All In This Together by Lauren Ogard

All In This Together Walking Halprinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Open Space Sequence

ALL IN THIS TOGETHER Walking Halprinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Open Space Sequence

John Beardsley and A.C. Grant The Cultural Landscape Foundation Washington, DC

Table of Contents A Plaza Reborn.................................09 A traumatic Birth.............................10 Public Action & Reaction..............11 A Walking Tour.................................16 Source Fountain...............................18 Lovejoy Fountain.............................19 Pettygrove Plaza...............................21 Ira Keller Fountain..........................22

Where the revolution began. Randy Gragg

A crowd gathered atop Forecourt Fountain. Photo Stanley W. Bryan, August 1970. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries (PNA-13580).

The plaza reborn On a sunny June day in 1970, architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable witnessed the opening of what she declared to be “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.” The place was Auditorium Forecourt Fountain, a stark collage of concrete planes and pillars wash in a thirteen-thousand-gallon-per-minute cascade of water, the likes of which no city had seen before. Only days earlier, Huxtable, one of America’s leading voices on architecture and urbanism, had expressed a less sanguine view about Portland’s urban prospects. In a New York Times column entitled, “In Portland, Ore., Urban Decay Is Masked by Natural Splendor,” she lambasted city leaders for failing to forge the “dreamworld urbanism” uniquely possible in Portland’s verdant, riverside setting. The city’s delicate fabric of two-hundred-foot-square blocks and modestly scaled period architecture, she argued, was being eroded by “scattered, bomb-site” parking lots and “Chamber-of-Commerce-image” towers. “Against the Suave Schlock of California architectural imports,” she wrote, even an icon of nature as powerful as Mount Hood’s snowcapped peak “doesn’t stand a chance.” Yet, in Forecourt Fountain’s towering forms and muscular flows of water, she saw a savior, a new kind of “people’s plaza” that held the hope of becoming the “soul of the city” in a manner recalling baroque masterpieces such as Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona, but with a “geometric naturalism” befitting the Northwest. Huxtable’s praise proved prophetic. Forecourt Fountain, along with the sequence of three other plazas designed by Lawrence Halprin and Associates, marked a turning point

both for Portland and for American public space. The sequence—Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt (later renamed Ira Keller) Fountain, along with the small, lesser-known Source Fountain—represented a new kind of urban plaza, a grandly sculptural, metaphorical experience of nature that welcomed an activity largely absent from the midcentury American downtown: play. Today, the sequence’s bold artistry, unabashedly synthetic form, and generous invitations for interaction are mainstays of urban park design in the work of architects as diverse as Laurie Olin and Martha Schwartz. But when Halprin began designing the Portland plazas in 1963, the ideas were new—or, as Huxtable argued, renascent. The tradition of “public city spaces of deliberately conceived beauty and pleasurable utility,” she wrote, had been all but forgotten, “replaced by the parking lot.” Yet, even more dramatic than the plazas’ break with the dreary tropes of 1960s American urbanism was the role they played within the turbulent politics of the time. Seen within the context of the riots and occupations occurring in the campuses, plazas, and parks of cities elsewhere—and occasionally even in Portland—Halprin’s and the city’s unyielding embrace of new public spaces designed solely to foster civic joy was nothing short of radical.

A t r a u m at i c b i r t h The Portland Open Space Sequence emerged from brutal beginnings: an urban renewal development that erased one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, South Portland. Fueled by generous grants for “slum removal” from the Federal Housing At of 1949, Portland joined the mid-century American rush to demolish inner-city neighborhoods deemed beyond repair and to be losing tax base. The city identified eleven districts to be cleared and built anew and, by a narrowly approved 1958 ballot initiative, created the Portland Development Commission to do the job. First undertaking: the South Auditorium Project. Named for the Civic Auditorium long-standing at its northern edge, the ninety-acre district had once been a predominately Jewish neighborhood with five active synagogues. With $12 million in federal funds, the PDC condemned fifty-four blocks, relocated more than fifteen hundred residents, and, by 1962, scraped the land of everything but a few select trees. A consortium of local and California investors won a competitive bidding process for the largest piece of land with an offer of $4.1 million. This group teamed up with the recently opened Portland office of the Chicago-based architecture firm Skidmore Owings Merrill (SOM) to propose a “city within a city” dubbed “Portland Center.” In most ways, SOM’s scheme was cut from the cloth of other mid-century American urban renewal projects, with its high-rise apartment towers and mid-rise office buildings surrounding centrally located fountain plazas. Neither the architectural form, massing, nor materials bore any relationship to the surrounding city. But, atypically for the era, SOM retained Portland’s distinctive two-hundred-foot-block street grid,

