City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America

1. THE CREATIVE ORIGINS OF LARRY AND ANNA HALPRIN

25 LAWRENCE HALPRIN was born July 1, 1916, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The social concerns that distinguish his career were founded on family values. His mother, Rose Luria Halprin, worked with the Women’s Zionist Organization of America, Hadassah, and served as its president for multiple terms beginning in 1932. Her tireless activism would shape Halprin’s childhood experience and inform his lifelong pursuits. His father, Samuel W. Halprin, initially owned a wholesale women’s clothing business, but later became president of a scientific instruments export firm that traded between the United States and what was then the struggling Jewish population in Palestine. Before Samuel lost his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, his financial success enabled him to take his family on a year-long trip to Europe and the Middle East. Larry’s maternal uncle, Sydney Luria, who was invited to accompany the family to keep Larry and his younger sister up to date with their studies, dispensed of traditional lesson plans and took them outside to explore their surroundings in France, Italy, Egypt, and finally Palestine where they stayed for four months. According to Luria, he gave a pad and gouache to 1. the creative origins of larry and anna halprin 26 the creative origins of larry and anna halprin Larry, who immediately began drawing and painting everything he saw.1 The family traveled throughout Palestine, yet Halprin recalls most vividly their house on the outskirts of Jerusalem fronted by a wheat field through which camels would be led on the path from the desert to the city. This “archetypal” imagery or “parade of fantasies” moving past his window was “like stepping back into . . . Biblical times” for Halprin, whose profound awareness and appreciation of the past consistently impacted his approach to designing for the present.2 In the summer of 1933, Halprin returned to Palestine to live until 1935. About this experience , Halprin recalled, “I was going back to a place that I loved. I was looking for adventure . I worked in the building trade; I worked in gardens; I worked in a factory extracting potash from the Dead Sea. I worked in orange groves.” He also helped to found what became Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, near Haifa, where he lived for several months.3 While immersed in the kibbutz movement, he participated in the land’s transformation from barren and austere to microclimates more habitable and productive for human occupation. Though this agricultural setting is where, as many have noted, Halprin’s connection to the land originated, it was also the ideals of the kibbutz that had significant impact on his interest in the productive nature of what he and Anna called “collective creativity.” Prior to his kibbutz experience Halprin had considered becoming a painter, yet later recalled, “I thought that the most relevant thing to do was not to be a painter but somehow to get into something which had some meaning for the development of the country . . . With that as an idea I went to Cornell to study agriculture in a social context.”4 Halprin returned to the United States to begin pursuing his B.S. in plant sciences at Cornell University School of Agriculture, and he spent his summers working on farms in the Midwest and New England. His research was most focused on how plants adapted to shifting natural environments; concepts derived from this experience no doubt informed his lifelong passion for understanding not just plants’ adaptability but the biological, psychological , and social response of humans to different environmental conditions. Outside of academics, while at Cornell Halprin also became involved in social reform and labor organizing. He enthusiastically recognized parallels between the social aspirations the creative origins of larry and anna halprin 27 of the kibbutz and New Deal programs in the United States.5 Just as he was finishing his degree in 1939, a professor informed him that a plant researcher at the University of Wisconsin needed help in work related to Halprin’s studies. Thus the fall after he graduated from Cornell, postponing his return to the kibbutz because the war had begun, Halprin set out for the Midwest, apparently ready to pursue a Ph.D. in plant physiology. He graduated , however, in 1941 with an M.S. in horticulture, completing a thesis on photoperiod (the optimum length of daylight hours needed for normal plant growth) and its effect on flowering plants. At both Cornell...