ABC Stone in Greenpoint is an oddly suitable place to see an exhibition about landscape because there are expensive marble slabs everywhere and because they pipe in jungle sounds (to scare away pigeons). The Landscape Architecture Legacy of Dan Kiley, like most retrospectives mounted by the Cultural Landscape Foundation, is more interesting for the video interviews it pulls together than for the soft-focus photos of Kiley’s obviously beautiful gardens, which are commonly compared to the baroque designs of Andre Le Nôtre because both feature squares. Former colleagues reminisce about the period when Kiley, who contributed more than a little to the profession’s macho reputation, ran his design studio like a sleepaway camp out of a barn on Lake Champlain, with bonfires and ice fishing mixed in with the drafting. Especially memorable is a clip about the construction of the Ford Foundation atrium—the Versailles of POPS. Kiley protégé Richard Haag recounts his mentor’s skeptical response to Kevin Roche’s pitch for re-creating a New England forest inside a Midtown office building: “Yeah, but Kevin—is it going to thunder and lightning in there?” (It doesn’t, but they do pipe in Bill Evans to scare away teens.) The design called for forty-foot mature southern magnolias, trucked up from Virginia and tilted into place like the megaliths at Stonehenge. This detail reminded me of how someone at the landscape architecture firm OLIN once told me about driving around California buying evergreen oaks from people’s backyards to be transplanted into the private park inside Apple’s Cupertino spaceship. The “forest” in the Ford Foundation never grew well and was recently replaced with Rainforest Café–accurate plants by the Miami landscape architect Raymond Jungles. Kiley’s dignified public spaces evoke a time when our overlords still bothered to impress us.