PASSINGS: LAWRENCE HALPRIN

A picture of a fountain and rocks at the FDR memorial in Washington DC at evening. By Cafzal

NY Times - Lawrence Halprin, the tribal elder of American landscape architecture, who used the word choreography to describe his melding of modernism, nature and movement in hundreds of projects, including the memorial to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, died on Sunday at his home in Kentfield, Calif. He was 93. . . .

Places he shaped include Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis; a sequence of urban spaces with dazzling fountains in Portland, Ore.; a park atop a freeway in Seattle; and large plazas in Los Angeles.

"He almost single-handedly reclaimed the city as the purview of the landscape architect," said Charles Birnbaum, founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation. . .

The Roosevelt memorial was Mr. Halprin's favorite project, his wife said. Partly because he had loving memories of Roosevelt, and partly because of the sheer difficulty of the task. The memorial commission accepted Mr. Halprin's concept of four outdoor rooms and gardens animated by water, stone and sculpture in 1974. The project, somewhat reduced in size, was completed in 1997.

Mr. Halprin used that span of time meticulously. He went to a quarry and personally picked some of the 4,000 stones in the walls. He made a drawing of each of the 4,000 so he could put each one exactly where he wanted it. . .

Sam Smith, Progressive Review, 2006 - My introduction to the impact of urban planning came in the late 1950s as a radio reporter. I was sent to interview a woman who was refusing to move out of her house in DC's Southwest urban renewal area. Hundreds of acres had been leveled around her and still she clung on like a survivor of the Dresden carpet bombing. The project, the largest in the nation, had begun in April 1954 and five years later some 550 acres had been cleared. Only 300 families remained to be relocated. More than 20,000 people and 800 businesses had been kicked out to make way for the plan. Some 80% of the latter never went back into operation.

The design was hailed by planners and liberals; a 1955 report for the District was titled No Slums in Ten Years. Just as today, many liberals saw nothing wrong with eminent domain as long as it produced a more purified community. Not everyone was so sanguine, however. One of the leaders in the fight against SW urban renewal was Rev. Walter Fauntroy, later active in the civil rights movement. And in a 1959 report of the National Conference of Catholic Charities, the Rt. Rev. Msg. John O'Grady said, "It is sad. It is not urban renewal; it is a means of making a few people rich. Instead of improving housing conditions, it is shifting people around from one slum to another."

The Supreme Court disagreed. In 1954 it had upheld the underlying law and in a decision written by none other than William O. Douglas, declared:

"It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well-balanced as well as carefully patrolled . . . The experts concluded that if the community were to be healthy, if it were not to revert again to a blighted or slum area, as though possessed by a congenital disease, the area must be planned as a whole."

Years later, a woman who had lived in Southwest recalled that when her mentally ill mother had a spell, there were always neighbors or relatives to take her in and shield her from what was happening. It wasn't until they were forced out of the community of Southwest and had to live alone that she learned how sick her mother was.

Today, the new Southwest is rarely cited as a model of urban living. It reflects the planning biases of the 50s - cold, boxy construction and a lack of convenient shops, thanks in part to the deal struck at the time with the now struggling commercial mall. Many people seem to prefer less planned communities, places whose character developed from those who live and work there rather than being imposed from without.

In the years to come, I would become involved in endless planning battles both as a journalist and as an activist. Many were successful such as the effort to end the freeways that threatened to turn DC into an east coast Los Angeles and the campaign to save the historic buildings along Pennsylvania Avenue that the planners wanted to trash. Some were not, such as the effort by small business people to stay in downtown DC. In my own neighborhood we fought off developers three times on one site until a builder came up with a decent plan. The group leading the fight disbanded with $3,000 left in its bank account which was given to another group fighting yet another soon successful battle. We stopped a ten story office building, saving instead one of the earliest park and shops in the country. And we even defeated the local bishop of the Episcopal Diocese, leaving the community with a place to run its dogs for the next thirty years.

During this whole period, I only once came across an urban plan actually designed for the people who lived in the place being planned, and that one had a non-governmental patron. Lady Bird Johnson had gotten landscape architect Lawrence Halprin - the man who thought it was all right for children to play in his fountains - to propose improvements to the then ethnically and economically mixed neighborhood of Capitol Hill where I lived in 60s. Colorful Mexican playground equipment began appearing at local public schools and children in vest pocket parks found turtle sculptures on which to climb. In a relatively short time, Capitol Hill became not only more attractive but more fun. It was an exception, but an instructive one: how it feels when a planner works for the citizens and not the government. In nearly every other instance it was either explicitly or implicitly assumed that the plan would attract a better class of people and business to the place being planned. The people presently there were at best an afterthought.

An article by J. William Thompson in Land Online speaks of Halprin's "democratic identification with the people who built his landscapes and those who use them. For this, to my knowledge, no award is ever given - yet it's a quality I consider crucial to the building of great landscapes. . . I discovered a very different side of Halprin when he led me on a tour of the FDR Memorial in Washington, D.C., at its opening in 1997. What struck me first was Halprin's absolute joy at seeing the public take possession of the memorial. 'Boy, look at all those people!' he exclaimed as we turned the corner into the first memorial room and saw the crowds; he was even more delighted that, as he pointed out, the crowds were flowing through the memorial's rooms in the patterns that he had 'choreographed.' Looking back, I realize that the memorial is successful because Halprin had cared deeply about how users would move through it. . . 'Equally inspiring were Halprin's interactions with the construction crew, with whom he seemed to have bonded in an almost paternal way. . . Somehow, Halprin had created a community of intense purpose. He was the master builder, but every single person involved in the effort understood that he or she was creating something of great public value that would endure for centuries. In short, Halprin had the power to rally the foot soldiers in the service of a vision of democratic urban space that he himself glimpsed long before."