Karl Linn was born in 1923 in Dessau, Germany. He grew up on an orchard founded by his mother, Henrietta Rosenthal, as an accredited training center for gardening and horticultural therapy. Linn’s father, Josef Lin, was the Chief Librarian at the Jewish Community Center in Berlin. In 1933, their home was raided by the Nazis and Josef fled to Palestine. Forced to sell the farm, Henrietta followed with the children in 1934.

The family started a new farm near Haifa. When Karl was 14, he dropped out of school to become a farmer to support his ailing parents. He graduated from the Kadoorie School of Agriculture in 1941, helped to found the Kibbutz Maagan Michael, and developed an elementary school garden program in Tel Aviv that taught students to grow food for their own lunches.

At 23, the experience of anti-Semitism in Germany and a growing uneasiness at the way Jews were treating Arabs in Palestine encouraged Linn to move to Zurich, Switzerland. There he trained as a psychoanalyst at the Institute for Applied Psychology, graduating in 1948, and then he moved to New York where he had a private practice as a child psychoanalyst.

Having learned early that nature could be a powerful force for emotional healing, Linn returned to landscape architecture in 1952. He continued to study both landscape design and psychology, taking a summer course with Stanley White at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1954 and graduating from the New School for Social Research in New York with an MA in Gestalt Psychology in 1956.

Linn rose quickly in the landscape architecture field earning the commission for Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram building and collaborating with architect Philip Johnson on the building’s Four Seasons Restaurant. However, he began to feel that his increasingly wealthy suburban clients were robbing him of his social relevance. In 1959, at the invitation of department chair Ian McHarg, Linn joined the Landscape Architecture faculty at the University of Pennsylvania. While at Penn, he developed a program to transform vacant lots in urban neighborhoods into neighborhood commons, engaging students, residents, social service agencies, and local governments in the design and construction process. The program evolved into the Neighborhood Renewal Corps Nonprofit Corporation in Philadelphia, and later also in Washington, D.C., and was a model for the Domestic Peace Corps as well as similar design-build centers in Baltimore, New York, Boston, Newark, Columbus, Louisville, Chicago, and St. Louis.

Linn continued to teach landscape architecture as a tool for social change at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. He retired from teaching in 1986 and moved to Berkeley where he was involved with the Earth Island Institute and the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners. He co-founded Urban Habitat, East Bay Urban Gardeners, the People of Color Greening Network, and Berkeley’s Community Gardening Collaborative. The Karl Linn Community Garden in Berkeley was dedicated to him in honor of his life-long service to community and peace and inspired Karl to develop several more community garden and art projects in adjacent lots.

Linn was an active member of the American Society of Landscape Architects and became a Fellow in 1999. He was also active in establishing Arab-Jewish dialogue in the Bay Area, co-founding the East Bay Dialogue Group and cementing his legacy as an advocate for peace everywhere. Karl Linn passed away in 2005.

Sources: Fox, Margalit. “Karl Linn, Architect of Urban Landscapes, Dies at 81.” The New York Times. 13 Feb 2005. Accessed 26 Oct 2016. Hoge, Patrick. “Karl Linn -- landscape architect devoted to social justice.” The San Francisco Chronicle. 8 Feb 2005. Accessed 28 Oct 2016. “Karl Linn (1923-2005) Biographical Sketch.” Karl Linn (1923-2005) Press Packet. 8 Feb 2005. Linn, Karl, “Curriculum Vitae, 1999 nomination for Fellow of the ASLA,” Karl Linn Collection, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.