knitting the new neighborhood’s internal pedestrian passages into the city’s overall pattern. Equally unusual, the PDC—under the leadership of chairman Ira Keller and executive director John Kenward—contracted with a landscape architect directly, recruiting Lawrence Halprin and Associates of San Francisco. In the first meeting with Halprin in May 1963, Keller gave the architect his charge: design the public space “on such a scale of artistic excellence that it will have real permanency. So good that in itself (it) becomes a lovely feature of living there.” The first two plazas that Halprin designed for the Sequence, Lovejoy Fountain and Pettygrove Park, were unprecedented in the history of American landscape architecture. Halprin shaped Lovejoy into a metaphorical high-mountain “cascade” falling through a series of fractured geometries and into hide-and-seek pools, all set against the undulating backdrop of a copper-clad wood canopy designed by his collaborator, Charles Moore. A pair of promenades-one lined with Crimean linden, the other with red horse chestnuts-led to Pettygrove Park, which rose in a series of playfully exaggerated berms covered in grass and sprinkled with red oak, sweet gum, American elm, copper beech, and tulip trees. Accents of low, curved retaining walls of Columbian basalt echoed both the Olmstedian picturesque and, more locally, the Historic Columbia River Highway. To the first park’s “yin” of hard-edged, board-formed concrete forms, sparse plantings and cascading waters, Halprin proposed the second park as the “yang” of softness and repose.

P u b l i c ac t i o n & r e ac t i o n Portlanders took to the plazas instantly. “May there be lots of love and lots of joy in this park,” said PDC’s Keller of Lovejoy Fountain at its christening on July 26, 1966. The Oregon Journal’s editorial writers rejoiced that “the fountain wonderfully captures the spirit of Oregon’s streams” and wryly pointed out that Pettygrove Park’s voluptuous berms had quickly earned the plaza a nickname: “Mae West Park.” Within a few months, however, Halprin’s instant civic euphoria became clouded by contention over who had the right to use this new kind of public space and how. Lovejoy Fountain’s crystalline pools, in particular, threw into relief an intensifying generational and cultural divide. As Owen L. McComas, the general manager of the adjacent Portland Center Development, described it to the Portland City Council in September 1967, “Men and women referred to in the vernacular as ‘hippies’ have literally taken over the fountain as their private swimming pool, laundry area, bathing area, bedroom area.” On September 22, at the urging of then-Parks Commissioner Frank lvancie, Portland Police posted new rules prohibiting “wading, swimming, and bathing” in the plazas. Penalty: $500 and possible jail time. Despite the hyperbole, the council passed only a tepid new curfew: 11:00 p.m. Exceptions were allowed by permit. In retrospect, Portland’s political debates over the rights of its cavorting hippies seem quaint compared to the graver events enveloping the nation in 1968. Yet, as public space became the site of confrontation in many American cities, the Portland Development Commission reacted counterintuitively: it continued to build more plazas. Within weeks of the new ban on

wading in Lovejoy Fountain, the PDC broke ground on another small Halprin-designed plaza. Dubbed “Source Fountain,” it became part of the watershed metaphor underlying Halprin’s first two fountain plazas. A simple, waist-high, brick ziggurat bubbling over with water, it seemed to actually invite a washing of face or feet, if not the sprinkle of a baptism. More surprising, the PDC began laying plans for a larger, even more prominent plaza to the north. With a confidence borne of already rapidly rising tax revenues collected from Portland Center, in 1967 the PDC acquired the block directly to the west of the newly renovated Civic Auditorium. Skidmore Owings Merrill drew up plans for a traffic turnaround, a central fountain, and an underground parking structure for 150 cars. But architectural advisor Walter Gordon protested. And in February 1968, the PDC invited Halprin back to develop a fourth plaza.

The fountain overlooking the renovated auditorium. Photo Frederick A. Cuthbert, August 1970. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries (PNA-13574).

