ALL IN THIS TOGETHER

Walking Halprin’s Open Spaces

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Where the Revolution BeganA Traumatic Birth

Public action & Reaction

The Open Space SequenceSource Fountain

Lovejoy Fountain

Pettygrove Park

Ira Keller Fountain

About the Foundation

02

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WHERE THE REVOLUTION BEGAN Randy Gragg

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On a sunny June day in 1970, the architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable witnessed the opening of what she declared “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.” The place was Auditorium Forecourt Fountain, a stark collage of planes and pillars wash in a thirteen-thousand-gallon-per-minute cascade of water, the likes of which no city had seen.

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, Oregon, 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 fabric of two-hundred-foot-square blocks and 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 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” that was befitting of the Northwest.

Huxtable’s praise proved prophetic. The 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 artistry, synthetic form and invitations for interaction are mainstays of urban park design in the work of architects as diverse as Laurie Olin and Martha Schwartz. When Halprin began designing the 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. Halprin’s and the city’s unyielding embrace of new public spaces designed to foster civic joy was nothing short of radical.

“THE SEQUENCE’S BOLD ARTISTRY, UNABASHEDLY SYNTHETIC FORM, AND GENEROUS INVITATIONS FOR INTERACTION ARE MAINSTAYS OF URBAN PARK DESIGN.”

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CoverArtistic sketch of the Source Fountain by Ryan Morse.

Opening Spread

Previous page

Top leftTrees and leaves in Pettygrove Park being exposed to the sunshine. Photo R. Morse, February 2015.

Bottom leftThe fountain at Lovejoy Park codified natural rhythms of rock in concrete. Photo R. Morse, February 2015.

“THE ARCHITECTURAL FORM BORE NO RELA-TIONSHIP TO THE SURROUNDING CITY.”

A Traumatic Birth

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Portland’s Open Space Sequence emerged from brutal beginnings: an urban renewal development that erased one of Portland’s oldest neighborhoods, South Portland. Fueled by 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 and, by a narrowly approved 1958 ballot initiative, created the Portland Develop-ment Commission to do the job.

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 funds, the PDC condemned fifty-four blocks, relocated more than fifteen hundred residents, and, by 1962, scraped the land of everything but a few 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.”

SOM’s scheme was mostly cut from the cloth of other mid-century urban renewal projects, with high-rise apartment towers and mid-rise office buildings surrounding centrally located fountain plazas. The architectural form didn’t bare any relationship to the surrounding city. However, 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—contracted with a landscape architect directly, recruiting Lawrence Halprin and Associates of San Francisco.

The first 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 “cascade” falling through a series of fractured geometries and into hide-and-seek pools, all set against the undulating backdrop of 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 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.

South Auditorium Urban Re-newal District after demolition, 1963. Courtesy City of Portland Archives (A2004-001-1023).

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The public 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 writers rejoiced that “the fountain wonderfully captures the spirit of Oregon’s streams” and 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 when compared to the graver that wereevents enveloping the nation in 1968. As public space became the site of confrontation in many American cities, the Portland Development Commission reacted counterintuitively: it continued building 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.

Public action & reactionMore 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. 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 twen-ty-five-foot diagonally sloping grade of the future Forecourt Fountain’s site offered an opportunity, in Halprin’s words, for a “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. 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, 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 South Auditorium area as vacant land after urban renewal in 1964. Courtesy City of Portland Archives (A2005-001-274).

THE OPEN SPACESEQUENCE John Beardsley and A.C. Grant

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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.” That space was none other than the Auditorium Forecourt Fountain (which was to be later known as the Ira Keller Fountain), a stark collage of planes and tremendous pillars washed by a cascade of water, the likes of which no city ever had seen.

Only days earlier, Huxtable, one of America’s leading voices on architecture and urbanism, expressed a less sanguine view of 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 fabric of two-hundred-foot-square blocks and scaled period architecture, she argued, was being eroded by “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.” 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.

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Previous pageA man walks his dog along the Lovejoy Fountain. (Photo R. Morse, February 2015.)

LeftThe Source Fountain’s distinct bricks mimic smoke rising from a chimney and reference the use of red brick along the 2nd Avenue Pedestrian Mall. (Photo R. Morse, February 2015.)

BelowA bird rests on one of Ira Keller’s steps. (Photo R. Morse, Febuary 2015).

