Lawrence Halprin

Ira Keller Fountain, Portland, Oregon

Lawrence Halprin (July 1, 1916 – October 25, 2009) was an American landscape architect, designer and teacher.

Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often collaborated with a local circle of modernist architects on relatively modest projects. These figures included William Wurster, Joseph Esherick, Vernon DeMars, Mario J. Ciampi, and others associated with UC Berkeley. Gradually accumulating a regional reputation in the northwest, Halprin first came to national attention with his work at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project in San Francisco, and the landmark pedestrian street / transit mall Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis. Halprin's career proved influential to an entire generation in his specific design solutions, his emphasis on user experience to develop those solutions, and his collaborative design process.

Halprin's point of view and practice are summarized in his definition of modernism:

"To be properly understood, Modernism is not just a matter of cubist space but of a whole appreciation of environmental design as a holistic approach to the matter of making spaces for people to live.... Modernism, as I define it and practice it, includes and is based on the vital archetypal needs of human being as individuals as well as social groups."

In his best work, he construed landscape architecture as narrative.

Early life

Halprin grew up in Brooklyn, New York; and as a schoolboy, he earned acclaim playing sandlot baseball. Being Jewish, he spent three of his teenage years in Israel on a kibbutz near what is today the Israeli port city of Haifa.

He earned a B.A. at Cornell University; and he was granted a M.A. at the University of Wisconsin. Then he earned a second master's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where his professors included architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. His Harvard classmates included Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei. A visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Wisconsin, had sparked Halprin’s initial interest in being a designer; and his formal training began in classes with Christopher Tunnard.

In 1944, Halprin was commissioned in the United States Navy as a Lieutenant (junior grade). He was assigned to the destroyer USS Morris in the Pacific which was struck by a kamikaze attack. After surviving the destruction of the Morris, Halprin was sent to San Francisco on leave. It was there he would stay following his discharge.

Career

After discharge from military service, he joined the firm of San Francisco landscape architect Thomas Dolliver Church. The projects he worked on in this period included the Dewey Donnell Garden (El Novillero) in Sonoma County.

Halprin opened his own office in 1949, becoming one of Church's professional heirs and competitors.

Halprin's wife, accomplished avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin, is a long-time collaborator, with whom he explored the common areas between choreography and the way users move through a public space. They are the parents of Daria Halprin, an American psychologist, author, dancer, and actress, and of Rana Halprin, a photographer and activist for Romani and human rights.

Halprin's work is marked by his attention to human scale, user experience, and the social impact of his designs, in the egalitarian tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted. Halprin was the creative force behind the interactive, 'playable' civic fountains most common in the 1970s, an amenity which continues to greatly contribute to the pedestrian social experience in Portland Oregon, where "Ira's Fountain" is loved and well-used, and the United Nations Plaza in San Francisco. The Heritage Park Plaza in Fort Worth, Texas, designed by Halprin and built in 1980, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as its featured listing of the week, on May 21, 2010.

Recently many of Halprin's works have become the source of some controversy. Some have fallen victim to neglect, and are in states of disrepair. Critics argue his pieces have become dated and no longer reflect the direction their cities want to take. Budgetary constraints and the urge to "revitalize" threaten some of his projects. In response foundations have been set up to improve care for some of the sites and to try to preserve them in their original state.

He was the co-creator with his wife, the dancer Anna Halprin, of the "RSVP Cycles", a creative methodology that can be applied broadly across all disciplines.

Projects

Halprin's range of projects demonstrates his vision of the garden or open space as a stage. Halprin recognized that "the garden in your own immediate neighborhood, preferably at your own doorstep, is the most significant garden;" and as part of a seamless whole, he valued "wilderness areas where we can be truly alone with ourselves and where nature can be sensed as the primeval source of life." The interplay of perspectives informed projects which encompassed urban parks, plazas, commercial and cultural centers and other places of congregation:

Selected list of landscape projects by Halprin

Title	Image	City	State	Year	Role / Notes
Ferris House		Spokane	WA	1955	Landscape
Washington Water Power		Spokane	WA	1959	Campus
West Coast Memorial to the Missing of World War II		San Francisco	CA	1960	Landscaping plan, located at the Presidio
1962 Seattle World's Fair		Seattle	WA	1962	Master landscaping plan
Sproul Plaza		Berkeley	CA	1962	At the University of California, Berkeley
Saint Francis Square		San Francisco	CA	1964	Cooperative housing project; design based on a pedestrian-oriented site plan, with three-story apartment buildings facing onto three landscaped interior courtyards
Sea Ranch, California	File:Sea-ranch-1587304 640.jpg	Sea Ranch	CA	1964	Master landscape plan; this is a historically significant planned community collaboration with developer Al Boeke and architects Joseph Esherick, Charles Willard Moore and others,
Ghirardelli Square		San Francisco	CA	1965	An early model for adaptive reuse of historic buildings.
Capitol Towers		Sacramento	CA	1965	Privately-sponsored urban redevelopment.
Bay Area Rapid Transit		San Francisco	CA	1966	Master landscape planning for sections of the system, including station plazas.
Oakbrook Center		Oak Brook	IL	1966	Landscape work
Innerbelt Freeway		Akron	OH	1966	Plan proposed for a park atop the freeway in 1966.
Northwest Plaza		St. Louis	MO	1968	Exterior landscaping and 'horsehead' fountain scheme.
Nicollet Mall		Minneapolis	MN	1968	One of the nation's first transitways
Cascade Plaza		Akron	OH	1969
Park Central Square		Springfield	MO	1970
Ira Keller Fountain and Lovejoy Fountain Park		Portland	OR	1971	Part of a multi-block sequence of public fountains and outdoor rooms in Portland.
Transit Mall		Portland	OR	1971	In Downtown Portland
Water Garden		Olympia	WA	1972	At the north plaza of the Employment Security Building. Permanently shut down and drained in the late 1980s due to leaks and cracked foundations.
Skyline Park		Denver	CO	1974	Inspired by Colorado National Monument; largely destroyed following 2003 redesign.
United Nations Plaza		San Francisco	CA	1975	Part of the Civic Center complex.
Sculpture Garden at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts		Richmond	VA	1975	Demolished in 2006.
Manhattan Square Park		Rochester	NY	1975	5-acre (20,000 m2) urban park with waterfalls, playground and skating rink
Riverbank Park		Flint	MI	1975
Freeway Park		Seattle	WA	1976	Innovative reclaiming of interstate right-of-way for park space
Plaza 8 Water Feature		Sheboygan	WI	1976	Adjacent to the Mead Public Library, 8th Street
Downtown Mall		Charlottesville	VA	1976	8-9 block pedestrian only zone along the city's historic main street
Main Street		Greenville	SC	1979	Redesigned in 2008.
Heritage Park Plaza		Fort Worth	TX	1980
Levi's Plaza		San Francisco	CA	1982
Bunker Hill Steps		Los Angeles	CA	1990
Grand Hope Park		Los Angeles	CA	1994
Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial		Washington, D.C.		1997
Letterman Digital Arts Center		San Francisco	CA	2005
Approach to Yosemite Falls		Yosemite National Park	CA	2005	Loop-trail approach (and associated stonework) to Lower Yosemite Fall, with views of Upper Yosemite Fall
Stern Grove Amphitheater		San Francisco	CA	2005

Notes

Awards

• 1964 AIA Medal for Allied professionals
• 1969 Elected fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects
• 1970 Elected honorary fellow of the Institute of Interior Design
• 1976 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal
• 1979 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture
• 1979 Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement awarded by the AIA
• 1987 Elected into the National Academy of Design
• 2002 National Medal of Arts
• 2002 Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell Golden Ring
• 2003 ASLA Design Medal
• 2005 Michaelangelo Award

Publications

• A Life Spent Changing Places (2011) ISBN 978-0-8122-4263-8
• The Sea Ranch: Diary of an Idea (2003) ISBN 1-888931-23-X
• The FDR Memorial: Designed by Lawrence Halprin (1998) ISBN 1-888931-11-6
• The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial (1997) ISBN 0-8118-1706-7
• "Design as a Value System", Places: Vol. 6: No. 1 (1989)
• Lawrence Halprin: Changing Places (1986) ISBN 0-918471-06-0
• Ecology of Form (audio book) (1982) ISBN 1-85035-074-4
• Sketchbooks of Lawrence Halprin (1981) ISBN 4-89331-701-6
• Lawrence Halprin (Process Architecture) (1978)
• Taking Part: A Workshop Approach to Collective Creativity (with Jim Burns) (1974) ISBN 0-262-58028-4
• Lawrence Halprin: Notebooks 1959–1971 (1972) ISBN 0-262-08051-6
• The RSVP cycles; creative processes in the human environment. (1970, c1969) ISBN 0-8076-0557-3
• Freeways (1966)
• “Motation.” Progressive Architecture Vol. 46 (July 1965): ppg. 126-133
• Cities (1963)

References

• Hirsch, Alison Bick. (2014). "City Choreography." University of Wisconsin Press. ISBN 978-0-816-67979-9
• Worth, Libby and Helen Poynor. (2004). Anna Halprin. London: Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-27329-9
• Rainey, Reuben M. (2001). "The Garden as Narrative: Lawrence Halprin's Frankllin Delano Roosevelt Memorial," in Places of Commemoration : Search for Identity and Landscape Design by Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn. Washington, D.C. : Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. ISBN 978-0-88402-260-2; OCLC 185572850
• Walker, Peter and Melanie Louise Simo. (1994). Invisible Gardens: the Search for Modernism in the American Landscape. Cambridge: MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-23177-0; OCLC 30476510

External links

• The Telegraph: Lawrence Halprin obituary
• National Park Service article
• Illustrated appreciation of Ira Keller Fountain in Portland Oregon
• Washington Post profile of Halprin on the dedication of the FDR Memorial