Reflections on a Friend and a Mentor

by Charles A. Birnbaum, FASLA, FAAR, Founder + President, The Cultural Landscape Foundation
Lawrence Halprin Memorial Service, December 20, 2009

Larry Halprin was born in Brooklyn, New York, on July 1st 1916 – that day the Dodgers were ranked first in the American League with 38 wins and 24 losses. – Later that year the Dodgers went on to win the National League pennant -- a prize they had not captured for 16 years. Larry would go on to Poly Prep where he was awarded “High School Pitcher of the Year” in 1932 and 1933. Also in 1933, he went to Palestine for the first time. In our 2003 interview he noted, “it wasn't so much that I ran away from home . . . but I did.”

At 13 Larry was taken on a European grand tour by his parents. He later reflected, “I was just overwhelmed by the cities and loved them. And it was much more than stopping in at every cathedral, which is what the usual thing is. And I was more and more amazed by what made cities wonderful, which is not what you can say about American cities . . . and so I thought as I went through, I amassed all these photographs of places around the world where all of a sudden you would say well, gee, that's a wonderful place to be. I would love to live here.”

From 1933 to 1935 Larry found a place where he loved to live, a kibbutz near Haifa, where (in his words) he was “just knocked apart by the relationship between the people, by the social way of living, by the sense of egalitarianism, by the intensely debatable but very interesting way they brought up their children. And in fact, by everything about it, leaving aside the sense of adventure, because it was a pioneer stage. It was like going out West before the Gold Rush herein a sense, the same feeling then. I just loved it.”

Upon returning from Israel in 1935, Larry attended Cornell and (later) the University of Wisconsin. While attending the College of Horticulture in 1940, he read Christopher Tunnard’s 1938 treatise, Gardens in the Modern Landscape, where Tunnard bemoaned “in a sick and suffering world . . . we have come to realize that the earthly paradise is unobtainable without the planner of garden and landscape. Society cannot overlook his power to contribute to the life of the community. In his own medium he dispenses the two chief anodynes of life – art and play – without which we perish as surely as if we lack bread. That medium, the landscape, has taken on a new meaning which he alone, with his own special art and knowledge, can make especially clear to us. Let us give him the opportunity for creation.”

Tunnard’s book was an epiphany for Larry. He later stated, “My God, it's about communities, the design of communities, the social implications of what you design, how you can make cities into remarkable places for people to live. And the sense of community that I had never seen since I was in the kibbutz in Israel. And so I thought to myself ‘Halprin, my God, landscape architecture, I'd better look into that.’”

With diverse life experiences that included his teenage Grand Tour when he learned how to draw; the Kibbutz experience which included understanding community, social networks, nurturing the land, and constructing landscapes; and now inspired and armed with Tunnard’s ideas initially as a muse, then later as a student at Harvard from 1942 to 1944, Larry would channel these life experiences and make them his own – -- filtered through a total design process that celebrated the “twisting and turnings, unknown explorations, [and] reactive to many different inputs and influences along the way.”

In an interview in 2003, Larry noted, “Sometimes people ask me about Sea Ranch, did that emerge from my experience on the kibbutz? Yes, it did. But again, it's like all these questions about form. Are you copying art with your form? Are you copying the kibbutz in Sea Ranch? You know, that's nonsense. What I've been influenced by is the basic quality of the experience and then I can transfer it to some new experience of mine. And that's what the influence of the kibbutz was at the Sea Ranch. And if somebody asked me did the Sea Ranch emerge from the kibbutz, I would say no. But if they said were you influenced in the design at Sea Ranch?, You see the difference? It's an important difference for me, not only on a social level, but also on an art level.”

Larry’s kibbutz experience is echoed in other creative fields. For example, In The Kibbutz, An Exemplary Non Failure, (1974) Amos Oz (born in Jerusalem in 1939) writes: “I do not believe that there is any such thing as “kibbutz literature.” There are poems and books that have kibbutz settings, and there are poets and writers who have lived in a kibbutz, but the kibbutz has not inspired any “mutation” of Hebrew literature.”

