From The Garden: Lawrence Halprin and the Modern Landscape

An Introduction

As a landscape architect, urban designer, author, and proselytizer for the field’s recognition, Lawrence Halprin cast a giant shadow (Figure 1). His practice, which spanned half a century, was so multi-faceted that to date nothing written about him has satisfactorily covered the broad range of his contributions. In the last decade, however, there has been renewed interest in his early attempts to record movement; others have tried to assess the nature of the collaboration with his wife, the dancer Anna Halprin; others still have attempted to adopt his RSVP Cycles as a design method.¹ Sadly, of late Halprin’s several major works have been threatened, some have been demolished or bowdlerized, and much of the renewed interest in the Halprin landscape has been a byproduct of efforts to preserve major projects such as Manhattan Square Park in Rochester, Freeway Park in Seattle, and Heritage Square in Fort Worth. In another quarter, today’s increased stress on ecology and sustainability has led other researchers to study the design of The Sea Ranch in northern California—one of the first planned communities to carefully inventory the existing vegetation, hydrology, topography, and fauna and use these factors as the basis for design.² Collectively these landscapes demonstrate that Halprin’s thinking, as represented in his designs and his writings, was impressively comprehensive.

Figure 1.

Lawrence Halprin, Skyline Park, Denver, Colorado, 1976.

Only with slight exaggeration could we say that Halprin is generally known as a landscape architect who worked primarily in the urban sphere, designing fountains and plazas—including one major memorial—within cities from coast to coast, and even abroad. Yet, as Garrett Eckbo once claimed, it is the garden that provides the classroom and test site for landscape architects.³ There, one learns a vocabulary with which one designs, the processes by which landscapes are realized, the people who realize them, and not negligibly, how to approach and interact with people—in this case, the clients. While his later works were of considerably larger scale, Halprin, too, began in the garden. After an apprenticeship of less than five years in the San Francisco office of Thomas Church, he struck out on his own in the boom years that followed the end of World War II. Before returning to an outline of Halprin’s own career, however, it is instructive to describe the condition of modern landscape architecture—particularly as it developed in California—during those years in which Lawrence Halprin began his professional landscape practice.

Background

Through the 1920s and into the 1930s the course of California garden design followed a path of least resistance. As it had been historically in many places in the world, the California garden provided a place for retreat, family activities, and the production of vegetables and flowers. While typically of meager dimensions, the suburban garden expanded the internal spaces of the house or bungalow and lured people outward to profit from greenery, sunlight, and fresh air. As with many if not most ethos, a good part of the California story was bound in myth—a myth promulgated by local boosters and land developers, and fanned by the cinematic image and the sale of citrus. The design of these gardens tended to be simple and conservative, especially if homegrown. But even gardens designed by landscape architects rarely, in manner, led the clients they served. Instead, accommodating their tastes was the norm.

But change was coming. After graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1935 the young Garrett Eckbo headed south to work for Armstrong Nurseries in Los Angeles.⁴ During the year or so he spent there Eckbo produced over 100 garden designs, for the most part simple affairs with sets of spaces assigned to varied activities—gardens that specified an abundant number of species, especially when considering the size of their sites. The style of the Eckbo designs of that time could be appropriately termed “California Comfortable” as the gardens provided suitable settings for the desired lifestyle, without asserting their design as a manner, much less as...