the landscape architects of hollin hills: barney voigt, dan kiley and eric paepcke

The flowing, integrated look of Hollin Hills, with gardens and parks embracing the houses in a sea of green, was intentional from the beginning, and was largely the work of three pioneering landscape architects: Lou “Barney” Voigt, Dan Kiley, and Eric Paepcke.

Click here to see a collection of their Hollin Hills landscape plans.

Lou Bernard “Barney” Voigt

Barney Voigt (1915-1953) worked with architect Charles Goodman almost from the beginning of Hollin Hills, and was a defining voice in developing the Hollin Hills landscape philosophy. Landscape and architecture should fit together seamlessly, he felt, with each embracing and enhancing the other.

“l have tried to tie one lot into the other to make the community look as if there were no individual lots,” he once said, “but a beautiful park.”

As Dennis Carmichael points out in his essay, A Landscape of Democracy, Voigt “sought to create gardens that flowed seamlessly from one yard to the next.”

Voigt worked with individual homeowners, who could buy an individualized landscape plan for $100, including a private consultation. His designs, writes Carmichael, favored “quiet, restrained sweeps of shrubs and trees arcing across the landscape in simple masses.”

Voigt — who called his Hollin Hills landscaping “experimental” and wanted the community to be his “showplace” in the Washington, DC area — was in Hollin Hills once or twice per week. He was widely liked in the community, and wrote a column on gardening for the monthly Hollin Hills Bulletin.

To see a six-page collection of Voigt’s writings on “How To Use Your Landscape Plan” — which explain his ideas in detail, and offer practical tips — please click here.

In an interview in the August 1951 issue, Voigt noted that “when I meet with residents to ascertain their likes and dislikes, I try to act as an agent between the owners and the community. I just try to think in terms of the whole. Individuality I encourage, even stress, where it will not mar the effectiveness of the whole.”

For a description by Voigt of his plan for the No. 2 butterfly-roof house at 2208 Marthas Road, click here.

Voigt, who also worked on the Goodman-designed subdivision of Hammond Wood, received received his B.S. from the University of Illinois in 1939, before enrolling at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he received an MA in landscape design.

In 1942 and 1943, he taught Landscape Architecture and Botany at Black Mountain College, an experimental school in Asheville, North Carolina, which offered a Bauhaus-style curriculum across a broad range of disciplines. There he collaborated with Lawrence Kocher and Josef Albers to create a landscape plan for the campus.

During World War II, Voigt worked with the firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, where he helped develop site plans for atomic plants in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and worked on projects for the Office of Strategic Services and the Department of State. After the war, he went to work for the National Capital Parks Planning Division, before joining Goodman’s architectural firm in 1950.

Sadly, Voigt’s work on the landscape at Hollin Hills was cut short in 1953 by his untimely death at the age of 37. Rippon Park, at the corner of Paul Spring Lane and Rippon Road, was renamed for Voigt the next year.

Daniel Urban Kiley

Dan Kiley and his assistant Eric Paepcke completed the Hollin Hills design after Voigt’s death, with Kiley leading the project from 1953 to 1955 and completing an estimated 100 landscape plans. Kiley was a modernist who brought a new and much different style, says Carmichael: “He was interested in pure geometry, and his gardens featured striking circular forms, straight lines, and the strong collision of geometric planes.”

Hollin Hills was a proving ground for the young landscape architect, and he experimented with a range of geometric forms, using paving, fences, and walls to shape spaces in clearly man-made ways.

As Laura Trieschmann, Andrea Schoenfeld and Jere Gibber point out in the 2013 Hollin Hills registration form for the National Register of Historic Places, “Kiley liked to cluster the same plants across adjacent lots, if given the opportunity, blurring individual property lines. He also married the individual properties with the communal parks by using homogeneous vegetation.”

“Hollin Hills was the experimental ground,” wrote Joseph Disponzio, “on which Kiley transformed his design language into the masterful modern idiom for which he is known.”

Kiley went on to become one of the most celebrated landscape architects of the 20th Century, but it’s difficult to find traces of his Hollin Hills gardens, and no one is sure how many were actually built.

Kiley “favored a more functional and harmonious approach to garden design that supported the bold simplicity of the modern house,” wrote Adam Bernstein in a 2004 obituary for Kiley in The Washington Post.

“In practical terms, that meant designs for terraces tied to the living room instead of ornate gardens inspired by the Renaissance. With an eye on modern architecture, Mr. Kiley also was influenced by the controlled, grid-like designs by 17th-century landscape architect Andre Le Notre, best known for his work at the Versailles palace gardens in France.

“More inventive than revolutionary, Mr. Kiley used such classically influenced geometric designs to balance and challenge the modernist architectural work of Eero Saarinen, I.M. Pei, Philip Johnson, Kenzo Tange, Michael Graves and Santiago Calatrava. With commissions ranging from the Irwin Miller house in Columbus, Ind., to the landscape framing of Dulles International Airport, Mr. Kiley was revered in his field.”

For a 1997 Washington Post article on Kiley’s plans in Hollin Hills, click here.

For more on Kiley’s early work, please see “Daniel Urban Kiley: The Early Gardens” by William S. Saunders.  

Eric Paepcke

Landscape architect Eric Paepcke practiced in the Washington area after moving here in the mid-1950’s, and had an international career. An assistant to Kiley, he became the primary landscape architect for Hollin Hills in 1955.

Having studied agronomy and botany, Paepcke's designs for Hollin Hills were organic, generally curvaceous plans that complemented the rigid geometry of Goodman's houses. Paepcke would continue his association with Hollin Hills until the last house was constructed and Robert Davenport closed the sales office in 1971.

In addition to his work on Hollin Hills, Paepcke landscaped numerous buildings in the area, including the National Academy of Sciences, the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis and the Egyptian Embassy. He also designed the gardens of the U.S. embassies in Lima, Peru, and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. A characteristic of his work was the attention he paid to site engineering, drainage, erosion control, soil conditions and plant growth. Born in Germany in 1906, he died in 1981 at the age of 75.