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and by Colleagues | Public Officials | Mentors and Others
Karl Linn might well be the most stimulating and original of all the teachers of landscape architecture during the history of the Penn's Landscape Architecture program.
--Ian McHarg in his autobiography, Quest for Life (1996).
[In 1959 McHarg invited Linn to set aside his career as a prominent landscape architect and join the Landscape Architecture faculty at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Pennsylvania.]
I feel his work has made a significant contribution in broadening the scope of architecture, landscape architecture and planning and has improved their ability to deliver services to many of those who could not otherwise afford professional services. Linn's pioneering attitude has won him the respect of many of the community leaders throughout the United States, particularly in the Black and Hispanic communities. Professor Linn is very well known and highly respected in the profession of landscape architecture and among people from all related disciplines. He enjoys a strong national as well as international reputation in his field.
--William Rock, Jr., Chairman, Dept. of Landscape Architecture, University of Toronto, 1980
Karl is well known and respected nationally for his ability to stimulate the important questions, the most potentially integrative questions, and the most human questions. It takes a special person like Karl Linn, who is first a thinker and a dedicated humanist and then a landscape architect, to help our professions better understand and relate to one another. Students instinctively understand and respect this sense of priority and naturally gravitate to Karl. Always unsettling, ever helpful and supportive, never satisfied, he is the quintessential teacher, an accomplished gadfly in the best Socratic sense. It is to his credit that he is revered as a central force in landscape architecture's intellectual and moral conscience.
--Jerome Diethelm, Chairman, Dept. of Landscape Architecture, University of Oregon, 1980
Karl makes the value and services the design professions can offer relevant and meaningful to all of society. He is among the first to connect education with the real world. He phrased it, "action teaching," and I applaud him. He helped make environmental advocacy a legitimate pursuit. I am greatly impressed with his ability to empower those he teaches; student, professional, citizen, the educator with the desire and ability to excel. He sanctions their rightful and gentle control over their human condition and the environment that supports them. The common shared matrix of our existence, in a sense, is our physical world. Karl uses this physical world as a generator of self and group awareness, as a source for creative efforts and a neutral facilitator of communication among people. He, in my view, is designing with and for life. Natural living elements of our physical world, and living, breathing people, are both fully considered in his clearly articulated approach.
--Walter Cudnohufsky, Director, Conway School of Landscape Design, Massachusetts, 1980.
Karl, whom I have known over the last 15 years, had in the 1960s as a practicing Landscape Architect in New York City and Philadelphia, demonstrated a high level of creative ability in landscape design. His uniqueness -- perhaps approaching genius -- is not, however, the exercise of his art exclusively in that domain; it is in his ability to unlock individual creativity in others while they are working toward communally derived goals during the process of designing and manipulating the landscape. I have seen him, through his love and concern for people, as well as for nature, teach through the occasion of designing a neighborhood park to draw out from the group important and previously unarticulated needs and aspirations.
--William Porter, Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), 1974
Karl Linn's teaching at MIT was an inspiration to great numbers of our students, and he drew many enthusiastic listeners from the community roundabout. His great skill lies in leading people to work together for common ends, while showing them the relevance of environment to the community, and how designers may securely connect their personal lives to their professional ones.
--Kevin Lynch, Chair, Dept. of City Planning, MIT, 1974
He opened up new attitudes not only toward art forms but about a moral relationship between the artist and his work; between the artist and his society. The meaning of new artworks close to life systems wasn't clear to the art school. Insistent social problems sharpened the question of the relationship of the artist's personal vision to the rest of society. Mr. Linn presented an approach to art-making that widened the traditional creative process. He sought mutual instead of individual inspiration. He fostered the imagination of the community. I can't think of any faculty during my eight-year tenure at the College who has had a greater impact.
--Jeremy Foss, Chairman of Fine Arts, Massachusetts College of Art, 1974
It is enough to say that Karl Linn is at once an inspiring teacher, an instinctive leader, a man passionately involved in improvement of the human condition, who never spares himself and whose leadership role has never stopped him from direct physical labor, however menial. He is a driving power for good.
--Ian McHarg, Chair, Department of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania, 1967
What is unique about Karl is his instinctual fusion of the aesthetic and the psychiatric pertaining to the ecology of a place. Seemingly unscholastic, he produces his own kind of scholarly distillate and uses it intuitively as the situation requires rather than with stubborn inflexibility. He is an artist in the way he approaches what we might call the canvas of his problems, improvising until he gets a feel of the possible solutions, and then gradually giving more apparent order to the situation. He has great faith in the capacity of people to regenerate themselves and their communities by learning to work together on creative concepts.
-- E. M. Benson, Dean, Philadelphia College of Art, 1967
Linn has a passionate and total commitment to his work and a personal genius for enlisting the enthusiasm of slum residents and young people in the improvement of their environment. In addition, he has marvelous ingenuity in designing with the use of local available materials on the most unpromising sites. The result is almost invariably a creative surge of energy, a new spirit of community in a blighted area and an ingenious space which serves some real community need.
--William L. C. Wheaton, Dean, College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley, 1967
Karl Linn is an outstanding psychologist as well as a landscape architect. His unique integration of these two fields is producing a whole new science that might perhaps be called the Social Psychology of Urban Space. His ideas about how to reorganize the urban setting in order to produce increased cohesion and positive mental health are particularly pertinent in these times.
--Frank Riessman, Director, Paraprofessional Training Center, NYC, 1967
Yes, I think what Mr. Linn has done, is doing, is very important for those small sane areas of life which hopefully will multiply till they all touch and we will have a saner world which values and appreciates and passes on so that the young may be helped instead of blocked.
--Sister Mary Corita, Chairperson, Dept. of Fine Arts, Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles, California, 1967
I believe that Karl is one of the most creative and sensitive men working in the field of community development. His experience in developing the Neighborhood Commons movement has inspired many in the urban field. He has much to tell us.
--Paul Davidoff, Chairman, Urban Planning Program, Hunter College, NYC, 1967
Reflections by Colleagues | Public Officials | Mentors and Others
