from The Oregonian / June 29, 2003

Urban plazas that set Portland's modern landscape
get some TLC
By Randy Gragg

Like freshly sheared poodles, the shore pines of Keller Fountain look a little gangly and self-conscious after their first serious pruning in 33 years.

But now that the sunlight spills through the plaza as freely as the fountain's waters fall, the Keller has regained the austere grandeur that moved famed architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable to call it "one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance."

With its siblings, Pettygrove Park and Lovejoy Fountain to the south, the Keller is part of an ensemble of downtown parks regarded by some historians as among the most influential urban landscapes of the 20th century. Designed by Lawrence Halprin and built between 1965 and 1970, they melded nature and modern sculpture to create an entirely new, grandly American form of public plaza.

The parks have become increasingly lonely places, cut off from downtown in a high-rise, urban renewal zone often dismissed as a mistake. But seen within the larger arc of history, they mark the beginning of a revolution in Portland urban planning and a 37-year legacy of creating downtown public space.

Developer John Russell initiated and paid for the $100,000 face-lift of two of the parks. The Keller and Pettygrove Park are so close to his 200 S.W. Market Building that he's come to regard them as a front and back yard. But Russell hopes the effort will be a first step toward creating a private/public partnership for maintaining all of Portland's downtown parks, similar to Manhattan's Central Park Conservancy.

Russell's first move is particularly notable because it's aimed at Halprin's work, said Charles Birnbaum, head of the National Park Service's historic landscapes initiative. Numerous urban parks by Halprin and his Modernist-era peers are falling into disrepair. And rather than coming to their rescue, cities such as San Francisco and Denver are considering or in the process of tearing them out.

"The quality and ambition but also the integrity of Portland's Halprin spaces today are astonishing," says Birnbaum, arguing that they should be nominated for National Historic Landmark designation. "The only other place that has had such a galvanizing impact on the landscape design is the Vietnam Memorial."

Choosing Lawrence Halprin Stretching between Southwest Clay and Lincoln streets and Third and Fourth avenues and tucked into the streetless enclave known as the South Auditorium District, the three parks are little known to newcomers. But for Portlanders with memories of the 1960s and early 1970s, the plazas were the city's social -- and counterculture -- center.
Halprin completed Lovejoy Fountain and Pettygrove Park in 1966 and the Keller -- then called Forecourt -- Fountain in 1970. They were the centerpieces of a freshly minted, 54-block city-within-the-city, the first project of the newly created Portland Development Commission.

The district was classic, mid-century urban renewal common to cities across the country -- from the largely low-income neighborhood that was bulldozed to make way for it to the pristine skyscrapers designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill that today still stand as the city's tallest residential towers.

John Kenward, then the PDC chief, recalls that Halprin was an easy choice to design the public areas of the district. Kenward and PDC commissioner Ira Keller visited the architect in San Francisco and saw the terraced public space he designed in the renovation of Ghirardelli Square. With projects dotting cities from Minneapolis and Denver to Jerusalem, Halprin was rapidly becoming the best-known landscape architect since Frederick Law Olmsted.

What neither Keller nor Halprin realized, however, was that Halprin's work was seismically shifting at the time, literally absorbing the forces of nature.

High Sierra patterns Despite his commanding touch with city redevelopment officials, Halprin hardly matched the starched individualist image of the era's architects. Married to the West Coast's most radical dance choreographer, Anna Halprin, he frequently collaborated on her boundary-busting, outdoor performances. And he had written several books that developed his theories for "scoring" public spaces in a self-styled musical notation of movement, Jungian psychological theory and pure '60s mysticism.

Interviewed recently in his San Francisco office -- where at 86, dressed in denim and a bolo tie, he works behind a swirling slab of redwood burl -- Halprin recalled how he began designing his first Portland parks, the Lovejoy and Pettygrove, shortly after returning from a sojourn in the high Sierra. There, for six weeks straight, he had done nothing but photograph and draw the erosion patterns on the rocks at timberline.

The process, he says, "turned my whole attitude about landscape design on its head." Portland suddenly offered him the chance to "try out advanced theories that were the direct opposite of the whole tradition of mimicking nature or making fantasies of what people would like nature to be like.

"The Lovejoy Fountain wasn't about copying," he explained. "It's an erosion shape, but one developed from understanding and using the forces of nature to determine form. "

Halprin partnered with a young architect/professor named Charles Moore on the designs. The two were also working on the dramatically sited, architecturally rich planned community on the Northern California coast called Sea Ranch. Moore -- who a few years later would become renowned for his historically astute-but-playful postmodern designs -- had just finished his dissertation on the role of water in architecture, and he became an equal collaborator on the urban fountain.

Halprin recalls flashing Moore and his partner William Turnbull slides of the high Sierra's rocks over and over again. The result was a hybrid -- the spilling steps of great Italian public spaces such as Rome's Trevi Fountain shaped into a muscular mountain topography.

Halprin placed the Lovejoy Fountain in a sequence of spaces: a small "Source Fountain" leading to the Lovejoy and finally to the softer, grassy berms of Pettygrove Park. Linked by elm-lined promenades, the procession became a metaphorical journey from mountaintop to foothills and a balance of "hard and soft, green and intimate -- the "yin and yang," Halprin explains.

Whatever the theories behind it, the Lovejoy Fountain, in particular, became an instant magnet for locals, particularly members of the burgeoning counterculture, who used it for everything from public bath to a site for mystical marriage ceremonies.

For landscape architects, the Lovejoy Fountain's importance was equally immediate.
"Larry brought nature into the city, not as a quieting force, but as a violent force," says Peter Walker, a noted landscape architect based in Berkeley, Calif. "After the Lovejoy Fountain, no thoughtful landscape architect didn't know what his purpose was, and how you had to go about it to succeed."

