Michael Singer, Sculptor Who Used Nature as His Medium, Dies at 78

Michael Singer, a sculptor whose work, beginning in beaver bogs and pine forests and proceeding at an increasingly grander scale, eventually blurring the lines of art, landscaping, architecture and urban planning, died on March 14 at his home in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 78.

Jason Bregman, a partner in Mr. Singer’s studio, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Mr. Singer was often characterized as a landscape architect, and an accomplished one at that, with public commissions at sites as varied as a recycling center in Phoenix, the Denver International Airport and a Whole Foods supermarket in Jacksonville, Fla.

But in fact he was an artist, one who saw his medium, and his ambition, in expansive yet humble terms, with work that attempted to remediate humanity’s disruption of the natural world.

In some cases, like a garden he designed for a Food and Drug Administration office outside Washington, he melded low-slung concrete structures with water elements and native grasses.

In others, like the Phoenix recycling center he designed with the artist Linnea Glatt, he created a structure that invited the public to observe how its waste was handled, turning what had been an out-of-sight, out-of-mind process into a source for education and even civic pride.