Ed Westbrook

February 2010

I have worked with Lawrence Halprin, (Larry to me), for over 22 years. My experience with Larry was as a stonemason and builder, so when we worked together it was in the mode of accomplishing his vision for a project in the material that I feel he had a great affinity for, stone. I always felt that Larry had an innate sense of stone as a material that is common to the human experience as well as elemental and grounding in his work. He had a strong sense of what was good and what was bad stonework, and he had an amazing ability to inspire my crews to stretch our craft, to what he wanted to achieve as art. When you worked with Larry you entered into a conversation and an exploration, a fluid working environment (often referred to as the Larry factor) that meant plans could change and details did not always remain fixed.

In working on the Letterman Digital Arts Center, building a natural stream feature, we scheduled my crew to spend an afternoon hiking along a spring fed creek in the Mt. Tamalpais watershed, Larry sketched and talked with the guys about the sound and feel of the stream, and how they felt in the environment, how the stream changed as the sun passed over, and how nature made her stream beds. Later as we worked from detailed models and sketches’, my crew would meet with Larry and we would all compare our work with what we experienced that day in an experiential loop that helped us place each stone and boulder with thought for how it would affect the final stream. Larry inspired working men to set aside any cynical “just another job” thinking and really engage with him in building something special, he would often arrive with an owner’s entourage on site visits, and simply walk away from the group and make a beeline to the foreman on the job and jump right into what was really the issue of the moment, asking for his opinion and solutions, and testing those ideas pulling them into his thinking then recycling by sketches a revision or improvement. We often left those visits with a handful of sketches that we immediately began to build from. This was a powerful way to work in collaboration; it built trust in our crews and foremen and inspired all of us to work at an artistic level. Everyone in my company takes great pride in the projects that we were lucky enough to build with Larry.

The sense of scale was something that we shared, Larry realized early in our working relationship that I innately understood scale, this was especially important when we were working with boulders and water features, as he could trust my judgment in selecting the stone and helping to compose the placements. This came to a peak when we began work on the Stern Grove Festival Amphitheater. Larry had a vision for a modern interpretation of a classical amphitheater and the stone would be the core element in the design; it needed to complement the natural setting, be extremely strong and have a real sculptural quality in the natural boulders. After a long worldwide search for the right stone we settled on a hard granite type stone from a remote area of China. It was not going to be possible for Larry to travel to the quarry with me on multiple trips to select the placement boulders and key elements, we needed to develop a way to communicate his vision not only to me and my crews, but also to the Chinese quarrymen. Larry used scale models of each boulder, with artistic sketches so we could train the Chinese men to look for boulders that where in scale and shapes close to what Larry envisioned. This lead to a really interesting exchange between the two cultures, my partners in China considered Larry an elder and a visionary, from their reading and interpretations of the sketches they developed a style of ideogram that related sentinel boulders to the sharp peaks of karsts mountains and the reclining boulders to sleeping hills, and so on. They added dimensions to these and working with me, they became very proficient at selection. The result was really exciting as we began to place the boulders with Larry as most of them arrived and fit almost exactly into the artistic sketched compositions.
Larry had a natural way of creating working environments of natural collaboration, where people felt engaged and empowered to do good work, he used this energy to fuel his designs and accomplish a built space that was infused with the artisan’s spirit.

Larry and Anna, and the Halprin family are very close with my family, we have all shared happy times and some challenges in the 22 years we have been friends. Aside from just our working relationship, Larry taught me that it is important to strive to be a good human being; he understood that building something real in the world takes a certain amount of ego and drive, and that can easily become arrogance from pride. He was truly engaged with people, he wanted to hear their stories and share the common experiences of life, he loved dance and art, good food and drink with friends, he loved children and the energy and enthusiasm of young people. In this last year the final thing that Larry taught me was the courage to face our own mortality; he sketched, designed, wrote and created almost to the end of his life, I will miss him.

My postscript is to mention the people in my company who have worked closely with Larry in all that we built together: Bob Paganini; Javier Ochoa, Hermino Ochoa, Sal Ochoa, Ramon Ibanez, Javier Andrade, Jason Joplin, Juan Santoyo, David Elkington, Wenbiao Chen, Wenjun Chen, Charlie Ragen, Moye Chen, Jeff Clark, Dillon Westbrook, Missy Westbrook, Cassie Westbrook, and Luke Westbrook.

Photo: Halprin and Westbrook at Stern Grove (Photo courtesy Ed Westbrook)