M. Paul Friedberga pioneering landscape architect, artist, planner, and educatordied on February 15 at age 93. News of Friedbergs passing was shared by The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF). Charles Birnbaum, TCLF president and CEO, interned for Friedberg in the 1980s, and the pair had been close ever since. In describing Friedbergs legacy, Birnbaum said the late visionary was serious about the idea of childs play and an unrepentant believer in the virtue of cities when U.S. cities were at their nadir.Friedberg was renowned for his tenure at City College, where he established the Urban Landscape Architecture program. Hes also remembered for his work at public housing sites in New York, and St. Louiss Pruitt-Igoe on spaces for children.Friedberg was born in 1931 in Brooklyn but spent his childhood in Pennsylvania. He went on to earn a degree in horticulture from Cornell University. Friedberg started his eponymous New Yorkbased practice in 1958.Friedberg enthusiastically embraced the participatory design movement of the late 1960s, Michael Allen a history professor at West Virginia University, told AN after the landscape architects death.Aerial view of Friedbergs Jacob Riis Plaza (Courtesy M. Paul Friedberg & Partners)One of Friedbergs first projects was at Pruitt-Igoe, the canonical St. Louis public housing development by Minoru Yamasaki. Friedberg worked alongside community activist Macler Shepard; he was brought onto to help save the development in the mid-1960s, almost a decade after construction ended, when the project was in dire straights. In his essay Incomplete by Design: Reconsidering the Life and Death Pruitt-Igoe, Allen notes that 70 percent of Pruitt-Igoes roughly 12,000 residents were under the age of 12. Together with Shepard, Friedberg interviewed children at Pruitt-Igoe to inform the ultimate design for new outdoor spaces.Allen told AN that what made Pruitt-Igoe stand out was how Friedberg treated children there as clients. Friedberg listened to their needs and developing playground models with their input, Allen said. His work led to the construction of well-used adventure playgrounds in 1967, an under appreciated bright spot for the troubled housing project amid its decline.Friedbergs master plan for Pruitt-Igoes open areas delivered a 250-seat amphitheater, and six playgrounds replete with wooden modular furniture. Later, in 1971, late St. Louis architect Charles Fleming was tasked with another master plan to save Pruitt-Igoe, nevertheless one that ended in vainPruitt-Igoe was demolished in 1976.Fountain at Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis (Jim Winstead Jr./Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 2.0)Prior to Pruitt-Igoe, Friedberg had garnered acclaim for his work in Harlem at Carver Houses, and at Jacob Riis Houses in Lower East Side. Today, Jacob Riis Plaza is widely considered among Friedbergs best works. Then came Peavey Plaza in Minneapolis, and Central Parks Billy Johnson Playground.At Jacob Riis Plaza, Friedberg said he employed something he called a total play environment, a space that encouraged physical, emotional and sensory exercise and participation. Landscape architect Peter Walker said in 2004 that what Jacob Riis Plaza was to landscape architecture, Mies van der Rohes Barcelona Pavilion was to architecture. Like Mies Barcelona Pavilion it was unlike anything seen before in the modern city, Walker said.Later, Friedberg helped revitalize New Yorks Battery Park City; he also designed projects in Canada, Japan, and elsewhere. He was awarded the ASLA Medal in 2015.Friedberg is survived by his wife, Doris Shahar, and three children.