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LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
| akashmatthew . bssanjana . lavanyachopra . snigdhajohar . thangsontombing
biography.
• Born, July 1, 1916, in New York City and raised in Brooklyn.
• He invested three of his teenage years in Israel on a kibbutz (communal settlement or
farm) near what is today the Israeli port city of Haifa
• He earned a B.A. at Cornell University; and he was granted a M.A. at the University of
Wisconsin.
• He then earned a second bachelor’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design,
where his professors included architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
• A visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Wisconsin, had sparked Halprin’s initial
interest in being a designer.
LAWRENCE HALPRIN
• In 1944, Halprin was commissioned in the United States Navy as a Lieutenant (junior
grade).
• He was assigned to the destroyer USS Morris in the Pacific which was struck by a
kamikaze attack.
• After surviving the destruction of the Morris, Halprin was sent to San Francisco on leave.
• Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often
ira keller fountain collaborated with a local circle of modernist architects on relatively modest projects.
biography.
• Halprin first came to national attention with his work at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the
Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project in San Francisco, and the landmark pedestrian
street / transit mall Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis.
• Halprin's career proved influential to an entire generation in his specific design solutions,
his emphasis on user experience to develop those solutions, and his collaborative design
process.
ghirardelli square
Halprin's point of view and practice are summarized in his definition of modernism:
“To be properly understood, Modernism is not just a matter of cubist space but of a
whole appreciation of environmental design as a holistic approach to the matter of
making spaces for people to live.... Modernism, as I define it and practice it, includes
and is based on the vital archetypal needs of human being as individuals as well as
social groups.”
• Lawrence Halprin, the Bay Area landscape architect, who pushed the design of America's
urban spaces in new directions over a career that spanned 60 years, died in 25th October,
serpentine transitway, nicollet mall 2009 of natural causes. He was 93.
career.
• After discharge from military service, he joined the firm of San Francisco landscape
architect Thomas Dolliver Church.
• Halprin opened his own office in 1949, becoming one of Church's professional heirs and
competitors.
• Halprin's wife, accomplished avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin, is a long-time collaborator,
with whom he explored the common areas between choreography and the way users move
through a public space.
united nation plaza
• Halprin's work is marked by his attention to human scale, user experience, and the social
impact of his designs, in the egalitarian tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted.
• Halprin was the creative force behind the interactive, 'playable' civic fountains most
common in the 1970s, an amenity which continues to greatly contribute to the pedestrian
social experience in Portland Oregon.
• Budgetary constraints and the urge to "revitalize" threaten some of his projects. In
response, foundations have been set up to improve care for some of the sites and to try to
preserve them in their original state.
• He was the co-creator with his wife, the dancer Anna Halprin, of the "RSVP Cycles", a heritage park plaza
creative methodology that can be applied broadly across all disciplines.
projects.
• Halprin's projects, demonstrate his vision of the garden or open space as a stage.
• Halprin recognized that "the garden in your own immediate neighborhood, preferably at your own doorstep, is the most
significant garden.”
• The interplay of perspectives informed projects which encompassed urban parks, plazas, commercial and cultural centers and
other places of congregation.
FDR memorial ira keller fountain lovejoy fountain park levi’s plaza
awards.
• The focal point is a sunken, concrete plaza containing a 2,000-seat amphitheatre with a
restaurant, and a waterfall fountain.
• A steel scaffold-like frame with viewing platforms and an observation tower allows visitors
to experience the plaza from a different perspective.
• The park’s complex, multi-level spaces were realized through concrete steps and retaining
walls arranged in angular patterns.
• Today the amphitheatre plaza with its steel frame, garden and promenade remain largely
intact. The children’s play area was updated in the 1990s and the skating rink was
redesigned to double as a reflecting pool in 2008.
IRA KELLER FOUNTAIN
Portland, Oregon
ira keller fountain.
• Halprin saw these plaza spaces as theatre sets for choreographing human movement –
and unlike being fountains solely for viewing, these were designed for interaction.
• The Portland Open Space Sequence was listed in the National Register of Historic Places
in March 2013.
• The central feature of the park is the concrete water fountain. Keller Fountain is often
noted as a memorable feature of the public landscape in downtown Portland, and in 1999
was awarded a medallion from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
• The park, which is known for its accessibility for allowing visitors to stand at the top of
the waterfall, is designed according to construction code to prevent children or adults
from falling down the waterfall; the top of the falls are actually 36 inches pockets of
water, acting as a safety wall.
The relationship between man and nature continues to be
inevitable and ever evolving; we see it impeccably in the
face of landscape in design.