangular lawn pointing to a roofless outdoor chamber. Ms. Pattison worked with Kahn on many variations of the design to stay on budget and satisfy funders.
William Whitaker, the curator of the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, which holds papers that had been left in Kahn’s office when he died in 1974, studied multiple drawings by Kahn and Ms. Pattison, and what he saw convinced him that she had had a significant hand in Kahn’s final design.
After Kahn’s death, at 73, the project was mothballed. It was revived more than 30 years later, and adjustments to the design were made by a New York architecture firm, Mitchell/Giurgola Architects. Ms. Pattison said she was not consulted. The firm’s landscape architect told The Pennsylvania Gazette, the alumni magazine of the University of Pennsylvania, “I never heard the name Harriet mentioned.”
Ms. Pattison practiced landscape architecture for more than 30 years, working alone but often collaborating with architects she knew through Kahn. Her notable projects included a master plan for the Hershey Co.’s 150-acre Pennsylvania headquarters, with design firm Ballinger; the design for the Columbia Avenue Station in North Philadelphia, with Mitchell/Giurgola; and landscapes for private homes in Pennsylvania and Maine, including several designed by Peter Bohlin, an American Institute of Architects gold medal winner.
A show of her work was presented at the University of Pennsylvania in 2016. That year she was named a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects. Birnbaum told the New York magazine site Curbed that in all of Pattison’s projects “you see the hand of an artist.”
Hers was a complicated life. Her romance with Kahn, who was nearly 28 years her senior, occurred while he was married to another woman. And for many years, while she raised her son and tried to establish herself as a landscape architect, she all but hid herself away.
“I was with a man I loved; I had a child I adored and a path toward a career,” she wrote in a memoir, published in 2020. “But these had cost me the acceptance of ‘society.’ I felt caught between two eras, and even two parts of myself.”
Ms. Pattison never married, and she lived alone until her death.
To viewers of Kahn’s film, she may have seemed to have sacrificed everything for a man she couldn’t marry. By contrast, her book, “Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir With Letters From Louis Kahn,” portrays her as a woman who built a career and a family despite great challenges.
The book includes hundreds of letters, telegrams, and postcards that Ms. Pattison received from Kahn in the 15 years before his death. The letters are intimate, revealing, and self-deprecating; one, sent from Pakistan on March 31, 1965, begins: “Sweetie, The conquering hero has conquered nothing.” They often included sketches of buildings or drawings of imaginary animals for young Nathaniel. Some document their professional collaborations.
“We were soul mates and inspired each other,” Ms. Pattison said in her son’s film. “It was an equal exchange in many ways.”
Harriet Pattison was born Oct. 29, 1928, in Chicago, the youngest of seven children of William Lawrence Pattison, who ran a small real estate company, and Bonnie Abbott Pattison. Harriet attended the private Francis Parker School in Chicago, spent three semesters at Wellesley, and then transferred to the University of Chicago, from which she graduated. Deciding to become a set designer, she enrolled at the Yale School of Drama.
In 1958, soon after moving to Philadelphia, she was formally introduced to Kahn at a holiday party. That led to what were “the most important 15 years, I think, in Lou’s life and in mine,” she told journalist Martin Pedersen in the online magazine Common Edge in 2021.
When Nathaniel was born she was 34 and had not yet chosen a career. Landscape design seemed like a good fit. But in the mid-1960s, she wrote in her memoir, “a woman with a child and no wedding ring was cause for gossip, even suspicion.”
“I hoped I could maintain a quiet anonymity,” she added, “but I soon found myself developing a kind of affectless outer shell to protect myself.”
Kahn arranged for her to work for Dan Kiley, a prominent landscape architect in Vermont. Kiley’s studio was a haven for mother and son, “a kind of utopia, an openhearted commune focused on a single artist’s work,” she wrote.
Yet observing the hierarchy in Kiley’s firm, she decided that to succeed as a landscape architect she needed a professional degree. She enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania.
After graduating, Ms. Pattison went to work for George Erwin Patton, a landscape architect who often collaborated with Kahn. Patton assigned her the Kimbell Museum project, which gave the couple an opportunity to work together.
In 1974, Kahn promised to leave his wife, according to Ms. Pattison. As she recalled in her son’s film: “I said, ‘I can’t bear it any longer. You have to live with us.’ And he said he would.”
Then Kahn left for Ahmedabad, India, where the Indian Institute of Management, which he had designed, was under construction. A week later, his body was found in a men’s room at Pennsylvania Station in New York, where he was to catch a train back home to Philadelphia. He had had a heart attack.
Nathaniel Kahn’s movie, an Oscar nominee, helped burnish Louis Kahn’s reputation as an architect but did nothing for his reputation as a husband and father. After its release, Kahn biographers often “took a dim view of his domestic life,” Ms. Pattison told Pedersen. “That annoyed me because they took sides and were judgmental.”
Her annoyance led her to write her memoir, she said. In it, she described the dedication ceremony for the FDR memorial, in 2012, during which she was introduced by Tom Brokaw as having “worked closely with Louis Kahn to develop the magnificent landscape for this park.”
The acknowledgment “thrilled and surprised” her, she wrote, adding, “My great longing was to live a life in art, and with Lou’s help I had found a way to do it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.