In July-mere days before the city council’s contentious hearing on park curfews-the PDC and Halprin signed the contract. Compared to the relatively flat profiles of the other two plazas, the twenty-five-foot diagonally sloping grade of the future Forecourt Fountain’s site offered an opportunity, in Halprin’s words, for a truly “three-dimensional design.” On the day the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill giving eighteen-year-olds the right to vote, officials tested Forecourt’s powerful fountain jets for the first time. Two days later, a youthful crowd gathered outside for the public dedication. Photographs and film footage of the dedication show stern-faced police, the riots still fresh in their minds, stiffly poised throughout the plaza. But as the christening commenced and those gathered readied for the fountain’s first ceremonial blast, Halprin, rakishly dressed and looking, in the words of the Oregonian, “faunlike,” took the microphone. “These very straight people somehow understand what cities can be all about,” said the fifty-four-year-old architect, smiling to the crowd and waving his hand at the city officials. “So as you play in this garden please try to remember that we’re all in this together ... I hope this will help us live together as a community both here and all over this planet Earth.” With Halprin’s offer of the plaza as a place of civic healing, the waters spilled forth. As the young onlookers waded into pools, splashing, holding hands, and dancing, Halprin joined them, blue jacket, red tie, and all.

The open space sequence John Beardsley & A.C. Grant

A wa l k i n g t o u r While engaged with the construction and critique of modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, Halprin anticipated some of landscape architecture’s ambitions today, more than four decades later, including a concern for the behavioral or perceptual experience of landscape and a recognition of the need for community involvement in the design process. And despite his deep attachment to landscapes, he remained a committed urbanist, recognizing the particular challenges and opportunities landscape architecture faces in the creation of habitable cities. Indeed, Halprin might be seen as anticipating the current enthusiasm for” landscape urbanism,” with its focus on landscape and infrastructure as organizing strategies for the city. Against this backdrop, Halprin began to articulate a notion of design shaped by an awareness of natural processes. Arguing that people have needs beyond shelter, including “space, green, sky, wildflowers, woods,” he insisted that “we need to evolve… a new way to design communities which arises out of man’s biological need for community-in-landscape.” Rejecting both rigid geometry and pseudo-naturalistic, curvilinear informality, he argued for a design that is “biologically sound” and “esthetically organic.” “We have to take a leaf from nature’s book and evolve our solutions, not impose them,” he wrote. “We should not copy nature’s outward forms but her method of operation.” Communities, Halprin argued, should be “as inevitable in their biological structures as our needs are.” “The essential dilemma in the art of making landscapes,” Halprin insisted, “is how to transmute experiences with the natural landscape into human-made environments that are

fit for living.” How did he translate his beliefs into practice? By being attentive not to the outward forms of nature, but to the consequences of natural processes-wind and water erosion, freezing and thawing, glacial and wave action, for instance-he arrived at what he called “an ecology of form.” These processes, Halprin knew, are relevant to understanding geomorphology as well as the location and distribution of plant communities, which gravitate to specific landscapes, conditioned by microclimate, slopes, soils, drainage, and successional change. Halprin’s notebooks provide ample-and beautiful-evidence of his careful attention to landscape detail, especially the forms of coastal cliffs and mountain cataracts, along with their respective botanical characteristics. Halprin’s “ecology of form” did indeed generate landscapes “fit for living.” These ideas are at the heart of what makes his work in Portland so memorable. Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, the Source Fountain, and Keller Fountain—the individual pieces that together comprise the whole of the Open Space Sequence—all resonate with Halprin’s notion of a language of form based on an understanding of natural processes. Using land made available by urban renewal and with Portland’s West Hills as a backdrop, the spaces formulate a regional narrative of cascades, foothills, and forest trees weaving throughout the city, introducing abstractions of natural forms and patterns into the urban landscape.

“The Dreamer” at Pettygrove Park, shrouded in fog and obscured from the westerly approach by the park’s distinctive mounds. Photo Joseph Readdy, October 2008.

S o u r c e f o u n ta i n The southernmost of the downtown fountains, the small structure sometimes referred to as “the Chimney Fountain” gives the illusion that water is flowing between the bricks, a smoke might seep through a chimney. The bubbling fountain is a square of red-brick set within a low-rise twelve-foot square by one-foot deep rectangular pool. The fountain consists of thirteen stepped brick courses that rise two feet above the concrete base. In form, the square diminishes in size from an eightfoot square base to an open top two feet square. Surrounding the pool is a forty-seven-foot square plaza of red-brick with gray concrete rays that emanate from the fountain at the eighth azimuth. At the south edge is a tiered retaining concrete wall with the lower level doubling as seating. Though Source Fountain is small, it sets up the entirety of Halprin’s narrative for the entire sequence: an intricate balance between the natural and the artificial, with water unifying both. Water and concrete, together, tie together the sequence.

