Bloomberg CityLab Ι March 1, 2025
In 1972, the New York Times described the landscape architect M. Paul Friedberg as one of the “New Left of playground designers” for his radical breaks with tradition. His playgrounds and landscapes emphasized abstract, elemental forms for play and exploration, inserted into gritty New York City public housing projects, light years away from the ornamental gardening approach that spawned the discipline in the 19th century.
He looked the part, too, combining the standard designer fit (black pants and black turtleneck) with a bit of countercultural swag in the form of a black leather jacket. Friedberg would roar into his office on a motorcycle and park it in the vestibule, dropping off a handful of napkin sketches the moment after he put the kickstand down. A meeting across town meant mounting the bike again and weaving through traffic, this time with a member of his staff holding on tight, swept along in Friedberg’s relentless energy and quest to make cities livable, invigorating and joyful — at a time when American urbanism was in a deep crisis.
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 was born in New York City, but grew up largely in rural Pennsylvania and Middletown, New York. For a designer so invested in urbanism, he had rustic beginnings, commuting to school on a horse-drawn sled and playing outside his one-room schoolhouse on an ash pile. He studied ornamental horticulture at Cornell for $75 a term, but for a landscape architect, he was startlingly unconcerned with plants. Contemporary landscape architects prize the ecological and biophilic role of plants; Friedberg often saw plantings deployed as superficial decorations that required too much maintenance.
“I used to think plants were annoying,” he told the Cultural Landscape Foundation for an oral history recorded in 2006. “Now I like them very much.”
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.
Friedberg further developed this approach at the Jacob Riis Houses on the Lower East Side, completed two years later. Also financed by the Astor Foundation, this playground and plaza made a fundamental break with the standard convention of playgrounds organized as a series of self-contained play-structure set pieces (think swings, slides and teeter-totters). Instead, the designer weaved a gradient of sculptural forms that were open to interpretation and imagination. There were masonry igloos and tunnels, pyramids with embedded slides, Cubist water fountains and pools made of intersecting planes of concrete, a variety of terracing and elevation changes that subtly outlined plazas and amphitheaters — all linked by planks, cables, slides and climbing bars. From the air, the composition appeared as a city out of the Stone Age, a hybrid of natural and synthetic forms where the powerful and elemental sense of abstraction meant it could, in the imagination of a child or adult, stand in for a cityscape or the treacherous wilds.
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.”
This desire for “creative participation” and opportunities for independence and seclusion in Friedberg’s landscapes seemed to celebrate the heterogeneous thrum of urban life in ways some weren’t comfortable with. Some residents and officials complained that the unstructured spaces in Riis Plaza invited vandalism and teen misbehavior. In his 1970 book Play and Interplay: A Manifesto for New Design in Urban Recreational Environment, Friedberg defends the goings-on in his maligned igloo tunnels at Riis and asks the scolds to take a seat. “There have been interesting occasions, however, as when some mattresses were brought into the tunnels and set afire, sending smoke billowing out of the top — a marvelous event in this ‘don’t touch’ world.” And yes: “There are sexual explorations carried out here, by preteens during the day, teens at night.” As to the kiddie casinos set up on the concrete tables at another park, “Did [the city] imagine that gambling did not exist when the table appeared or that it would stop when the table was gone?” Friedberg prized this independence at the expense of dowdy Victorian moralism: The city was for self-expression and experimentation, a place to grow up as fast as you wanted.
Simply accepting that this is how adolescents behave could be viewed as resignation or countercultural liberation, but for Friedberg, it meant loosening the grip of authoritarian condescension, which was generating some very bad urbanism in American cities of the 1960s and ’70s. At the time, when cities were viewed at best as a failed development model and at worst as a spreading cancer, the public realm itself was conceived as something like an implicit threat. Locks, fences, concrete, steel: Public landscapes became inward-facing bunkers fit for little more than survival, designed to preempt “the next nuclear attack,” says landscape architect Signe Nielsen. “It was almost like public space was a liability,” she says.
