Lawrence Halprin: Another View

This is a recollection after more than 40 years and reflects my memories and feelings more than serving as an historical document. I apologize if there are errors or mistakes.

Early Life

Larry Halprin was born in one of the bloodiest periods of human history, at the end of the First World War. This was a period, between the World Wars, when many people in the West were uncompromisingly committed to the then-current ideological camps. Socialism, Communism, and Fascism were political ideologies competing with indigenous American capitalism during Halprin’s youth.

After graduating from high school in the summer of 1933 Larry went to live in what was then Palestine. He worked at several jobs in different parts of the country and was among the founders of Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, where he lived for almost a year. He was much influenced by the people of the kibbutz who were full of enthusiasm about the new society that they were struggling to create. He relished the intensity and vigor of the “kibbutzniks,” and always felt that his time in Ein Hashofet was a formative, positive period in his life. At times he criticized Israel, but he loved it. In almost all of his trips to Israel he would try to squeeze in a visit to Ein Hashofet.

His mother, Rose, even though she was a great Zionist and a central personality in American Jewry through her involvement in the Hadassah Women’s Organization (of which she was president for decades), wouldn’t even hear about Larry remaining in a kibbutz, particularly with war looming in Europe.

Eventually her strong character prevailed and in 1935 Larry left the kibbutz, returning to the United States to study. In spite of this, he did go through the experience of war. He joined the US Navy and was an officer on a ship that was hit by a Japanese kamikaze in the

Figure 1.

The author at Lawrence Halprin’s office.

Figure 2.

Lawrence Halprin at Caesarea, 1998.

Pacific Ocean. This left a strong mark on him. He often talked about his experiences in Israel and in the Navy.

While searching for direction after the war, Larry stumbled by chance on a small book by Christopher Tunnard that changed his life. He found in this short writing the answer to his search for a vocation: landscape architecture. He never regretted it.

In fact a similar series of events happened to me because of the influence of Larry Halprin. At the time I was studying architecture in the University of California, Berkeley. In the fourth semester, I took a required course in which different practitioners explained the professions relating to architecture. This course took place at 8 a.m., a time when students could be quite tired and inattentive. The practitioner explaining landscape architecture was Lawrence Halprin. That morning I remember the room filled with beautiful colored slides coming from two sources. The projects that he showed us were his newest work in private residences and a shopping center, but for me it was like seeing the Promised Land. Until that time, I had never heard of this profession, but I knew immediately that this was what I really wanted to do. When class was over, I spoke to the lecturer, Larry, and he encouraged me with my instant decision to change majors from architecture to landscape architecture. He told me then about his experience on the kibbutz and that he believed Israel needed people with this expertise. By the end of the week I was studying landscape architecture.

Larry’s Influence

I got to know Larry more closely in my senior year as a student when he was teaching the design class in Landscape Architecture at Berkeley. One of his assignments was to study the city and to express it graphically and in other ways. I suggested that instead of each student choosing their own media—which would result in many small projects with nothing holding them together—we could photograph elements from the city and put...