Oz goes on to note, “. . . I look around and I see a social system that, for all its disadvantages, is the least bad, the least unkind, that I have seen anywhere . . . The kibbutz is the only attempt to establish a collective society, without compulsion, without repression, and without bloodshed or brainwashing. It is also, a unique attempt for better or worse, to reconstruct or revive the extended family . . .

Oz suggests that in the 1930s (the time Larry was there), “the founders of the kibbutz entrenched themselves in the land, digging their pale fingernails into the earth. Some were fair- haired . . . others were brazing and scowling. In the long burning hours of the day they used to curse the earth scorched by the fires of the sun, curse it in despair, in anger, in longing for rivers and forests. But in the darkness, when night fell, they composed sweet love songs to the earth, forgetful of time and place. At night, forgetfulness gave taste to life . . . “There,” they used to sing, not “Here”

There in the land our fathers loved
There all the hopes shall be fulfilled
There we shall live and there a life
Of health and freedom shall we build

If the Kibbutz was a microcosm of the Jewish State, Larry’s landscapes, I would suggest, are a microcosm of the larger natural setting where he has always enjoyed abstracting nature. As exemplified in his trailblazing work in Portland in the 1960s, where steps echo the rocky ledges of the High Sierras; his dramatic water canyon over a freeway in Seattle from the 1970s which “does not look natural but behaves in a natural way;” from the 1980s San Francisco’s Levi Plaza with its focal point fountain – a massive slab of carnelian granite – a counterpoint to the park to its east and its meandering stream, “a symbol of the origins of Levi’s and the California dream”; and the FDR Memorial, dedicated in 1997, and conceived as “a memorial whose environmental qualities are primarily experiential rather than purely visible.” In these myriad projects it is equally Larry’s interpretation of nature and how humans interact with nature which is his hallmark – what Sea Ranch colleague, architect Charles Moore described as “the power of the ideas [and] the unstoppable dynamics of his vision - a vision of humans experiencing with all of our senses, a richly dynamic natural world.”

From the moment Larry opened his office, he began to realize these ideals, while exploring the idea of “choreographed for movement” -- an expression that first appears in his Portland sketches. This idea also plays out in 1955 when Larry created a trapezoidal-shaped Dance Deck, nestled into his and Anna’s wooded hillside residence in Kentfield; and, serving as a bridge to future expressions of “solid, modern, non-organic forms.”

In the public projects from the 1960s onward, Larry moved away from biomorphic and Kidney shaped garden forms and in the decades that followed, his ideas of space being “choreographed for movement,” and the recognition that “participation and activity are essential factors in a city, became critical tenets.” Perhaps nowhere are they more inviting than in Portland’s eight-block choreographed sequence with its chain of open spaces, with the Auditorium Forecourt Fountain, which The New York Times architecture critic, Ada Louise Huxtable dubbed in 1970, “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

Larry passed away on October 25th at the age of 93. Just one month earlier his office celebrated 60 years of practice in the Bay Area. With his richly illustrated autobiography now complete and a number of his celebrated designs such as the Portland Chain of Open Spaces (which now has its own Conservancy) experiencing a newfound renaissance, Larry, with reservations, would retire to his home with frequent visits to Sea Ranch to once again be a Sunday painter, to enjoy nature and his grandchildren.