Pettygrove Park’s distinctive mounds on a sunny afternoon.Photo R. Morse, February 2015.

“IN PORTLAND, OREGON, URBAN DECAY IS MASKEDBY NATURAL SPLENDOR...”

Huxtable’s praise proved prophetic. Forecourt Fountain, along with the sequence of three other plazas designed by Law-rence Halprin and Associates, marked a turning point both for Portland and for American public space. The sequence—Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Forecourt Fountain, along with the lesser-known Source Fountain—represented a new kind of urban plaza, a sculptural, metaphorical experience of nature that easily 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. When Halprin began designing the 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 occupations occurring in the campuses, plazas, and parks of cities elsewhere—and occasionally even in Portland—Halprin’s and the city’s embrace of new public spaces designed solely to foster civic joy was nothing short of radical.

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While engaged with the construction of modernism in the 1960s and 1970s, Halprin anticipated some of landscape architecture’s ambitions today, 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 natural landscapes, he stayed a committed urbanist, recognizing the 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 articulated a design notion shaped by an awareness of natural processes. Halprin argued that people have needs beyond shelter, including “space, green, sky, wildflowers, woods,” and 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.” Halprin

“WE HAVE TO TAKE A LEAF FROM NATURE’S BOOK AND EVOLVE OUR SOLUTIONS...”

rejected rigid geometry and pseudo-naturalistic, curvilinear informality, instead arguing 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 fur-thermore 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 Halprin succ 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 torwards 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. 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 form based on an understanding of natural processes. Using land made available by urban renewal, the spaces formulate a narrative of cascades, foothills, and forest trees weaving through the city, introducing abstractions of natural forms and patterns into the urban landscape.

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Source FountainSW 3rd AVENUE & LINCOLN STREET

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1968

Source Fountain as it overlooks the 2nd Avenue Pedestrian Mall. (Photo J. Readdy, October 2008.)

LeftLovejoy Fountain from the southwest. Courtesy University of Oregon Libraries (PNA-32000).

RightThe fountain at Lovejoy Park. Photo R. Morse, February 2015.

Lovejoy Fountain

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Hidden among the blocks of the district, 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 “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 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 congrega-tion of students and community members frequently gather to eat their takings from the nearby food cart pods in the sun.

SW 1-4th Avenue & Harrison, Lincoln

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1966

Manuel Izquierdo’s “The Dreamer” at PettygrovePark on a wet spring day.

PettygrovePark

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SW 3rd-4th Avenue,Market & Clay

COMPLETED

1971

Pettygrove Park was conceived at the same time as Lovejoy Fountain & Park and imagined in ways as the complement and contrast to its cement-clad sibling. Pettygrove 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 topo-graphical interest. A 1965 drawing reveals Halprin’s sense of the berms as sculptural forms, underscored by his instruction to keep trees off of the mounds themselves.

Recent years have seen some of Halprin’s original ideas fall a bit from their intention. 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 resto-ration 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.

In 1979, the Portland Development Commission installed Manuel Izquierdo’s 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.

“HE FILLED THE SCULPTURE WITH FOAM SO THAT FALLING RAIN WOULD MAKE A GENTLE SOUND LIKE A KETTLEDRUM...”

RightKeller Fountain in February. (Photo R. Morse, February 2015).

Ira Keller Fountain

“[THROUGH PARTICIPATION KELLER GIVES] AN INTENSIFIED EMOTIONAL AND PSYCHO-LOGICAL EXPERIENCE.”

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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 one-acre 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. 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 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 a 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 some-time 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

SW 3rd-4th Avenue,Market & Clay

COMPLETED

1971

The South Auditorium area as vacant land after urban renewal in 1964. Courtesy City of Portland Archives (A2005-001-274).

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traditions exploit the experience of movement as much as an awareness of static views. Japanese stroll gardens, for instance, use devices like stepping stones, thresholds, and turning paths to intensify the experience of motion through space over time. For Halprin, the conceptualization 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 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 out-come or “performance” of design, both in terms of 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 both 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.

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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. 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 and support for individual landscapes-at-risk; and recognizing and celebrating the efforts of owers, 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.

About the Cultural Landscape Foundation

Left“The Dreamer” at Pettygrove Park, obscured from the west-erly approach by the park’s distinctive mounds. Photo R. Morse, 2015.

Next spreadPlatforms gently standing next to the Ira Keller Fountain. Photo R. Morse, February 2015.

“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.”