Review: City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America, by Alison Bick Hirsch

Abstract

Alison Bick Hirsch City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, 320 pp., 105 b/w illus. $30 (paper), ISBN 9780816679799 City Choreographer constitutes the most comprehensive monograph to date on the well-known landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, whose often-dramatic designs for fountains, plazas, and interconnected pedestrian pathways helped to change the faces of various American cities during the 1960s and 1970s. From the perspective of current planning policy and preservation, this monograph is timely insofar as a number of Halprin’s best-known works, notably Denver’s Skyline Park (1974) and Minneapolis’s Nicollet Mall (1968), have recently been destroyed or altered beyond recognition. Other Halprin landscapes remain in a state of disrepair or planning limbo. Part of the purpose of the book, reiterated in the introduction and conclusion, is to make a plea for the ongoing relevance and importance of Halprin’s design methods (perhaps more so than his built projects) for the shaping of contemporary urban form. As Alison Bick Hirsch notes: “The vocabulary, methodology, and intentions of Halprin’s open-ended scoring approach have only recently become part of accepted disciplinary discourse, yet with little recognition of Halprin’s pioneering efforts” (3). Given the author’s ultimately skeptical stance toward the actual open-endedness of Halprin’s methods or designs, however, the historical lesson for the present remains ambivalent. The very term city choreographer embraces this ambivalence, marking Halprin as someone whose intention it was to stage the unrehearsed movements of diverse urban inhabitants, enticing them to explore and play on his designs, and at the same time control, or “score,” patterns of movement in the city. In this sense one is reminded of earlier attempts by the proponents of the so-called New Monumentality, such as Sigfried Giedion, to spur a “spontaneous” public life through spectacles of modernist art and architecture that would appeal to some instinctive or childlike response to color and form. One is also reminded of Edmund Bacon’s attempt to construct Philadelphia as a three-dimensional composition …