It was just four years ago, with Larry still going strong at the age of 89, that his office completed three capstone projects: the astonishing tri-fecta of Lucas Studios at the Presidio, Stern Grove, and Yosemite Falls. Ironically, it was because these projects were still to be built that scholars were late to evaluate Larry’s work, and unlike Dan Kiley or Philip Johnson who both would live to see multiple National Historic Landmark designations listed during their lifetime, Larry was not as lucky and instead would witness the demolition and redesign of a number of his projects from the 1970s, including Nicolette Mall in Minneapolis, Skyline Park in Denver and the sculpture garden at the Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. In addition, two of his revolutionary 1976 Bicentennial Commission projects – Seattle’s Freeway Park (the first park over a freeway in the U.S.) and Fort Worth’s Heritage Plaza (the progenitor of the outdoor rooms that would later be employed at the FDR Memorial) would also be targets for less than sensitive renovations that would threaten their design integrity.

It was this shared concern to guide these landscapes into the future and give them a voice that served as a personal bond between Larry and me. In one interview Larry reflected on his threatened work, noting “like anything I treasure them all just like you treasure children. Some of your children are more problems than others. But even so, you love them. I don't think from my point of view that there's much difference in my attitude about my children and my works of art.”

Taking this one step further, we can suggest that Daria, who was born in 1948 would have the Donnell Garden with its calming biomorphic forms as her sister; Rana helped Larry jump over the garden wall in 1952 with Larry’s first master plan where he got to site the buildings on the University of California, Davis campus. One can even forge connections with the next generation -- grandchild Ruthanna and Oregon’s Willamette Valley plan for Choices for the Future are born the same year when Larry’s plan asks, “What kind of environment do you want to live in?” – an appropriate question to raise when becoming a grandfather.

Optimistic, sensitive, thoughtful, cherubic, with a love of design, people, nature, and shaping cities and spaces, and the blurring of lines between his personal and professional life: all these characterized Larry. He will be remembered for his built legacy as much as for his multidisciplinary workshops which gave rise to his RSVP Cycles (Resources, Scores, Valuation and Performance) – a cyclical process that recognized that creativity, like nature is not necessarily linear while soliciting creative “input” from everyone from artists to residents.

In closing, I would like to share with you a passage I came upon recently at the University of Pennsylvania archives, an article published in Impulse Dance Magazine in 1949.

Now picture this – Larry and Anna married in 1940, they moved to California together in 1945, he worked for Tommy Church designing “gardens for people” and opened his own firm in September 1949 – No large scale plans, Motation, RSVP Cycles for several decades . . .

Larry writes, “Our lives have changed over the years. So have our dances, and our gardens. We are no longer content to sit stiffly in the garden in our best Sunday clothes, protected from the sun by a frilled umbrella.

Our gardens have become more dynamic and should be designed with the moving person in mind. Our garden space has become a framework within which these activities of all sorts take place – games, barbeques, walks, swimming and even at time lounging. As a framework for movement activities the garden can influence our lives tremendously. If it flows easily in interesting patterns, textures and foliage all rhythmically united..then it can influence people’s movement patterns through its spaces taking on the fine sense of dance.

We are coming to realize that our everyday surroundings have tremendous importance in their influence on our emotional lives. The art process must be a total and continuing experience rather than compartmentalized into museums, theatres or symphony concerts. If the kinaesthetic sense is satisfied at a dance concert and left dormant during the week we are only half alive. But if it can be cultivated and encouraged in our daily lives in garden and house and all our environment by designing for constantly pleasant movement patterns, our lives can be given a continuous sense of dance.”

San Franciscans are blessed with extraordinary everyday surroundings spanning four decades of Larry’s ever-evolving approach to the city – Ghiradelli Square, Embarcadero Plaza, United Nations Plaza, Levi Plaza, and more recently, Lucas Studios at the Presidio, and Stern Grove. Today, let us celebrate these places not only by remembering Larry, but by also making a personal commitment to guide these irreplaceable places into the future.

In closing, I would like to share one last quote by Larry which is quintessential Larry – “My art, which from my point of view is intuitive. It's not particularly intellectual. It depends a lot on myths and symbols and basic primitive ideas of what human beings are like. And the rest of it is bullshit.”

Photo: Halprin and Birnbaum at the Donnell Pool (Photo courtesy The Cultural Landscape Foundation)