Lawrence Halprin & Associates, 1954: A Brief Memoir

Over the years I have had a number of mentors— among them, Stanley White, Hideo Sasaki, and Dan Kiley—but the very first was Lawrence Halprin. In 1954 the office of Lawrence Halprin and Associates was small, with little of the driving ambition that was to characterize the much larger Halprin offices of later years. In addition to Larry, the 1954 office consisted of Jean Walton, Satoru Nishita, Don Carter, and Richard “Viggie” Vignola, all graduates of the University of California, Berkeley, and two part-time students from Berkeley, Michael Painter and myself.

I remember climbing the long flight of steps up to my job interview with fear and trepidation. I had been recommended for the job by “Punc” Vaughn, the chairman of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Berkeley, and my professor, Mai Arbegast. I showed Mr. Halprin my drawings, which were much influenced by Garrett Eckbo’s Landscape for Living—a book that was the thing in our design class. Larry took one look at them and said he hated the design and the style. My heart sank. Then he said, “But I’m going to hire you anyway. You can learn a better way here.” The job paid $1.25 an hour, and I was elated!

The office was on Commercial Street just east of Montgomery Street on the edge of the artistic and professional district in San Francisco known as Jackson Square. It was surrounded by the small offices of landscape architects like Eckbo, Royston, and Williams; Douglas Baylis; and Osmundson and Staley, who had come to San Francisco because of their interest in the widely published work of Thomas Church, a generation older and the leading modern landscape architect in America. These offices, along with Church’s, were found sprinkled among those of the best-known Bay Area architects of that day. These included William Wurster, Joseph Esherick, Henry Hill, John Campbell and Worley Wong, and the young Robert Marquis and Claude Stoller.

Halprin’s office was on the second floor of a post-1906-fire building with windows front and back, brick walls, wood floors, and little structural integrity. It basically consisted of a 100-foot-long room, then shared with the hospital architect Rex Whitaker Allen. Two rows of drafting tables made of hollow-core doors and saw horses ran down each side of the rear space, and the front area had been divided into two office conference rooms, one for Larry and one for Rex. The partitions, which had complex, elegant overlapping joints, had been designed by Allen’s predecessor in the space, a brilliant young Bay Area architect named Gordon Drake.

The social order of the office was basically paternal; we associates saw ourselves as young members of a family, a family governed by fairly strict rules. The office was quiet, no personal radios allowed. We began at eight a.m., had a coffee break at ten, lunch from twelve to one, and tea at three. Quitting time was five p.m. In the fifties, such working rules were not uncommon and were shared by many other design firms. Clearly, this was not the wild and noisy charrette scene that was to come to Halprin’s offices in the 1960s and 1970s.

The office library was full of books on architecture, art, design, and landscape, not just technical guides, and we were encouraged to read and discuss them. All the people connected to the office, including Larry, were lavish with their time, generously answering questions and explaining things to Mike Painter and me. It was a teaching office with an attitude we were grateful for, a valuable lesson I have remembered throughout my professional life. Everyone was interested in the why, as well as the what.

Don Carter was the associate who was most interested in detail and artifact. Whether it was a bridge, a fence, or a drinking fountain, each received his complete and intense attention. Under his influence we engaged in a continuing argument about the perfect bench: Should the seats be kept level and stepped, or should they jointly slope? What was the perfect height...