To Walker and other practitioners, Halprin singlehandedly bridged a split in landscape architecture between those designing exclusive private gardens devoted to artistic form and those doing city planning with little artistry at all. Halprin's Portland plazas helped found a new genre of civic plaza, integrating the adventurous spirit of art with public space.

"That's what leadership is in the art world," Walker flatly states. "Somebody just blows everybody's mind, and then everybody has a new direction and ambition."

Forecourt forward Soon after Lovejoy, Halprin won the commission for a third park two blocks away in front of the newly renovated Civic Auditorium (now called Keller Auditorium). Working with another talented designer, Angela Danadjieva, he transformed the block's naturally steep, 20-foot slope into a concrete waterfall more powerful than any ever built in an urban setting. In another boundary-breaking move -- and a further nod to the influence of Anna Halprin's spontaneous urban choreography -- the fountain's ascending series of platforms and waist-deep pools offered an invitation to the public to wade into the fountain's public drama.

In addition to Huxtable's judgment that the Keller Fountain was one of the greatest public spaces since the Renaissance -- rare praise by the famously irascible critic -- the fountain's 1970 unveiling became a local legend.

Held in the edgy days following a violent clash between Portland police and antiwar protesters, the dedication took on the mood of a Wild West drama as city officials gathered for speeches at the foot of the fountain and hundreds of youths assembled at the top. When the spigots released the fountain's 13,000-gallon-a-minute flow, however, any tensions quickly dissolved. While the officials politely applauded, the youths jumped in to the rallying cries of "Right on!"

"These very straight people have somehow grasped what cities can be all about," Halprin said, turning from dignitaries to revelers to emphasize the democratic spirit underlying his design. "As you play in this garden, please try to remember that we are all in this together."

Domino effect Keller Fountain opened six months before voters elected a 29-year-old Legal Aid lawyer, Neil Goldschmidt, to the City Council. Activists were in the early stages of conceiving a series of revolutionary renovations, from dismantling Harbor Drive to build Tom McCall Waterfront Park to centralizing regional mass transit in a Transit Mall -- also Halprin-designed. Drawn into a single blueprint unprecedented in post-World War II urban planning, the 1972 Downtown Plan, the proposals became an action agenda as Goldschmidt stepped up to being the mayor.

Neat cause-and-effect chains are difficult to link in the building of cities, but the Halprin plazas stand firmly at a turning point for Portland. In many ways, growing unease with the sweeping, top-down changes wrought by urban renewal projects such as South Auditorium helped galvanize the public behind the 1972 plan's more grass-roots remodeling of the city's existing fabric.

Halprin's role in stimulating a new constituency for public space can't be underestimated. As the first new downtown parks since the city's earliest plats, the Lovejoy, Pettygrove and Keller began a 30-year expansion of public space rivaled by few American cities. From Halprin's Source Fountain essentially springs everything, from Pioneer Courthouse Square to the soon-to-be constructed North Park Square in the Pearl District.

Rescuing the parks Halprin's Portland plazas have had their rockier moments. Pranksters periodically suds the Keller, necessitating expensive total shutdowns. The trees suffer from urine. Bikers have carved trails in Pettygrove's berms. And skateboarders erode the Lovejoy's concrete steps while Moore's landmark gazebo, for lack of maintenance, rots.

As the savior for two of the parks, Russell is a fortuitous combination of businessman, preservationist and neighbor. Trained as an architect, he now heads the body that first developed the parks, the Portland Development Commission. Early in his career, he rehabilitated Victorian-era buildings in the Yamhill District, and then he reached a rapid first crescendo with what still stands as the city's most architecturally refined high-rise, the PacWest Center at 1211 S.W. Fifth Ave.

Russell's first involvement with Halprin's Portland plazas came in the early '90s after he bought the 200 S.W. Market Building. The parks and tree-lined promenades literally surrounding the building hadn't received any serious maintenance during their three-decade life. The trees camouflaged his building, darkened the streetlights and provided the perfect habitat for drug dealing.

Russell quickly paid for a light trimming and successfully pushed for a city renovation of the fountain's pumps. But when it came to more needed serious pruning and thinning, it took three years to win Portland Bureau of Parks and Recreation's approval, even with Russell's considerable political clout.

Parks chief Zari Santner says the city must be careful to protect the parks, despite lacking the necessary funds to care for the intricacies of such complex designs.

"We get it from all sides," she says, "from building owners wanting to move trees to community members wanting to save everything. We have to do things in a way that's credible."

The process that resulted in the work on Pettygrove Park and the Keller Fountain is a good model, all involved agree. Hired by Russell, Marcy McInelly and her urban design firm, Urbsworks Inc., inventoried and assessed every tree in Keller Fountain and Pettygrove Park, creating a cutting and thinning plan in consultation with Halprin. Blake Thomas, one of the city's most sought-after arborists, did the pruning and removing of trees.

Santner and Russell think they have created a template for future private efforts to renovate and maintain all downtown parks. Birnbaum regards it as a national model for stewardship of Modernist-era landscapes.

To Russell, the healthier, newly sculpted trees are an especially sweet accomplishment. An avid amateur in the art of pruning, he likens his vision of parks stewardship to a tree he once encountered on a walk through the gardens of Kyoto, Japan. A cedar, it rose 50 feet, turned downward for 35 feet and then hovered along the ground.

"It had been trained and maintained that way for centuries," he says. "That was its contribution, to be that tree." Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575; randygragg@news.oregonian.com

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