raymor

Kiley Gardens was a masterpiece of modern landscape architecture that was neglected and may soon be demolished.

Read the sad story here:

http://www.tclf.org/news/april_2004_kiley_asla.htm

There is a group that is seeking to restore the Gardens to its former glory. Here is their website:

http://www.kileygardens.org/

Currently, the park containing the Gardens is overgrown and now resembles a modern ruin, almost “cemetery” like. Astonishingly, the project is only 15 years old.

The Gardens serve as the plaza for a large bank building downtown. "The design of the Gardens and the bank building involve "Number Mysticism and the Golden Proportion. The Golden Proportion, including a logarithmic pattern know as the “Fibonacci” series, led to the conceptual proportioning in the design process. After analyzing the project site, it was observed that the footprint of the site, located next to the Hillsborough River, approximated to the diagonal of a 2 to 5 rectangle, in relation to the Tampa grid plan. This existing ratio correlated with two numbers in the Fibonacci series, which begins: 1,1, 2, 3, 5, 8 13, ….

The project’s program consists of a thirty-three story cylindrical office tower, two six-story cubic bank pavilions and a 4.5 acre plaza over a two-level parking garage. A tower ratio of 2 to 5 (diameters to height) was established by using 13-foot, floor-to-floor, increments. Multiples of 13 feet were used to establish the radius of the tower (78 feet) and the height and sides of the cubic pavilions (also 78 feet each). The tartan grid pattern of the plaza echoes the tower and pavilion elevation patterns. The garden is divided into parallel rectangular grass areas each 78 feet wide and of varying lengths, with 13-foot pathways between them. Sabal Palmettos line the pathways and six-hundred Crape-Myrtles are informally arranged within the areas to contrast the rational geometry."
--quoted from The Cultural Landscape Foundation
http://www.tclf.org/kiley_tampa.htm