Water flowing from Source Fountain. Photo Joseph Readdy, October 2008.

L o v e j o y f o u n ta i n Hidden among the urban superblocks of the district, the Lovejoy Fountain is meant to bring to mind the natural mountain cascades of the Sierras. And the result comes surprisingly close to its goal; to be sure, there is an awful lot of concrete imitating nature, but all the angles and planes combine to create a splendid splash, daring to borrow from both the shifting dunes of the desert and the weathering processes of water on real stone. Life Magazine’s assessment of it in 1966 as a “mid-city mountain stream” seems apt, if only the surrounding area felt more like the mid-city. As in his later sequence work with Angela Danadpeva on Keller Fountain, where Halprin’s notions of how to turn the mid-city into a serene rolling waterfall and stream end and collaborator Charles Moore’s begin are ill-defined. Moore, for his effort, is most commonly awarded the design credit for the pavilion canopy, a celebration in using wood in geometric arrangements to do the work of trees as much as the fountain itself is a celebration of using concrete to do what boulders would in a stream otherwise. Both seem like variations on the same theme, and necessitate the presence of one another. A recent restoration has given new life to Moore’s canopy, which had long been deteriorating due to its exposed beams in the Portland damp. In the fountain itself, waterfall effects were derived from studies of nature—especially the effects of constriction and obstruction and their impact on the movement and the sounds of water. But these phenomena are translated into clearly manmade forms and materials: a five-and-a-half-inch contour is deployed uniformly throughout the fountain, which

The canopy and fountain at Lovejoy Park. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries (PNA-32001).

was cast in concrete behind two-inch-by-six-inch boards. Water is gathered into narrow, steep chutes where it explodes off obstacles before settling quietly into a pool. The structure reads clearly as an abstraction, but with enough veracity to be convincing as an expression of natural phenomena. At the bottom of the pool, where the light from the large, more modern towers that have come to surround the park doesn’t block the park in summer, a large congregation of students and other community members frequently gather to eat their takings from the nearby food cart pods in the sun.

2nd Avenue Pedestrian Mall, facing south from Market Street. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries (PNA-32010).

P e t t y g r ov e p l a z a Pettygrove Park was conceived at the same time as Lovejoy Fountain & Park and imagined in many ways as the complement and contrast to its cement-clad sibling: green while the latter is paved; shadowy while the latter is exposed; soft while the latter is hard. It takes the angular urban forms of Loveioy and contrasts them with allusions to the foothills. The two together are the strongest instance in Halprin’s early work of two spaces linked in a conceptual sequence-an idea that Halprin would develop for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C., where separate “rooms” represent the different terms of the Roosevelt presidency. Pettygrove is also distinguished for its use of local Columbia River Gorge basalt in the park’s stone detailing, and for the earth berms that give the space topographical interest. A 1965 drawing reveals Halprin’s sense of the berms as sculptural forms, underscored by his instruction to keep trees off the tops and sides of the mounds themselves. Recent years have seen some of Halprin’s original ideas for the park fall a bit from their intention. Highly invasive English Ivy, planted in small parts during the original construction, has overtaken several of the formerly grassy mounds, leaving the areas once intended as restful spots for urban daydreaming unreachable. A restoration coming to Pettygrove will remove much of the ivy and attempt to bring back the highly picnic-friendly grass knolls, hopefully capturing more food cart traffic during the more temperate months in the process.

The fountain here includes a surprise. In 1979, the Portland Development Commission installed Manuel Izquierdo’s golden-hued muntz bronze sculpture of a reclining woman, The Dreamer, in the center of the fountain along the 2nd Avenue side of the park. Izquierdo, professor emeritus of Pacific Northwest College of Art, said that his sculpture “speaks of hope, of beauty and serenity, of love, and for a better life in our midst.” He filled the sculpture with foam so that falling rain would make a gentle sound like a kettledrum rather than the ringing it would make if hollow. Where Lovejoy and Keller fountains are often brash and energetic, this feature makes Pettygrove’s fountain an appropriate repose.

