Remembering the Legacy of Lawrence Halprin
The Cultural Landscape Foundation joins the country in mourning the death of Lawrence Halprin, who passed away Sunday, October 25th at his home in Kentfield, California. During his career which spanned more than 60 years he has created a legacy of landscapes from California to Washington, D.C.
Halprin was born in 1916 and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His education was augmented by travels with his family to Europe and an experience of Kibbutz life in Israel. Halprin studied horticulture at Cornell and at the University of Wisconsin. While at Wisconsin he discovered his artistic nature was better suited to landscape architecture. Entering the Harvard School of Design in 1942, he was influenced by the modernist ideas of fellow students and faculty, which led upon graduation to his work in California with Tommy Church on the modernist Donnell Garden and other projects.
Halprin translated his love of nature, his experience in the High Sierras to many of his projects. The resonance and cascade of the mountain stream are signature experiences seen at Freeway Park in Seattle, the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial, in Washington DC and the Ira Keller and Lovejoy Fountains in Portland, Oregon.Involving communities as part of the design process was an important part of Halprin’s philosophy; his R.S.V.P workshops led many through the creative process. Collaboration with his wife Anna Shuman Halprin led Halprin to develop a system he called scoring, a means of noting movement through space. This movement became integral to Halprin’s designs. Other celebrated Halprin landscapes include the Ghirardelli Square, Levi Plaza, and the Embarcadero Fountain in San Francisco, and The Sea Ranch, in northern California.
Still designing into his late 80s, Halprin created the landscape for the George Lucas Studio at the Presidio and revitalized the space at Stern Grove, both in San Francisco as well as the Yosemite Falls approach at Yosemite National Park.
Halprin was awarded numerous honors such as the AIA Medal for Allied Professions (1964), Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (1969), ASLA Medal (1978), ASLA Design Medal (2003), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1978), the University of Virginia Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture (1979), and the National Medal of the Arts (2002), the nation’s highest honor for an artist.
