from The Oregonian / June 29, 2003

Some of Halprin's landscape projects falter in test of time
By Randy Gragg

 

Several of Lawrence Halprin's seminal landscape designs have fallen out of fashion in other parts of the country and are being destroyed. And despite the recent face-lifts of Keller Fountain and Pettygrove Park, Halprin's most historically important Portland design -- Lovejoy Plaza -- is falling into increasing disrepair.

In most cases, changes in the buildings and the society around Halprin's parks have done them in. Shrinking city budgets can no longer meet the maintenance needs of the complicated fountains and often highly sculptural plazas.

Denver recently began demolishing Halprin's famed "Skyline Park," a sunken three-block promenade of berms and fountains running through the center of downtown, after the 20-block redevelopment it was first built to serve never prospered with the predicted street life.

San Francisco, where Halprin was once voted "Man of the Year," is considering seriously altering or tearing out the architect's dramatic granite block in the United Nations Plaza. Located next to a popular gathering spot for the homeless, it has become a public bathroom.

To Fred Kent, director of the New York-based Project for Public Spaces, Halprin's high sculptural aesthetics run counter to proven formulas for public space.

"A space should be flexible and be able to change over time and to grow as a civic gathering place for the community," says Kent, who advocates removing the U.N. fountain.

Unabashedly hostile to the whole genre of urban spaces Halprin helped found, Kent argues that any public space "designed for eternity and cast in stone is not a healthy idea."

But to the National Park Service's Charles Birnbaum -- who cofounded the Cultural Landscape Foundation to respond to the threats posed to the work of Halprin and peers such as Dan Kiley, Thomas Church and Hideo Sasaki -- the landscapes are artworks victimized by fashion and shortsighted economics.

"Rather than address this astonishing patrimony," Birnbaum contends, "downtown development corporations just want something to get rid of skateboarders, kids with piercings and the homeless."

Halprin is advocating the preservation of the U.N. Plaza. But other landscape architects are divided.

Peter Walker, a noted Berkeley-based designer who once worked for Halprin, for instance, thinks the the plaza should go.

"It's not one of Larry's best works," he says. "I wish somebody would get rid of some of my early work. But then, there's some things I've lost that I wish were still around.

This article is Copyright 2003 Oregon Live. All Rights Reserved.