Silas Baxter-Neal at Keller Fountain in *Open Sequence*, 2021, by Chris Mulhern and Tristan Brillianceau-Lewis

It was a warm summer day in downtown Portland, Oregon. The year was 1970 and mass protests filled the streets following the murder of student protestors at Kent State, the imprisonment of Bobby Seale, the US Army’s transportation of nerve gas through Oregon, and the ongoing Vietnam War. Days prior, 30 protestors and 4 police officers were sent to the hospital as conflict ensued over a 3-block-long “liberated zone” in downtown Portland.

Just a few blocks from this zone sat the newly constructed Auditorium Forecourt Fountain (later renamed the Keller Fountain), which marked the culmination of a decade-long redevelopment project in downtown Portland. The landscape architect, Lawrence Halprin, who many of us know for his design at San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center (EMB), took the stage at the fountain’s ribbon-cutting event wearing a suit and tie — atypical for a middle-aged bearded man whose daily attire of pocketed khakis was more suitable for birdwatching or gardening. Along with the city officials and ordinary citizens that had gathered for the event, there were protestors, a significant police presence, Jane Jacobs, and even an absurdist dance group in bright blue tights twirling batons. Halprin concluded the day’s ceremonies with the statement, “These very straight people somehow understand what cities can be all about... so as you play in the garden, please try to remember, we’re all in this together”, before jumping into the fountain fully clothed. Much of the crowd followed.

Keller Fountain on Opening Day, 1970, via the Portland Parks Foundation

Silas, once again at Keller Fountain in *Open Sequence*, 2021, by Chris Mulhern and Tristan Brillianceau-Lewis

Halprin’s practice was an anomaly in the world of architecture — in its approach to design and the makeup of its office, which was defined as much by Lawrence’s partner Anna Halprin — an artist and dancer, as it was by the man who bears the practice’s namesake. This last point is important because no single design practice has had more of an influence on the landscape of skateboarding than the Halprin, who not only authored the original plan of one of the public spaces that gave rise to modern street skating in 1972: Justin Herman Plaza AKA Embarcadero AKA EMB .

Even more remarkable is the fact that decades earlier in 1948 while working for the landscape architect Thomas Church, Halprin contributed to the design of the first kidney pool in the US at the Donnell Garden in Sonoma, California. A widely published icon of post-war modern design, the Donnell pool became the model for the multitude of empty pools that marked the Los Angeles suburbs in the mid-’70s.

Open Space Sequence

Most of us got to know Keller Fountain and the nearby Lovejoy Fountain Park in Silas Baxter-Neal’s 2021 Open Sequence part by Chris Mulhern and Tristan Brillianceau-Lewis — an ode to northwestern crust and the idea of skateboarding as a study of place, a place where Silas found nearly every imaginable way to skate Keller’s terracing steps, ledges, and even the signage leading down from the front door of the civic auditorium.

Lovejoy Fountain Park, via Portland Archives

The term “Open Sequence” refers to the 8-block continuous sequence of “outdoor rooms” designed by Halprin for the City of Portland between 1965 and 1978. While Halprin was commissioned for numerous large-scale public projects across the US in his career, including Washington D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Rochester, this is considered one of his more successful. The sequence is marked by 3 large open spaces: Keller Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Lovejoy Fountain Park. The various “rooms” offer a range of sensory experiences — terracing fountains, expansive waterfalls, grassy mounds, and groves of trees, all drawing from the local northwest geography including the Cascade mountains and Columbia River Gorge.

Halprin’s Sketch for Lovejoy, Translated into Silas’ Part

Keller Fountain Park, which the New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable described as “the most important urban space since the Renaissance”, was designed by Angela Danadjieva, who before joining Halprin’s office, worked in film art direction. The park encompasses a whole city block across from Portland’s civic auditorium. It is a massive valley carved out of the middle of the city, formed with terraced seating and steps, and with cascading waterfalls that act as a backdrop to dozens of concrete platforms, creates a series of miniature open-air stages. The city once considered decommissioning the fountain due to its high operating costs, but according to The Oregonian, the city’s administrator, “concluded that he would probably be taken out and shot before the public allowed him to shut the water off.”

Lovejoy also features concrete terraces and water features, but its topography is more subtle than at Keller. Tucked away within a larger block, its signature steps are mellow and meandering. It is a landscape that appears geologic in form, like a concrete ruin that has been eroded over centuries but leaving hard topographic edges rather than smooth surfaces. Like a river with channels, one path follows a gentle slope along a set of rising steps, a crustier version of something one might find in Barcelona. The other path leads to an out ledge of unrelentingly rough concrete. One of Silas’ marathon lines leads through a pavilion designed by Thomas Church, with whom Halprin previously worked on the Donnell Pool. According to the Society of Architectural Historians, it was, “as if the mountainous and stream landscape has been squeezed into smaller and urban space, a kind of abstract miniaturization.”

The Halprins’ Geologic Naturalism

In skateboarding, Halprin’s two most important contributions are EMB and the lesser-known but potentially more significant Donnell Garden Pool. Unlike Keller, EMB found less success as a public space. Its overly-complicated centerpiece fountain by Armand Vaillancourt, was described by the critic Allan Temko in San Francisco Magazine as, “A fountain deposited by a dog with square intestines”. EMB’s vacuous brick and concrete expanse, especially in the ‘70s prior to the demolition of the freeway that loomed behind it, was intended to function like a classic Italian piazza. These civic aspirations failed to fully materialize and some years later, when the plaza was partially filled in with a series of concrete terracing ledges, it inadvertently became a cultural icon and the world’s most important petri dish for the evolution of street skateboarding.

