Lawrence Halprin was an influential American landscape architect born in 1916. Some of his most notable projects include Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis, and the Ira Keller Fountain and Open Space Sequence in Portland, Oregon. Halprin pioneered the use of landscape architecture to create interactive public spaces and saw his designs as stages for human movement. His work emphasized user experience and accessibility. Halprin was awarded many honors over his 60-year career, including the National Medal of Arts. He passed away in 2009 at the age of 93.

1. LAWRENCE HALPRIN
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
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2. biography.
• Born, July 1, 1916, in New York City and raised in Brooklyn.
• He invested three of his teenage years in Israel on a kibbutz (communal settlement or
farm) near what is today the Israeli port city of Haifa
• He earned a B.A. at Cornell University; and he was granted a M.A. at the University of
Wisconsin.
• He then earned a second bachelor’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design,
where his professors included architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer.
• A visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Wisconsin, had sparked Halprin’s initial
interest in being a designer.
• In 1944, Halprin was commissioned in the United States Navy as a Lieutenant (junior
grade).
• He was assigned to the destroyer USS Morris in the Pacific which was struck by a
kamikaze attack.
• After surviving the destruction of the Morris, Halprin was sent to San Francisco on leave.
• Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often
collaborated with a local circle of modernist architects on relatively modest projects.
L A WR E NC E HA L P R I N
ira keller fountain

3. biography.
• Halprin first came to national attention with his work at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the
Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project in San Francisco, and the landmark pedestrian
street / transit mall Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis.
• Halprin's career proved influential to an entire generation in his specific design solutions,
his emphasis on user experience to develop those solutions, and his collaborative design
process.
Halprin's point of view and practice are summarized in his definition of modernism:
“To be properly understood, Modernism is not just a matter of cubist space but of a
whole appreciation of environmental design as a holistic approach to the matter of
making spaces for people to live.... Modernism, as I define it and practice it, includes
and is based on the vital archetypal needs of human being as individuals as well as
social groups.”
• Lawrence Halprin, the Bay Area landscape architect, who pushed the design of America's
urban spaces in new directions over a career that spanned 60 years, died in 25th October,
2009 of natural causes. He was 93.
ghirardelli square
serpentine transitway, nicollet mall

4. career.
• After discharge from military service, he joined the firm of San Francisco landscape
architect Thomas Dolliver Church.
• Halprin opened his own office in 1949, becoming one of Church's professional heirs and
competitors.
• Halprin's wife, accomplished avant-garde dancer Anna Halprin, is a long-time collaborator,
with whom he explored the common areas between choreography and the way users move
through a public space.
• Halprin's work is marked by his attention to human scale, user experience, and the social
impact of his designs, in the egalitarian tradition of Frederick Law Olmsted.
• Halprin was the creative force behind the interactive, 'playable' civic fountains most
common in the 1970s, an amenity which continues to greatly contribute to the pedestrian
social experience in Portland Oregon.
• Budgetary constraints and the urge to "revitalize" threaten some of his projects. In
response, foundations have been set up to improve care for some of the sites and to try to
preserve them in their original state.
• He was the co-creator with his wife, the dancer Anna Halprin, of the "RSVP Cycles", a
creative methodology that can be applied broadly across all disciplines.
heritage park plaza
united nation plaza

5. FDR memorial
seattle freeway park ferris house landscape
lovejoy fountain park
ira keller fountain
manhattan square park
levi’s plaza
projects.
• Halprin's projects, demonstrate his vision of the garden or open space as a stage.
• Halprin recognized that "the garden in your own immediate neighborhood, preferably at your own doorstep, is the most
significant garden.”
• The interplay of perspectives informed projects which encompassed urban parks, plazas, commercial and cultural centers and
other places of congregation.

6. awards.
• 1964 AIA Medal for Allied professionals
• 1969 Elected fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects
• 1970 Elected honorary fellow of the Institute of Interior Design
• 1976 American Society of Landscape Architects Medal
• 1979 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture
• 1979 Gold Medal for Distinguished Achievement awarded by the AIA
• 1987 Elected into the National Academy of Design
• 2002 National Medal of Arts
• 2002 Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell Golden Ring
• 2003 ASLA Design Medal
• 2005 Michaelangelo Award

7. MANHATTAN SQUARE PARK
Rochester, New York

8. manhattan square park.
• This five-acre site in the East End district of downtown Manhattan when the city cleared 60
acres for urban renewal. Designed by Lawrence Halprin in 1971-1972, an open space
surrounded by largely unrealized high-density development.
• One of Halprin’s most multi-purpose facilities, the park opened in 1974, a reprieve from
congested urban living.
• Vehicular and pedestrian traffic were separated via Park Drive (now Manhattan Square)
and a sky-lit underpass below Chestnut Street.
• Halprin’s spatial organization alludes to the historic city street grid, 45 degrees off the
current city layout.
• The park was divided into six zones, including a children’s play area with a wading pool, a
hockey rink that converted to tennis and basketball courts, a large meadow for athletic
events, a bermed garden shaded by a grove of trees, and a wide, tree-shaded promenade.

9. manhattan square park.
• The focal point is a sunken, concrete plaza containing a 2,000-seat amphitheatre with a
restaurant, and a waterfall fountain.
• A steel scaffold-like frame with viewing platforms and an observation tower allows visitors
to experience the plaza from a different perspective.
• The park’s complex, multi-level spaces were realized through concrete steps and retaining
walls arranged in angular patterns.
• Today the amphitheatre plaza with its steel frame, garden and promenade remain largely
intact. The children’s play area was updated in the 1990s and the skating rink was
redesigned to double as a reflecting pool in 2008.

10. IRA KELLER FOUNTAIN
Portland, Oregon

11. ira keller fountain.
• A product of urban renewal, this massive land clearing project
was realized with $12 million in federal funds targeted for the
South Auditorium District.
• This park in Portland’s “city within a city” was not originally part
of the Open-Space Sequence planned by Lawrence Halprin and
Associates.
• Working with Angela Danadjieva, Halprin designed a park that
solved the site’s complex grades with a powerful urban
waterfall. Collectively, the Forecourt along with the Source
Fountain, Lovejoy Fountain Plaza, and Pettygrove Park were
meant to evoke a metaphorical watershed.

12. ira keller fountain.
• Halprin saw these plaza spaces as theatre sets for choreographing human movement –
and unlike being fountains solely for viewing, these were designed for interaction.
• The Portland Open Space Sequence was listed in the National Register of Historic Places
in March 2013.
• The central feature of the park is the concrete water fountain. Keller Fountain is often
noted as a memorable feature of the public landscape in downtown Portland, and in 1999
was awarded a medallion from the American Society of Landscape Architects.
• The park, which is known for its accessibility for allowing visitors to stand at the top of
the waterfall, is designed according to construction code to prevent children or adults
from falling down the waterfall; the top of the falls are actually 36 inches pockets of
water, acting as a safety wall.

13. The relationship between man and nature continues to be
inevitable and ever evolving; we see it impeccably in the
face of landscape in design.