Michael Singer, a sculptor whose work, starting with beavers and pine forests and moving to ever larger scales, eventually blurred the lines that separated art, landscaping, architecture and urban planning, died March 14 at his home in Delray Beach, Florida. It was 78.
Jason Bregman, Mr. Singer’s studio partner, confirmed the death but did not give a cause.
Mr. Singer was often described as a landscape architect, and an accomplished one at that, with public commissions at sites as diverse as a recycling center in Phoenix, Denver International Airport and a Whole Foods supermarket in Jacksonville, Florida.
But in reality he was an artist, one who saw his medium and ambition in expansive but humble terms, with work that sought to repair humanity’s disruption of the natural world.
In some cases, such as a garden he designed for a Food and Drug Administration office outside Washington, D.C., he paired low-sloping concrete structures with water features and native grasses.
In others, like the Phoenix recycling center he designed with artist Linnea Glatt, he created a structure that invited the public to observe how he handled his waste, turning a process that was invisible and unknown into a source of education and even civic pride.
Though formally trained as a painter, by the early 1970s Mr. Singer had turned to sculpture, making abstract, abstract architectural pieces out of steel and concrete in his Lower East Side loft.
Shortly after a 1971 exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum announced him as a rising star on the New York art scene, he left the city for a 100-acre farm in southern Vermont. Taking inspiration from the beavers he observed working in the wetlands on his property, he began creating works from organic materials such as bamboo, reeds and logs, placing them in and around the same swampy locations.
In one work, “Situation Balance Series/Beaver Bog,” completed in 1973, he loosely stacked half a dozen fallen hemlock trees in a patch of swamp. To a casual observer, it might appear that the logs fell into place naturally, and only after noticing the jute rope used by Mr. Singer to hold them in place would his intervention become apparent.
It was often associated with the Land Art movement of the 1960s, perhaps most famously represented by Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty,” completed in 1970, a 1,500-foot bluff of stone and mud jutting out into the Great Salt Lake in Utah.
But where artists like Mr. Smithson used bulldozers and earth movers to create sweeping monumental changes to the landscape, Mr. Singer let nature take the lead. Reflecting the emerging environmental movement of the 1970s, it improved the land in minimal but surprising ways.
“I wanted to create works where human activity would not be destructive and yet interface with the natural environment,” he told Sculpture magazine in 1998.
Appreciating a Singer work required deep engagement with its site—its topology, its flora, its climate—to understand why he made certain design choices. He preferred to use materials that he found nearby and that would eventually decompose, further complicating the relationship between art and nature.
While much of his work in the 1970s was small and portable enough to fit in an art gallery, by the early 1980s he was creating large and permanent site-specific commissions.
In 1980 the city of Grand Rapids, Mich., hired him to create an artwork for a new flood wall along a 600-foot stretch of dirt and brush. When he surveyed the site, he realized the project would involve cutting down a stand of mature cottonwood trees. To save them, he proposed a new design for the wall, lower and multi-level, that incorporated the trees as well as local wild grasses.
“He was known for taking things that you would consider very mundane and turning them into something beautiful,” Margie Ruddick, a landscape architect who worked with him on the redevelopment of Queens Plaza in New York, said in a telephone interview.
His approach to the Phoenix recycling center followed a similar path. The building was originally designed to be utilitarian and imposing, with Mr. Singer and Ms. Glatt’s work added as merely an aesthetic filigree.
Instead, they asked for two months to completely redesign the center. The pair returned with a low, light-filled building that places public engagement at its core, with a series of viewing galleries and classrooms—all for $4.5 million less than the original plan.
“The result is not pretty,” New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in a 1993 article praising the project. “On the contrary, artists have reached awe. Like the great Galerie des Machines at the 1889 Paris Exposition, the center extracts from industry an aura of holy terror, fusing it with the American tradition of landscapes of the relentless and the sublime.’
Michael Lewis Singer was born on November 12, 1945 in Manhattan and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island. His father, Bernard, owned and operated several cemeteries in New York. His mother, Mildred (Gimbel) Singer, was a homemaker.
He is survived by his sister, Louise Stolitzky;
After graduating from Cornell in 1967 with a degree in fine arts, he immersed himself in the Manhattan art scene, mixing with Richard Serra, Gordon Matta-Clark and other artists working at the intersection of sculpture and architecture.
As he became more interested in land art and its examination of the relationship between humanity and nature, he became convinced that the relationship was destructive and needed to be rethought. Hence his move to Vermont and his fascination with beavers. (He continued to live in Vermont, but maintained a winter home in Delray Beach.)
“I spent 15 years in these swamps, trying to understand the human connection to the natural environment,” he told the Times in 2004. “How do we express it? How do we act in a way that is not controlling, destructive?”
It remained his constant preoccupation for the rest of his career, even as he moved on to projects with multimillion-dollar budgets and five-year time frames. Such projects, he believed, could not be left in the hands of architects, but rather required the insight of artists like himself.
“It’s not that we have the solutions, sometimes we will, but we have observations, questions and ideas,” he told Sculpture magazine. “An artist facing a problem will come up with new ideas and questions. Some of them will be ridiculous and some of them will offer unimaginable possibilities.”