By Andrew Santella
But his talent for draftsmanship and design were matched by his contempt for his superiors. “Why should a man have to stand such bastards just for the sake of doing a little work?” he asked his mentor, the pioneering landscape architect Jens Jensen, in a 1938 letter. Caldwell never could stand them for long. He was fired from the Park District in 1939 and again in 1940, after a brief return.
But Caldwell will not see his garden renewed. He died in July, at 95.
Caldwell provided a living bridge to the architectural titans of the first half of the century. He was a superintendent in Jensen’s office in the 1920s and for a time studied and lived with Wright at his Taliesin home and workshop in Wisconsin. And in 1945, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought him to the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he spent two 15-year stints as a professor of architecture and helped shape the landscape of the university’s south-side campus.
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He worked on landscape jobs all over the midwest for Jensen, absorbing the master’s jeremiads and helping set the massive stones that were a Jensen trademark. Working on a Jensen project near Spring Green, Wisconsin, in 1927, Caldwell stopped at Taliesin to meet Wright, who had already become a hero to him. He embarked on a fellowship with Wright, staying at Taliesin on and off between 1927 and 1932. Caldwell had begun to write poetry, and when he shared it with Wright the architect told him that writing a poem was fine but it was better to live a poem. Some of Jensen’s and Wright’s oversize personalities rubbed off on him.
Caldwell absorbed Jensen’s ecological fervor and paired it with a conviction that parks and open spaces, available to all, could help instill democratic values. In a 1942 essay on Columbus Park, he contrasted Jensen’s design with the gardens of Versailles–for Caldwell “an expression of a despotic culture.” Columbus Park “celebrates the common citizen…and the largeness of ‘these states,’ the vast sweep of the open landscape, the thrill of space.” In essays such as “Atomic Bombs and City Planning” and “The City in the Landscape,” both written in 1945, Caldwell displayed a profound social consciousness and the modernist conviction that planning can make life “simpler and freer, more secure and more satisfying.”