Embarcadero Plaza, Previously Known as Justin Herman Plaza

Embarcadero Center in 1971, against the backdrop of the now-demolished Embarcadero Freeway

While it was Alvar Aalto, the precursor to everyone from the Eames to IKEA, who designed the world’s first kidney pool in Finland in 1939, it was Halprin’s mentor, Thomas Church, with Halprin working alongside him, that brought it to the masses of California in 1948. The Donnell Garden pool in Sonoma, CA was the first widely published kidney pool in the United States. Unlike Aalto’s earlier take on the kidney shape, the design Donnell Garden was more explicitly compositional, with Adaline Kent’s iceberg-like sculpture acting as a central feature and a counterpoint to various abstract rock and grass formations around the perimeter of the pool. This abstract balance of wet and dry materials or soft and jagged forms is distinctive of the modernist underpinnings of Thomas Church’s work. Halprin, as an indicator of the generation that followed, eventually seemed to be less interested in this visual purity, and as evident in his later work at Keller and Lovejoy, was more interested in engaging the whole human body and its wide range of sensory experiences. In all likelihood, Donnell has never been skated, while surprisingly, Aalto’s has. Donnell’s cultural significance was well documented in a 2019 episode of 99 Percent Invisible. The pool’s curving form was soon replicated throughout the newly built backyards of postwar southern California, the same backyards that the pioneers of early pool skating found their way into in the mid ‘70’s.

Gregg Weaver aka the “Cadillac Kid”, Skateboarder Cover, 1975, Photo by Warren Bolster

Nothing that Halprin designed was intended for skateboarding. Both EMB and Donnell were built decades before the advent of either street or pool skating. Is it just a coincidence that skateboarding’s most important early sites were either designed by or at least influenced by the Halprins? Is it something in the practice’s affinity for large-scale concrete forms and meandering river-like paths, or could it also be their interest in the movement of the human body through space?

Anna Halprin, City Dance, San Francisco, 1977

Anna Halprin: A Maker of Worlds

Anna Halprin was a celebrated artist, better known as the “pioneer of postmodern dance” than for her work in Halprin’s landscape architecture practice. Halprins’ approach was shaped by their life in California in the ’60s. Together, the couple authored the RSVP Cycles, a methodology for collaborative design with public input and participation — a practice that, while the norm today, was far ahead of its time. It was a reaction against the top-down approach toward city building that had dominated in the US during the postwar era (see the previous piece on Mies van der Rohe), as evident in the monotonous corporate architecture of that era and the disastrous urban renewal policies within cities such as San Francisco. It’s important to note that Halprins’ “Open Space Sequence” was itself an urban renewal project, one that displaced hundreds of elderly and low-income residents, mostly of Irish, Italian, and Jewish descent, as well several labor union offices.

If Lawrence Halprin defined the overall form and structure of spaces, it was Anna Halprin who gave them soul. She not only shaped Lawrence’s thinking but actively participated in the design process and community workshops. Early in her career, she sought to develop a new form of dance that was personal and explorative, free from the stuffiness and technical obsessions of the East Coast culture that she grew up in, one that she criticized for “portraying not being”. She was, in her own words, ”trying to get at something more basic, more humanistic, and I did that by using ordinary movement”.

Anna at the Halprins’ Dance Deck, 2017, just a few years before her passing in 2021 at age 100

Like most architects shaped by the tenets of modernism, Lawrence Halprin sought to find “universal forms of expression”, yet Anna was able to more fluidly adapt to the avant-garde’s shifting focus in the 60s, “from aesthetic essentialism to endless pluralities of human and cultural experience.” In other words, while Lawrence’s focus was often on architectural form (as illustrated in many of his sketches that seem to suggest a literal pastiche of natural forms), Anna was focused on people. She incorporated Gestalt psychology and healing into her practice and led group dance therapy sessions for cancer and AIDS patients from their backyard deck in Kentfield, CA.

She made little distinction between performer and audience, and saw dance as a way of being- less about virtuosity than to “gain new insights into the mystery of our lives.” Kyle Beachy echoed this same sentiment regarding skateboarding in The Most Fun Thing, “Moments are fleeting. Moments are repeated. There is no story, here, to tell, only an animating principle of simultaneity…It is not a narrative practice, but interrogative.” Silas’ Open Sequence part was released just 2 months after the passing of Anna Halprin, and although the timing was coincidental, it can be seen as a tribute to her legacy and her impact on the built environment.

Alison Bick Hirsch sums up Halprin’s attitude towards public space in her 2014 book, City Choreographer - Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America, “By stimulating imagination, direct awareness, and a kind of primal spontaneity and impulse, he hopes to free city dwellers from the restraints ingrained by the conditioning of a regimented culture”. This statement could very well be a description of Gonz’s opening line in Video Days. At its best, doesn’t skateboarding fulfill this exact desire?

Mark Gonzales in *Video Days*, fulfilling desires as only he can

The Halprins’ success, at least in Portland, is due to both Anna and Lawrence’s ability to do what any decent work of art does: transform. Keller and Lovejoy are not literal mountains or cascades, nor are they stark, lifeless concrete masses. Both spaces are more than the sum of their parts. They are prompts to action, full of gaps, idiosyncrasies, and sharp and unexpected turns that are invitations for interrogation and play. The Halprins' vision of this play was, like skateboarding, both solitary and social, a form of movement that defies quantification. The kind of enjoyment one finds in snapping high-speed ollies over sewer caps, or in a solitary spontaneous outburst of song in one’s home. In the Halprins’ built “scores”, there are moments for both outward expression and inward exploration to be found in the staggered terraces, water gaps, and odd stairs. They created idiosyncratic landscapes that may force an extended step that blossoms into some other unexpected form of movement. Is it meaningful? Is it liberating? Perhaps, on some occasions, it may just be enough.

Dancing in the Park