From The Garden Lawrence Halprin and the Modern Landscape Marc Treib AN INTRODUCTION As a landscape architect, urban designer, author, and study the design of The Sea Ranch in northern Califor- proselytizer for the fi eld’s recognition, Lawrence Hal- nia—one of the fi rst planned communities to carefully prin cast a giant shadow (Figure 1). His practice, which inventory the existing vegetation, hydrology, topog- spanned half a century, was so multi-faceted that to raphy, and fauna and use these factors as the basis for date nothing written about him has satisfactorily design.2 Collectively these landscapes demonstrate that covered the broad range of his contributions. In the last Halprin’s thinking, as represented in his designs and decade, however, there has been renewed interest in his his writings, was impressively comprehensive. early attempts to record movement; others have tried Only with slight exaggeration could we say that to assess the nature of the collaboration with his wife, Halprin is generally known as a landscape architect the dancer Anna Halprin; others still have attempted who worked primarily in the urban sphere, designing to adopt his RSVP Cycles as a design method.1 Sadly, fountains and plazas—including one major memo- of late Halprin’s several major works have been threat- rial—within cities from coast to coast, and even ened, some have been demolished or bowdlerized, and abroad. Yet, as Garrett Eckbo once claimed, it is the much of the renewed interest in the Halprin landscape garden that provides the classroom and test site for has been a byproduct of eff orts to preserve major landscape architects.3 There, one learns a vocabu- projects such as Manhattan Square Park in Rochester, lary with which one designs, the processes by which Freeway Park in Seattle, and Heritage Square in Fort landscapes are realized, the people who realize them, Worth. In another quarter, today’s increased stress on and not negligibly, how to approach and interact with ecology and sustainability has led other researchers to people—in this case, the clients. While his later works Figure 1 Lawrence Halprin, Skyline Park, Landscape Journal 31:1–2 ISSN 0277-2426 © 2012 by the Board of Regents© of the University of Wisconsin System Denver, Colorado, 1976. were of considerably larger scale, Halprin, too, began ideas fi rst conceived while still a student at Harvard. In in the garden. After an apprenticeship of less than fi ve a 1937 article in Pencil Points, “Small Gardens in the years in the San Francisco offi ce of Thomas Church, he City,” he demonstrated a variety of formal vocabularies struck out on his own in the boom years that followed on sites subdivided from a prototypical San Francisco the end of World War II. Before returning to an outline block (Figure 2).5 These designs established a vocabu- of Halprin’s own career, however, it is instructive to lary he would employ for decades to follow. describe the condition of modern landscape architec- By the end of the 1930s other designers, too, were ture—particularly as it developed in California—dur- exploring new directions. A half-generation older than ing those years in which Lawrence Halprin began his Eckbo, Thomas Church also began to move on from professional landscape practice. the California Comfortable style characteristic of his landscapes at the late-1920s residential development of Background Pasatiempo, where he collaborated with the architect Through the 1920s and into the 1930s the course of William Wurster.6 At the 1939 Golden Gate Exposition, California garden design followed a path of least re- Church realized two gardens in which the meandering sistance. As it had been historically in many places in wall and unusual materials staked out new territory— the world, the California garden provided a place for territory he would mine productively in the postwar retreat, family activities, and the production of vege- years, most notably in the celebrated 1947 Donnell tables and fl owers. While typically of meager dimen- garden in Sonoma, discussed below. sions, the suburban garden expanded the internal spaces of the house or bungalow and lured people outward to Blending Building and Site profi t from greenery, sunlight, and fresh air. As with One of the central conceits of architectural modernism many if not most ethos, a good part of the California was that of interconnection, both within a building’s story was bound in myth—a myth promulgated by local internal spaces and with the environment outside them. boosters and land developers, and fanned by the cin- The replacement of the bearing wall by the structural ematic image and the sale of citrus. The design of these frame posed the wall as a screen, a plane reduced to gardens tended to be simple and conservative, especially minimal thickness, or even entirely absent. That the if homegrown. But even gardens designed by landscape wall could be transparent or