Lawrence Halprin was an influential American landscape architect, designer and teacher. Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often

collaborated with a local circle of modernist architects on relatively modest projects  Gradually accumulating a regional reputation in the northwest, Halprin first came to national

attention with his work at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project in San Francisco, and the landmark pedestrian street / transit mall Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis

Mr. Halprin (from Brooklyn) gave us the modern style of landscape architecture after World War 2. This style used concrete as much as it did vegetation. But he also gave us space, urban open space.

Halprin's point of view and practice are summarized in his definition of modernism:

"To be properly understood, Modernism is not just a matter of cubist space but of a whole

appreciation of environmental design as a holistic approach to the matter of making spaces for

people to live.... Modernism, as I define it and practice it, includes and is based on the vital

archetypal needs of human being as individuals as well as social groups

Freeway park,seattle

ABOUT THE PARK

Located between 6th and 9th Avenues, Freeway Park is bounded on the north by Union and on the south by Spring Street. To the east is First Hill, to the west the park overlooks Seattle's financial center. Freeway Park provides a space where residents, shoppers, downtown office workers, hotel visitors and the whole array of people from all backgrounds who make up the downtown population may come together to enjoy the social elements of a citypark.

HISTORY

Jim Ellis has been a lifelong civic leader who led the effort to create Freeway Park in 1976. Ellis also spearheaded initiatives to clean up Lake Washington in the 1950s; to finance mass transit, parks, pools, and other public facilities through "Forward Thrust" bond issues in the 1960s; to preserve farmlands in the 1970s; to build and later expand the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in the 1980s; and to establish the Mountains to Sound Greenway along the I-90 corridor in the 1990s. Most of the projects he was involved in happened only after years of opposition and were a direct result of Mr. Ellis' tenacity. Freeway Park was championed by Jim Ellis and built with the Forward Thrust funds in 1976.

The idea for a downtown park over the freeway is as old as the Seattle segment of Interstate 5 itself. By the time the last light through the city was completed in 1966, public-spirited individuals and the city, county and state officials were already talking about constructing a lid over the below-grade portion separating first hill from downtown.

With Forward Thrust bond money, as well as county, state and federal funding, the five-acre park became a reality in 1976.

Executed by Lawrence Halprin & Associates under the design direction of Angela Danadjieva, the first phase of this 5.5-acre park opened in 1976 and remains one of the most compelling treatises on post-War landscape architecture.

The first park built over a highway, Freeway Park sits perched above Interstate 5 in downtown Seattle, where it uses the air rights of the interstate.

The park is defined by a series of irregular, linked plazas that are intertwined and enclosed by board-formed concrete planting containers and walls.

Here, Halprin’s office abstracted the topographic undulations of the city’s landscape. 

The separate areas of the park, known as the Central Plaza, East Plaza, and West Plaza, achieve consistency and cohesion through a shared materials palette of concrete, broadleaf evergreen plantings, and site furnishings.

The spaces are differentiated through the dynamism of the water features that occupy the spaces and the attendant differentiation of moods.  

A fourth space, the Naramore Fountain by sculptor George Tsutakawa,

predates Freeway Park and was integrated into the larger design. 

Freeway Park, Seattle

The park winds its way down First Hill, offering both a staircase and wheelchair-accessible ramps

West plaza

East plaza

Canyon fountain

Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial

The Franklin Delano Roosevelt memorial is a presidential memorial in Washington D.C. dedicated to the memory of U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to the era he represents.

For the memorial's designer, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, the memorial site represents the capstone of a distinguished career, partly because the landscape architect had fond memories of Roosevelt, and partly because of the sheer difficulty of the task

Dedicated on May 2, 1997 by President Bill Clinton, the monument, spread over 7.5 acres (3.0 ha), traces 12 years of thehistory of the United States through a sequence of four outdoor rooms, one for each of FDR's terms of office

In 1974 Lawrence Halprin was selected by the FDR Memorial Commission to design the 7.5 acre site adjacent to the Cherry Tree Walk on the western edge of the Tidal Basin. Halprin created a

new sort of memorial, a sequence of four galleries or garden rooms, crafted in a narrative sequence to tell the story of the U.S. during the four terms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency.

Memorial rooms The memorial’s rooms and water features, built primarily of red South Dakota granite, use

stone to express the fracture and upheaval of the times.

waterfall

Water, in the form of cascades, waterfalls, and pools, is a metaphorical component of the

palette, with the volume and complexity escalating as the narrative progresses.

Bronze sculptures

The memorial also incorporates 10 bronze sculptures and 21 carved inscriptions,

quotations from FDR’s speeches and radio talks.

The sculptures, by Leonard Baskin, Neil Estern, Robert Graham, Thomas Hardy, and

George Segal, depict images from the Depression and World War II, including a breadline and a man listening to a Fireside Chat on his radio. After complaints from the National Organization on Disability, a statue of the president seated in his wheelchair was incorporated into the memorial, the nation’s first memorial designed to be wheelchair accessible. The memorial was dedicated by President Clinton on May 2, 1997. In

Halprin’s New York Times obituary, the FDR Memorial was described as Halprin’s favorite project.