Harriet Pattison, a noted American landscape architect who worked closely with her romantic partner Louis Kahn, passed away in Philadelphia last week, according to their son, filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn. She was 94.

Pattison enjoyed a career that spanned more than thirty years, working predominantly in Maine and Pennsylvania before she pursued her own path following the death of Kahn in 1974. Pattison studied landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania after working briefly in Dan Kiley’s Vermont-based practice. She would later go on to work alongside Kahn on the Kimbell Art Museum and Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park projects through a position with George Erwin Patton. Pattison was also inducted as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2016.

Pattison’s reflections on her life with Kahn were published in the 2020 memoir Our Days Are Like Full Years: A Memoir With Letters From Louis Kahn. She was also included in Nathaniel Kahn’s soul-searching 2003 documentary My Architect, which was nominated for an Academy Award the same year. The pair first met in New Haven as Kahn was overseeing the construction of the Yale University Art Gallery. Pattison went on to say they were “soul mates and inspired each other.”

“I am overwhelmed by what has been achieved,” she wrote in the 2020 memoir. “My great longing was to live a life in art, and with Lou’s help, I had found a way to do it. This work allowed me to transcend myself and be part of something bigger and more lasting.”

The Cultural Landscape Foundation has a comprehensive Harriet Pattison Oral History interview that can be found here, along with a reflection from her longtime friend and TCLF President Charles A. Birnbaum.