Harriet Pattison
While at Yale, Harriet Pattison applied to Josef Albers’s course on color, where she reveled in the experimentation and play and Albers’s teachings about how colors “could knock you out or bore you.”
Although Harriet Pattison was accepted to the Yale School of Drama for theater design, she was soon placed into acting and cast in a leading role in a play. While at Yale, she applied to Josef Albers’s course on color, where she reveled in the experimentation and play and Albers’s teachings about how colors “could knock you out or bore you.” Her far-ranging talents ultimately led to a successful fifty-year career as a landscape architect. She worked with leading practitioners including Modernist architect Louis Kahn and landscape architect George Patton, with whom she collaborated on the renowned design for the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
Harriet Pattison was interviewed by Charles A. Birnbaum in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in June 2015. The video clip is courtesy of The Cultural Landscape Foundation. For the complete series, please visit http://tclf.org/pioneer/oral-history/harriet-pattison-oral-history.