Alfred Caldwell, the firebrand landscape architect and educator who used a distinctive Midwestern style to design such beloved features of the Chicago lakefront as the Lincoln Park Zoo Rookery and Promontory Point, died Friday at his farm in Bristol, Wis. He was 95.
Mr. Caldwell was for years a living link to three of the giants of Chicago architecture. He taught under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe at the Illinois Institute of Technology from 1944 to 1958. His own mentors included Frank Lloyd Wright and the eminent landscape architect Jens Jensen, both of whom drew inspiration from the Midwest prairie.
Although Mr. Caldwell shaped the northern half of Lincoln Park during the late 1930s while he was a landscape designer with the Chicago Park District, his masterpieces are widely regarded to have been done on a smaller scale.
One, the Zoo Rookery at Fullerton Parkway, is an intimate bird sanctuary with massive limestone walks and walls. The other, Promontory Point, juts into Lake Michigan at 55th Street, and has thick groves of trees and shrubs that create a ring around a central meadow. Both were completed in 1937 while Mr. Caldwell was with the Park District.
“He was for our generation the person who carried Jensen’s commitment to the native landscape to the present day,” said the landscape historian Victoria Ranney. “His landscapes, particularly Promontory Point and the Zoo Rookery, are fairly small, but (they are) gems of the lakefront.”
In a 1986 interview, Mr. Caldwell explained that he wanted Promontory Point to be “a place you go to and you are thrilled–a beautiful experience, a joy, a delight.” But anyone who expected him to always be a nice man talking sweetly about flowers was in for a rude awakening.
Once, when making a point to a student at IIT, Mr. Caldwell, 87 years old at the time, pounded the young man’s shoulder with a series of jabs that rocked him back and forth on his heels. That sort of behavior was his trademark.
In 1958, IIT’s trustees bypassed Mies, who had done numerous steel-and-glass buildings at the South Side campus, and asked the Chicago firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design IIT’s remaining buildings. Mr. Caldwell resigned on the spot. However, he returned to IIT in 1981 and remained on the faculty until his death.
Born in St. Louis in 1903, Mr. Caldwell grew up in Chicago. He came to detest the violence and squalor of cities and, like Wright, sought to decentralize metropolitan areas and resettle everyone in gardens.
Mr. Caldwell worked in Chicago from 1920 to 1931 as an assistant to Jensen, then was the parks superintendent in Dubuque, Iowa. In 1936, he became landscape designer for the Chicago Park District. After serving as a War Department civil engineer during World War II, he joined IIT, where he landscaped much of the university’s Mies-designed campus.
Mr. Caldwell received numerous professional honors, including the Teacher of the Year from the American Institute of Architects.
Mr. Caldwell’s survivors include a daughter, Carol Dooley; and a son, James.
Private services will be held.
IIT expects to hold a memorial tribute to Mr. Caldwell in the fall.