Friedberg often used the same sort of material palette — but reorganized to create linkages instead of barriers.
Landscape and its attendant green space and foliage, of course, was central to modern architecture from the beginning, as the movement sought to rebuild society after the horror and destruction of two world wars with ample lawns and open space, fresh air for the lungs and views for the eyes, surrounding either single-family homes or dense housing blocks. But ideas on exactly how these spaces should function were left wanting. Corbusier’s Radiant City plan to demolish much of central Paris in favor of a relentless series of tower blocks placed them all in a vast field of green.
Much of Friedberg’s work was a reaction against this green void. His master plan for Harlem River Bronx State Park “is not a Radiant City approach with towers in a vast green space,” as he wrote 1970. It’s a blocks-long continuous landscape of terraces, amphitheaters, docks, lagoons and plazas with cars banished to the periphery, all uniting housing towers. “The fabric will be quite urban—the hard surfaces of an urban landscape, the high density of an urban center, and the rich interplay of many people and many activities that are the essence of the urban experience,” he wrote.
Friedberg was not the only midcentury landscape architect to introduce the discipline to urbanism, but he was the only one to do so in America’s design capital, New York City. He established the first-ever Urban Landscape Architecture program at the City College of New York in 1970. “No one had an impact in New York in the way Paul Friedberg did,” says Charles Birnbaum, president and CEO of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, who was an intern in Friedberg’s office in 1982.
Most fundamentally, Friedberg pushed the transition of landscape architecture from drawing inspiration from the picturesque to finding direction in the prosaic. “This is the sidewalk and fire escape scene,” he wrote in his 1970 book, “where women enjoy free-time gossiping at the market, where men drink beer on a portable bridge table on the sidewalk, where children play hopscotch (in between passing cars) in the street, and where the older people lean out over a gritty window ledge to experience it all vicariously.”
In the 1970s, Friedberg refined a new urban landscape typology — the park-plaza — which combined multi-functional European-style civic plazas with plantings, often with dramatic water features. At Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis and Pershing Park in Washington, DC, sunken terraces lead to accessible reflecting pools that put Friedberg’s favorite material — water — front and center.
“He always had in his heart the notion that it’s people first,” says Nielsen, who was Friedberg’s student at the City Colleges of New York, and later on a member of his office’s staff in the 1970s. “For me, the driver of a project was the people who would use it, and I got that totally from Paul. It was never form for forms sake.”
Sadly, much of Friedberg’s most influential work, like his Carver Houses landscape, is no longer intact. Riis Plaza was demolished in 2000 after city administrators complained that people were selling drugs there. Both Peavey Plaza and Pershing Park were subject to protracted preservation fights before being renovated.
With their nods toward stark Brutalist massing and materials, these works can look dated now, especially when they’re not properly maintained. This time-out-of-placeness is accentuated by their isolation. What were intended to be elements of a contiguous carpet of inherently urban landscape became stranded, as this muscular and strident assertion of the public realm fell out of favor for more subtle and materially diffuse applications of urban landscape design.
But this work is powerfully influential, even if it’s often no longer intact. The dominant critical theory of landscape architecture today is landscape urbanism, which reconsiders the city as a series of landscapes, just as Friedberg did, decades before this idea had a name and a subsequent entry in college course catalogues. The adaptive reuse of disused urban infrastructure into high-profile forums for landscape design, like Manhattan’s High Line or The 606in Chicago, can only happen once the discipline accepts the city as its canvas.
“I’m one of the few who accepted the city as a viable place to work, and to enjoy the diversity and the places that are created for people to come together, understand each other, through the joy of sharing,” he said in 2006. “It’s enjoying the city, removing the landscape architecture bias of the past, the preconceived notion that the city is a hostile place. And, to me the city is where we are, the salvation. If you’re going to preserve the larger landscape, the city is the only way. That’s it.”