The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin Exhibition
NorthPark Center
Exhibition located between Neiman Marcus and Dillards
On Display Through 26 August 2018
Free and Open to the Public
The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin, a traveling photographic exhibition about the life and work of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) is on display at NorthPark Center through 26 August 2018.
Lawrence Halprin was among the foremost landscape architects of the twentieth century. His prolific career spanned more than five decades, and the innovative techniques he pioneered changed the profession forever. The Brooklyn-born Halprin began his career in 1945 with a four-year stint working for Thomas Church in San Francisco, where he collaborated with architect George Rockrise on the renowned Dewey Donnell garden in Sonoma, California. He opened Lawrence Halprin & Associates in 1949, and his oeuvre initially included residential gardens, campuses, and housing projects. However, by the mid-1960s, his firm had turned decisively to re-designing major urban landscapes. A series of innovative parks, plazas, and pedestrian malls brought international notice and critical acclaim. When the Ira Keller Fountain opened in Portland, Oregon, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable called it “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”
The exhibition, which debuted at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., was organized and curated by The Cultural Landscape Foundation. Created to honor the centennial anniversary of Halprin’ s birth, the exhibition features 56 newly commissioned photographs by leading landscape photographers of dozens of Halprin’s major works, ranging from recently rediscovered residential projects created early in his career in the 1950s to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. capstone projects such as the Yosemite Falls approach and Stern Grove in San Francisco, and significant postmodernist projects including the Los Angeles Open Space Network. The exhibition both honors the influential designer and calls attention to the need for informed and effective stewardship of his irreplaceable legacy. Despite Halprin’ s renown, his built legacy is fragile. In fact, on December 21, 2017, one of the Los Angeles projects featured in the exhibition, Crocker Court (now called Wells Fargo Atrium), the only atrium Halprin designed, was demolished with no warning.
Halprin, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), received numerous awards, including the ASLA Gold Medal, ASLA Design Medal, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the University of Virginia Thomas Jefferson Medal in Architecture, and the National Medal of Arts (2002), the nation’s highest honor for an artist.
“In the tradition of great artists, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin created a new and influential language,” said Charles A. Birnbaum, TCLF’s president & CEO. Tary Arterburn, FASLA of Studio Outside/Dallas and Mark Gunderson, AIA/Fort Worth have organized the exhibition locally with The Cultural Landscape Foundation to bring more attention to the renovation project currently under design by Downtown Fort Worth Inc. The exhibition, part of TCLF’s Landslide program, calls attention to threatened and at-risk works of landscape architecture and landscape features, and includes photographs of some of Halprin’ s most iconic projects, from Sea Ranch in northern California to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.
NorthPark Center
Exhibition located between Neiman Marcus and Dillards