translucent fostered a architects rarely, in manner, led the clients they served. heightened connection between indoors and outdoors, Instead, accommodating their tastes was the norm. a connection more seamless than ever before possible. But change was coming. After graduating from the At its extreme—in California, for example—architec- University of California, Berkeley, in 1935 the young tural modernism approached the near complete inte- Garrett Eckbo headed south to work for Armstrong gration of inside and out characteristic of traditional Nurseries in Los Angeles.4 During the year or so he Japanese building. There, space existed as a complete spent there Eckbo produced over 100 garden designs, continuum, the sole diff erence between garden and for the most part simple aff airs with sets of spaces architectural space being the roof that protected the assigned to varied activities—gardens that specifi ed an latter. Beyond that, only a thin layer of translucent rice abundant number of species, especially when con- paper, opened at the touch of a fi nger, suggested what sidering the size of their sites. The style of the Eckbo was “inside” and what was “outside”—a distinction at designs of that time could be appropriately termed times more psychological than physical. “California Comfortable” as the gardens provided suit- Of course, this seamless integration of inside able settings for the desired lifestyle, without asserting and outside appeared only where climatic conditions their design as a manner, much less as an artwork. allowed. In California the myth of indoor-outdoor By the end of the decade, however, things began to living had held sway since the late 19th century, when change. The Depression had led many design profes- novels such as Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona pro- sionals into government service rather than private prac- moted the allure of Hispanic life in the patio and the tice, and Eckbo had entered the western regional offi ce court, each planted lushly with fl owers, shrubs, and of the Farm Security Administration in 1939. There he vines.7 Through the 1920s the Spanish Colonial Revival designed several migrant farm worker camps, applying prolonged this dream of living in the Spanish manner, 6Landscape Journal31:1–2 Figure 2 Garrett Eckbo, Small Gardens in the City, 1937. Axonometric (courtesy Marc Treib). Figure 3 Frank Lloyd Wright, Barnsdall house, Los Angeles, California, 1923. Amphitheater. Treib 7 Figure 4 R. M. Schindler, Schindler-Chase house, Los Angeles, 1922. Site plan (Architecture and Design Collection, University of California, Santa Barbara). although truth be told, life in Spanish California had with these condensations he extended roof and fl oor hardly been comfortable for all but a very privileged planes and prolonged the structural beams, turning few. Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture in Southern Cal- them downward into columns—creating what came ifornia in the 1920s enriched the Hispanic myth with to be called the “spider leg.” With such devices Neutra architectural details drawn from Mesoamerican cul- reduced the perceived distinction of the architecture, tures such as the Zapotec and Mayan. In works such as further eroding the sense of limit begun with Wright’s the 1923 Barnsdall (Hollyhock) house Wright fashioned destruction of the box at the turn of the century. an intricate quilt of internal spaces complemented by Neutra’s early Lovell house of 1929, like Schindler’s patios and enclosed courts, the entirety of the scheme own houses, paired outdoor recreational spaces with reaching an axial culmination in an amphitheater des- the rooms of the house. But over time, the garden- tined for outdoor performances for Aline Barnsdall, her side wall of Neutra’s houses dematerialized, changing guests, and theatrical confrères (Figure 3).8 from wood panels or masonry walls into large planes Modernism entered more noticeably in the work of of glass—a transformation supported by the post-war two Austrian émigrés: Rudolph Schindler and Richard development of aluminum-framed sliding doors. In Neutra. The Schindler-Chase house of 1922 treated its 1947, Neutra’s Kauff man house in Palm Springs fi rst fl at site as a spatial matrix that embraced both interior addressed the landscape as a refi ned machine (Fig- and exterior (Figure 4). The thin concrete wall panels ure 5). Turned from the afternoon sun and the west- provided only a minimal membrane between inside ern winds, with views across the valley modulated by and outside, fi replaces opened externally as well as vertical aluminum louvers, the house opened to the east internally, and small porches encouraged the inhabi- and southeast—its polite, mannered lawn area set as tants to sleep healthfully outdoors. Life was good, or an island of civilization nestled in the rough desert ter- so it would seem. Many of Schindler’s other works, at rain.