i r a k e l l e r f o u n ta i n Keller Fountain is even more compelling as a single space than either Loveioy Plaza or Pettygrove Park. An eighty-foot-wide, eighteen-foot-high fountain forms the main feature of the oneacre park, but here, too, there is a story that unifies the space, recapitulating the regional narrative of the larger sequence of parks. Water rises from three “springs” in a grove of pine trees near the top of the sloping site, evoking a mountain glade. It runs through rills, passing under pavers, reaching a series of rectangular pools of different sizes and at various elevations. From there, it cascades down steeply sloping walls to pools at the base of the site. Unlike at Loveioy Fountain, where the water is one element in a space that otherwise needs activity, here, the fountain is the program. Originally called Auditorium Forecourt Fountain (or simply Forecourt), Keller Fountain was a collaboration between Halprin and Angela Danadpeva, who was a lead designer in his office at the time. Unraveling the much-contested authorship between the two designers forty years after the fact is impossible. Suffice it to say, the final work shares many elements of Halprin’s prior work and of both designers’ work since. The project again expresses Halprin’s idea of an ecology of form generated by high mountain cascades, as confirmed by an August 1968 drawing in his journal of a faceted cliff, titled “Sierra” and annotated as a “possible wall for Portland fountain.” A drawing from the same notebook, done sometime later that year, represents the whole narrative of the plaza, from the glade in the background to the rocky pools in the foreground. Composed of concrete aggregate, the fountain imitates neither the precise forms nor the materials of a “natural” waterfall;

once again, it is an abstraction based on natural processes. Halprin’s Portland projects are also distinguished for the way they elicit emotional and perceptual experience through a heightened awareness of movement in space. “Movement and choreography have always been an influence on me and my work,” Halprin wrote in the introduction to his Notebooks, and they proved especially significant at Keller. Landscape is widely regarded as a dynamic experience; many design traditions exploit the experience of movement as much as an awareness of static views. Japanese stroll gardens, for instance, use devices like stepping stones, gates, thresholds, and turning paths to intensify the experience of motion through space over time. For Halprin, the conceptualization of movement was linked not only to his intense interest in both daily and seasonal changes in nature but also to the choreographic experiments of his wife, dancer Anna Halprin. He described his investigations into the ways of designing for movement with terms like “notation” and “scoring,” the latter a notational system both he and his wife used to choreograph the outcome or “performance” of a design, both in terms of built form and user experience.’’ Keller Fountain provides one of the best examples in modern landscape architecture of an understanding of the ways that choreographed movement can enhance perception. It is designed to provide compelling experiences of exploration, shelter, and danger; it is at once fun and challenging. It features stairs to climb, waterfalls to hide behind, grottoes to enter, ledges to perch on, pools to wade in. It encourages physical participation and, through that, an intensified emotional and

psychological experience. If one stands on its edges or leaps from ledge to ledge, the fountain clearly presents risks. But in confronting those challenges, the participant experiences a sense of achievement-even emotional well-being.

The pebbles at the bottom of Keller Fountainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s pools are visible when the water is turned off in spring. Photo M.O. Stevens, May 2010.

Keller Fountain in early spring. Photo M.O. Stevens, May 2010.

Lovejoy Fountain in May 1972. The fountainâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surrounding buildings were not yet completed and both the west hills and Portland State Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s future Art Building is visible at center. Photo Stanley W. Bryan. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries (PNA-19264).

Laurence and Anna Halprin.

a b o u t t h e c u lt u r a l l a n d s c a p e f o u n d a t i o n The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF) is the only not-for-profit foundation in America dedicated to increasing the public’s awareness and understanding of the importance and irreplaceable legacy of its cultural landscapes. Through education, technical assistance, and outreach, we broaden awareness of and support for historic landscapes nationwide in hopes of saving this diverse and priceless heritage for future generations. While TCLF seeks donations to support its efforts, it is not a membership organization. Founded in 1998 by Charles Birnbaum, FASLA, TCLF achieves its mission by collaborating with Individuals and local, regional, and national groups to understand and protect our landscape heritage and to reach the broadest possible audience. For example, TCLF is one of the American Society of Landscape Architects’ “partners in education”; training professionals, students, teachers, and the general public to recognize, document and safeguard America’s cultural landscapes; serving as the nation’s largest and most valuable non-profit source of information about our nation’s historic landscapes and those pioneering individuals who have contributed (through design, planning and advocacy) to this legacy; raising awareness of and support for individual landscapes-at-risk; and recognizing and celebrating the efforts of owners, supporters and stewards of significant American places. TCLF’s overall success can be measured by the millions of people who have learned about cultural landscapes through its website, publications and events—as well as through the growing national awareness of the importance of America’s cultural landscapes and the increasing efforts to document and protect this heritage.