Place for reflection

When the Rev. Robert Roethemeyer looks across Concordia Theological Seminarys campus, he sees little clumps of four or five trees, sometimes of the same species, amid a broad lawn.

He calls them sacred groves, and indeed, he says, that was how they were seen by the person who meticulously laid out the plantings on the 191-acre campus on the north side of Fort Wayne more than 50 years ago.

He had this idea that you could sit under this sacred grove and in the natural environment and reflect on the questions of life, says Roethemeyer, director of library and information services, has been the unofficial shepherd of the seminarys buildings and grounds for several years.

It bespeaks his vision of what the campus was about, a place for reflection and contemplation of the gifts of God.

The visionary for Concordias grounds was landscape architect Dan Kiley. And today, says Julie Donnell, a founder of non-profit Friends of the Parks, the Boston-born practitioner of Modernism is probably the pre-eminent American landscape architect of the last century.

Yet, she says, most area residents probably dont know that Fort Wayne houses one of Kileys major works. Thats why the Friends are spearheading a stop by a nationally touring exhibit conceived to mark the centennial of Kileysbirth in 1912 and plead for the preservation of his legacy.

The reason we are doing this is, very seriously, that we dont recognize these landscapes, and this is an opportunity for people to understand how beautiful they are and how important they are to our cultural heritage, says Donnell, who is also on the board of the Cultural Landscape Foundation in Washington, D.C., organizer of the exhibit.

Featuring Kileys plan for Concordia among 27 of his more than 1,000 projects commissioned worldwide, the exhibit opens Tuesday at the Jeffrey R. Krull Gallery of the Allen County Public Library. Associated events are a reception and panel discussion with two Kiley experts at the library at 6:30 p.m. Friday and a Concordia campus tour guided by Roethemeyer at 10a.m. Saturday. All are free and open to the public.

The exhibit comes to Fort Wayne after appearing in Indianapolis and Columbus, two other Indiana cities with significant Kiley works. Some of his best-known landscapes include the Air Gardens of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Washington, D.C.s Benjamin Banneker Park and Independence Mall in Philadelphia.

Mark Zelonis, deputy director of environmental and historic preservation at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, steward of a Kiley installation at the Miller House and Garden in Columbus, says Kiley created three-dimensional works of art in which, true to Modernist credo, plantings and structures work seamlessly together.

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