M. Paul Friedberg, FASLA, (born 1931) is an American landscape architect.
M. Paul Friedberg was born in New York City where he attended Cornell University. In 1954 he graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree. He said that "after navigating four socially active years the reality of growing up set in."[1] He said that his largest influence for pursuing landscape architecture was the chance to connect people to themselves, to each other and to their environment.
In 1958, four years after graduating, Friedberg opened his landscape practice, M. Paul Friedberg and Partners. The contributions the firm has made to the aesthetic environment of urban life have been revolutionary in design and intent. Here, he soon became a leading Landscape Architect of new public spaces. All of which included plazas, main strip malls, and small vest-pocket parks. Paul Friedberg also established the first undergraduate landscape architecture program in a major city at the City College of New York, focusing on the social and physical issues inherent to an urban environment.
In 1965 M. Paul Friedberg designed an innovative play area at Riis plaza that would later be demolished in 2000. This innovative play area was created to allow children of different ages to utilize the many different structures including a series of pyramids, mounds, and a tunnel in many ways.[2]
In his seventies, M. Paul Friedberg continues to work and design at an amazing pace. To sum up his job, Friedberg happily smiles and says it is "not a bad way to spend [my] day,".[3] Due to Friedberg, landscape architecture was brought into the field of urban design on a large scale through the wide variety of urban spaces represented by his work. His personal philosophy is summed up in the following quote:
Design is a personal journey. The fact that I have the power to alter the appearance and content of a site merely by placing ideas on a piece of paper or a screen, is an ongoing adventure-and exploration into the unknown about how space and form can direct human response. It is about the discovery of myself, my aesthetic preference and social values at a given point in time. I create three-dimensionally what the writer accomplishes with words. It is not without anxiety, as the ideas haven't a reality until cast in a space and experienced.--M. Paul Friedberg, Silent AuctionHe is married to the landscape architect Dorit Shahar, and they have a daughter, Maya.[4]
One of Friedberg's most notable projects was the Jacob Riis Plaza, undertaken in the mid-1960s. The Jacob Riis Complex is a series of 14-story buildings along the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The large open spaces between the blocks were poorly laid out, with little consideration of the residents' needs. Friedberg's redesign separated the space into human scaled areas using pergolas, terraces and mounds. Materials and features were selected for their robustness, for example large timbers, and vandal resistant lighting.
2. “M. Paul Friedberg.” M. Paul Friedberg | The Cultural Landscape Foundation, tclf.org/pioneer/m-paul-friedberg.
