A Foam of Blocks: Lawrence Halprin’s Architectural Language:A Crossing through the Venetian Wilderness: Architectures 1979-1999
Authors: Umani Vittoria 
Published: October 2024

This paper is part of a bigger study on Lawrence Halprin, conducted through the analysis of his personal archives present at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and the Seattle’s City archives, together with trips and dedicated surveys for some of his projects. Many of Halprin’s urban projects are culturally linked to the 60s and 70s: the assassination of Martin Luther king Jr in Memphis and of Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles, the student protests against the Vietnam War, and the subsequent occupying of university campuses, and the violent clashes between protesters and the police. Yet as public space became the stage for confrontation in many American cities, Halprin’s open space projects seemed to encourage a different type of use: joyful playfulness, performance, dace. Many of his designs in fact, were developed with the idea of performance in mind, not surprising, as Halprin’s wife, Anna Halprin, was an important contemporary dancer and choreographer with whom he collaborated often, as well as one of his collaborators, Angela Danadjieva, a former designer of constructivist-inspired sets for Bulgarian state films. Larger urban renewal interventions were also fueled by the Federal Housing Act of 1949 that encouraged “slum removal”, inner cities-neighborhoods deemed beyond repair, and the “Federal-Aid Highway Act” of 1968, that encouraged the construction of superhighways to increase connectivity between cities and states. What appeared simply radical, is the fundamentally traditional idea of designing public spaces within the city with the deliberate intention for them to be beautiful and pleasurably utilized by the surrounding communities. These ideas had simply been replaced by design principles developed for the car, like multi lane roads, parking lots, shopping centers, drive thrus, etc.... The significance of these spaces can be seen for example in the Portland sequence – “Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt (later renamed Ira Keller) Fountain, along with the lesser-known Source Fountain – represented a new kind of urban plaza, a grandly sculptural, metaphorical experience of nature that welcomed an activity largely absent from the midcentury American downtown: play”. Skyline park in Denver, project that linked together three downtown blocks also encouraged play though the creation of metaphorical high-mountain cascades, canyons and open fields, designed through a series of fractured geometries of blocks and water basins for fountains. The presence of water features is a constant in Halprin’s designs, inspired by the wet and dry environments of the High Sierra. In fact, Halprin believed that only with flowing water can true beauty be achieved. This is very visible in all of his fountains but perhaps particularly in Seattle’s Freeway Park, where the water cascades, with their loud roaring manage to drown out the sounds of the adjacent freeway. His fountains are actual pieces of wilderness, geometrically mutated and transplanted into the city that with their glittering and static effects, without any type of barrier, effectively invite active participation, and encourage human activities like splashing, climbing, crawling, bathing, contemplating... In a cultural context that seemed to promote separation and isolation between different parts of established cities, Lawrence Halprin, with small or large commissions in Portland, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Denver, Seattle attempted (and in many ways succeeded) to create connections on the small, urban, human scale. By the 1990s, Halprin’s blend of nature, theater and urbanism would be established in a growing collection of plazas, and parks that, in each case, set the stage for major new public spaces.