LAWRENCE HALPRIN: (1916-2009)
One of the world’s leading landscape architects and environmental planners, Lawrence Halprin was at the forefront of design innovation with works ranging from the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, DC to the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem.
Born on July 1, 1916, Halprin was raised in Brooklyn, New York. In 1935, he began his studies in plant sciences at Cornell University. After graduation, Halprin pursued advanced studies at the University of Wisconsin, receiving an M.S. in horticulture in 1941. During this time, Halprin married Anna Schuman, a dance student whose work played a significant role in Halprin’s ideas about landscape movement. Halprin recounted that, while living in Wisconsin, he visited Taliesin East, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home-studio, and decided to study design. He entered the B.L.A. program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1942, studying with landscape architect Christopher Tunnard, whose book Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938) Halprin credited with confirming his interest in landscape architecture.
Halprin’s career as a landscape architect was delayed by two years as he, like many of his peers, enlisted in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In spring 1945, he returned to the United States and joined Thomas Church’s firm in San Francisco, where he worked for four years. In 1949, Halprin opened his own firm, soon hiring Jean Walton, Donald Carter, Satoru Nishita, and Richard "Viggie" Vignolo, who would remain with him for several decades while the practice grew to more than sixty staff.
During the 1950s, Halprin’s practice comprised typical project types of the post-War period — residential gardens, small housing projects, and eventually several campus masterplans as well as suburban shopping centers. During the 1960s, Halprin took on new types of projects at formerly marginal urban sites and began innovating with the very process of design, not only with forms and spaces. The projects where he reasserted the landscape architect’s role in regenerating the American city, made vital social and pedestrian spaces out of sites such as historic industrial complexes or the spaces over or under freeways. In doing so, he re-imagined a public realm for American cities that had been cleared by federal urban renewal programs and abandoned for new suburban developments.
These projects were memorable for their striking forms and sequences, which evoke multiple associations and recall varied references. As Halprin wrote in 1995, “My own way has been to design the outward forms of nature but emphasize the results of the processes of nature…This act of transmuting the experience of the natural landscape into human-made experience is, for me, the essence of the art of landscape design.” The sheer volume of work in the office, coupled with Halprin’s responsibilities on several national commissions, such as the White House Council on Natural Beauty and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. Such involvement afforded young designers in his office such as Charles Moore and Angela Danadjieva, the opportunity to make major contributions to the design language that has come to characterize Halprin’s urban spaces. This vocabulary, a fractured urban ground terraced to choreograph the movement of bodies and water, was rendered in poured-in-place concrete that simultaneously evoked monumental geological forms and dynamic ecological processes.
By the mid-1970s, Halprin’s office was considerably smaller. Yet at an age when many consider retirement, Halprin’s talent and enthusiasm were undiminished. He continued to receive major commissions for another three decades. For a generation that often divided landscape practice into landscape art versus ecological design, Halprin’s works and writings demonstrate how to link creative artistic impulses with the ecological sciences. He excelled at connecting phenomenological experience with environmental awareness and ethics.
His practice comprised a catalog of leading-edge environmental design in projects ranging from inner urban centers to National Parks. His reputation was built on over fifty years of expanding our expectations for the environmental realm. Projects that have been transformed by his particular sensitivity and talent have become benchmarks in the development of our current public space values. All of these projects spurred others to reassess the value and use of their resources. Halprin’s significant contributions include:
The Sea Ranch, a residential development on the California coast which is recognized for its great sensitivity to community values and the natural environment; Ghirardelli Square, in San Francisco an early model for the reuse of historic buildings in an urban environment; the grand fountains of The Portland Open Space Sequence, in Oregon, a joyful participation in public open spaces (they say “come-in”, not “stay out”). Other significant projects include Seattle Freeway Park, an environmental design to heal an urban freeway wound; Levi Plaza in San Francisco, an urban corporate campus as an alternative to flight to the suburbs; The Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, a presidential memorial in Washington D.C. which set a new standard for the public’s involvement in their past.
Through his philosophy of design, his books and lectures, Halprin moved far outside of the confines traditionally imposed by his field. By experiments in dance and choreography with his wife, Anna Halprin, he discovered a methodology for involving community in the design process. These early experiments were described in his book RSVP Cycles (Brazilier, 1969) and they remain a primer for all those interested in sources of design and creativity. Although such involvement with community was eyed suspiciously by the establishment for years, today, derivations of his “TAKING PART” workshop process are an integral part of citizen and community participation processes used throughout the country.
Halprin’s legacy may reside as much in how he restructured the process of design as in what he built. Recognizing that landscape design requires, in Moholy-Nagy’s terms, “vision in motion,” Halprin translated notational systems for dance and musical scores into a new landscape drawing convention. Called “motation,” this diagram documented and imagined movement through space over time in the landscape. Concerned about the hierarchical relationship between designers and the public and informed by artistic events and happenings conducted by his wife, the prolific choreographer, Anna Halprin, he worked with facilitators to insert community participation workshops into the design process.
In April 2005, he completed a new design for the Lower Yosemite Falls area in Yosemite National Park, and his design for a new concert facility in Stern Grove opened in June 2005. One of his final projects was in Israel – a Promenade overlooking the Jerusalem Forest.
Inevitably, the honors that Lawrence Halprin received for such a prolific career were multitudinous and varied. Among the numerous awards are the American Institute of Architects Medal for Allied Professions (1964), fellowship in the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) (1969), the ASLA Gold Medal (1978), the ASLA Design Medal (2003). He received a presidential appointment to the first National Council on the Arts and also to the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation. He was a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, The American Institute of Interior Design, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
He received honorary doctorates from the University of Pennsylvania and the California College of Arts and Crafts. More telling than awards, however, was the caliber of projects that sought Lawrence Halprin’s genius. This contribution is manifested in his design works and in his numerous articles, reports, and books and is documented in his extensive office files and drawings housed in the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania.
