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  • Foreword
  • John Beardsley

Lawrence Halprin was one of the most accomplished and productive landscape architects of the 20th century. He also wrote prolifically and persuasively about his own work. Ironically, his literary output may have occluded critical perspectives on his many and remarkable accomplishments as a designer. Between his autobiography, his notebooks and sketchbooks, the first-person accounts of his creative process in the publications Taking Part and The RSVP Cycles, and monographs on projects such as Sea Ranch in California and the FDR Memorial in Washington DC, Halprin seemed to command the discourse around his work. At the same time, his writings raised as many questions as they resolved: Halprin often spoke of his design process in intuitive terms and of relationships with nature in ways that stressed the universal, innate, and empathic—all of which could be maddeningly vague. It is time for an independent and critically engaged discussion of Halprin’s work.

This volume assembles essays by 13 authors, who provide close examinations both of significant design projects and of important topics in Halprin scholarship. The issue cannot hope to encompass every disciplinary perspective or address every facet of Halprin’s achievements. Instead, it brings together three principal groups of commentators: contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Halprin’s, many of whom worked with him; senior historians, who take the long view on Halprin’s work; and emerging scholars who interrogate Haprin’s work and methods from a critical distance. The issue is especially rich in first-person narratives by people who worked with Halprin: Pete Walker, who recalls his early years in Halprin’s San Francisco office; Shlomo Aronson, who worked with him in Israel; Iain Robertson, who over-saw the replanting of Freeway Park in Seattle; and Laurie Olin and John Parsons, both of whom worked with him on the FDR Memorial in Washington DC. Those taking more historical perspectives include Marc Treib, who provides a context for Halprin’s early work in California; Kenneth Helphand, who puts a cultural and geographical frame around his work in Israel; Reuben Rainey, who offers a critical tour of the FDR Memorial; and Randy Hester, who looks back at some of Halprin’s values and methods. Emerging critical perspectives are offered by Alison Bick Hirsch, who evaluates the Take Part process as it played out in Cleveland; Kate John-Alder, who explores Halprin’s notions of ecological design using Sea Ranch as a case study; Ann Komara, who offers a critique of Skyline Park in Denver; and Judith Wasserman, who explicates the creative synergies between Halprin and his wife, the dancer Anna Halprin.

Several recurring themes emerge. The first is a synthetic view of Halprin as a public and urban artist. Whether revising the Jerusalem Plan or repairing the damage caused by interstate highway construction in Seattle, Halprin’s work can be seen in the context of political and cultural activism that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, especially efforts at urban revitalization through new kinds of public space and the rise of public art. Marc Treib provides the setting for Halprin’s work as a public and urban artist by exploring his roots in California modernism, especially the material and formal innovations first tested in the garden and later adapted to the public space. Ann Komara and Iain Robertson reveal how Halprin went on to bridge the worlds of urban renewal, art, and engineering. Komara looks at Skyline Park in Denver, which was intended to manage storm water and aid in the revival of the city’s downtown, while organized around signature fountains that were expressions of a collaborative process, involving project designer Junji Shirai, sculptor Herb Goldman of Manhattan Beach, California, and fountain consultant Richard “Dick” Chaix. Robertson offers an account of his replanting of Freeway Park in Seattle. This project, [End Page 1] originally a collaboration with Angela Danadjieva Tzvetin, was built to reconnect parts of the city sundered by an interstate. Robertson’s narrative describes his rationales for thinning and replacing plants, which had grown so thick that they had obscured both the original sculptural impact of the of the park and the clarity of the circulation plan creating, consequently, negative safety associations that threatened...

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