Remembering Peter Rolland
NOTE: The biography in this remembrance is adapted from the entry about Peter Rolland written by Shavaun Towers that appears in the book Shaping the Postwar Landscape: New Profiles from the Pioneers of American Landscape Design Project.
开云体育官网 is saddened to learn of the passing of landscape architect Peter Rolland this past Saturday at his home in Rye, N.Y., a few weeks after his 95th birthday.
Rolland was both an educator鈥攁t Yale, Harvard, University of Virginia, City College of New York, Cornell, and University of Georgia鈥攁nd a practitioner working on housing, healthcare, university and corporate campuses, and others, in the U.S. as well as Australia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Sweden, Syria, and Venezuela.
Rolland was born on July 2, 1930, in Frankfurt, Germany, from which his family emigrated in 1936. He grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey, and graduated with a B.S. in ornamental horticulture in 1952 from Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, PA. It was a fellow German emigree, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, who urged his application to the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). At Harvard (1952-1955), Rolland studied under Hideo Sasaki, Norman Newton, and Walt Chambers, and later became of Sasaki鈥檚 first employees.
Upon graduation, Rolland joined Perkins & Will, a multi-disciplinary firm in White Plains, New York, as chief site planner. Drafted into the army the following February, he spent two years with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in Philadelphia, but also worked part-time in the offices of both George Patton and Horace Fleischer on projects with Louis Kahn. Rolland returned to Perkins & Will in November 1958 and worked on college master plans, hospitals, and large suburban high schools.
Seeking to practice in a purely landscape architectural office, preferably in California where the profession was exploring new territory, from 1960 to 1962 he worked in Lawrence Halprin鈥檚 office on various projects, including the Seminary South Shopping Center in Fort Worth, Texas; campus projects at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, and U.C. Davis; The Sea Ranch; the IBM facility at Los Gatos; and various public housing projects.
Rolland returned to the New York metropolitan area to open his own office in January 1963 in Rye, New York. He drew up a list of the top forty architectural firms in the city and set out to meet as many of their principals as he could. The commissions varied from a Chevrolet dealership to the Rockefeller Estate in Pocantico Hills, working directly for then-Governor Nelson Rockefeller. The office flourished in an era of significant economic growth and particularly benefited from major corporate moves to the suburbs and dramatic expansions of the State University of New York (SUNY).
In 1964, Rolland became the master planning landscape architect for the new SUNY Old Westbury campus. Then in 1965, he began designing the new SUNY Purchase campus with architect Edward Larabee Barnes. There the roster of architects, and clients, ultimately included Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Paul Rudolph, Venturi & Rauch, Gwathmey, Siegel & Henderson, and others. By design, the office portfolio included projects within a broad range of scales and types, but the aesthetic premise was always the same: the building and the landscape should read as if they came 鈥渇rom one hand.鈥 This was the underlying principle of the SUNY Purchase design; a powerful pairing of philosophy and personal taste.
Larger commissions were primarily institutional and corporate. And in 1968 his first international projects including planning a new resort in Guaymas, Mexico, and the much-published AIU Asian Headquarters in Tokyo, which showcased a modern American garden on the banks of the Imperial Moat. Rolland also continued to maintain a portfolio of residential projects as these brought opportunities to develop personal relationships with gifted young architects like Robert A.M. Stern.
In 1964, Rolland taught a joint studio at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, and his own studio for twenty years, from 1973 to 1993. He subsequently taught at the Harvard GSD (1991) and the City College of New York (biennially, 1998 - 2004) and headed numerous design charrettes at the University of Virginia (biennially, 1975 鈥 1991), Cornell University, and the University of Georgia.
The mid-1970s brought continuing corporate commissions from IBM, Mobil, Miller Brewing, and American Cyanamid, as well as several federal commissions with Marcel Breuer, including the Department of Health Education and Welfare Air Rights Building (Hubert M. Humphrey Building) in Washington, D.C., and the Grand Coulee Dam Visitors Center in Washington state. A six-month Mid-Career Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (AAR) in 1978 proved to be both personally and professionally pivotal.
The next years brought prestigious work, but the successful outcome of two design competitions, both begun in 1979 with new friends and AAR Fellows, would prove life-changing: The Folk Arts Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, with architect Richard Meier, and the New Parliament House for Australia with Mitchell/Giurgola Architects. The latter was 80 acres, with the building and the landscape truly conceived as one, creating an enduring and iconic monument for an entire nation.
In 1981 opened an office in partnership with Shavaun Towers. Throughout the 1980s Rolland consulted for the Australian National Capital Planning Commission, and the collaborations with Mitchell Giurgola Architects continued as well, including the Volvo Headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden, the IBM Conference Center in New Jersey, and a New York county courthouse. Among the firm鈥檚 other projects were two U.S. embassies, a series of projects at the Corning Glassworks, and continuing work on housing, healthcare facilities, and university campuses.
In the 1990s, Rolland worked on Alliance Airport in Texas and again collaborated with Mitchell Giurgola Architects, this time on projects in Italy. He also worked on the IBM Corporate Headquarters in collaboration with Kohn Pedersen Fox, begun in 1995. That same year, both he and Towers collaborated on the landscape master plan for Smith College with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, a reunion 44 years after their first meeting.
The collaborative approach was a genuine expression of the value Rolland placed on personal relationships in all aspects of his professional life. This, not a signature 鈥榮tyle鈥, was the hallmark of his practice. His goal was to be the 鈥渁rchitect鈥檚 landscape architect,鈥 advancing the viability and visibility of the profession within the larger design process. His work was characterized by elegant simplicity, minimalist modern geometry, a restrained palette of woody plants, and attention to detail. The strength and clarity of the initial sketch, developed in concert with the architecture and based on rigorous site analysis and problem definition, was always paramount.
In 1982, Rolland was elected a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). He received the Institute Honors for Collaborative Achievement award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) in 1990 for his significant contributions to the environment and the profession of architecture. He valued the AIA honors above all, even above the ASLA鈥檚 Award of Excellence, now the Firm Award, which he received in 1997. He was also named an Academician of the National Academy in 1994. Rolland retired in 1997, but continued to teach, serve on juries, and consult, including to the U.S. Department of State鈥檚 Foreign Building鈥檚 Operations Architectural Advisory Board鈥攈e was the first landscape architect on this prestigious panel.
He is predeceased by his wife Wendy, and survived by his children David, Seth, and Janna.