HISTORY

Where the Revolution Began

The Portland Open Space Sequence, as it was originally called, is a series of interactive fountains, plazas, and connecting pathways designed by Lawrence Halprin and Associates between 1963 and 1970. These mid-century modern parks are internationally celebrated and stand as Portland’s most inﬂuential works of landscape architecture.

Born of the creative experimentation and collaboration between landscape architect Halprin and his wife Anna, a pioneer in choreography and dance, the Sequence came to life in the unlikely setting of the city’s ﬁrst scrape-and-rebuild urban renewal project. Yet Halprin deﬁed the conventions of both American urban renewal and mid-century modernism, designing the kind of inviting, exuberant public space not seen since the Renaissance with Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navonna.

For Halprin, the Sequence became the ﬁrst step in a career-long exploration of sequential works of landscape design – with works that spanned from the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem to the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. For the City of Portland, Halprin’s Sequence marked the beginning of a tradition of remaking the city around interactive public spaces, such as the famed Pioneer Courthouse Square and newer parks in the Pearl District.

Creating a Tradition of Public Space

On a sunny June day in 1970, New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable witnessed the opening of what she called “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance” – in Portland, Oregon. The place was Forecourt Fountain, a 13,000- gallon-per-minute cascade of water the likes of which no city had seen before. The time was a critical moment when our downtown was teetering on the brink of the ﬁnal slide toward the desolation suﬀered by many American cities of the era.

Only days before, Huxtable, then America’s leading voice on architecture and urbanism, challenged Portland to rise to its potential for a “dreamworld urbanism” of a city nestled in nature. She warned against the “scattered, bomb-site” parking lots then covering over half of downtown and the growing collection of “chamber-of-commerce-look” towers. Against a skyline of “Suave Schlock” like the then-newly christened 536-foot-high First National Bank tower, a natural wonder even as powerful a Mount Hood, she wrote, “doesn’t stand a chance.”

But in Forecourt’s powerful concrete allusions to the stout columns of basalt and its spectacular ﬂows of water, Huxtable saw a civic savior, a new kind “people park” that echoed Baroque masterpieces such as Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona yet with a “geometric naturalism” beﬁtting its region.

“Mr. Halprin is onto something that makes the conventional piece of modern sculpture plonked onto the conventional corporate or public plaza look obsolete.”
— Ada Louise Huxtable, New York Times, 1970

Never one for hyperbole, Huxtable’s optimism proved well-placed.

As the ﬁnal in a sequence of four fountain plazas Halprin designed for Portland, Forecourt (later renamed Ira Keller) Fountain, indeed, marked the beginning of renaissance – for both downtown Portland and American public space.

Urban Renewal in Portland

Like many American inner cities, downtown Portland rapidly fell into decline after World War II. Residents took ﬂight to new suburbs. Regional malls like Lloyd Center drained shoppers from downtown stores. Older downtown buildings, once bustling with residents, workers and shoppers either fell into disrepair or were simply cleared for more parking.

With the Federal Housing Act of 1949 providing generous grants for “slum removal,” Portland and other cities looked to bold new forms of urban renewal. Oregon became the second state in the country to adopt a new tool called “tax-increment ﬁnancing” which made redevelopment possible by borrowing money against future tax revenues that new buildings would bring. The city identiﬁed 11 areas to be cleared and built anew and by a narrowly won ballot initiative in 1958, created the Portland Development Commission to do the job. First project: the South Auditorium Project.

“Sometimes progress depends on destruction.”
— Oregon Journal, 1962

Named for the Civic Auditorium long standing at its northern edge, the district had once been a predominantly Jewish neighborhood with ﬁve active synagogues. But suburban ﬂight was taking its toll. Though it still boasted a lively collection of delis, bars and tailors plus and a rising population of Italian, Greek, Irish and Roma immigrants, the PDC conducted studies showing 62 percent of its 385 buildings to be substandard. By 1962, the PDC had condemned 54 blocks for redevelopment and relocated more than 1,500 residents.

With $12 million in federal funds, the PDC next cleared the land and put the property out to bid, ultimately luring a consortium of local and California investors. Teamed with one of the leading architecture ﬁrms of the time, Skidmore Owings Merrill, they proceeded to build a “city within a city” called Portland Center. Cut from the cloth of major architectural fashions of the time, the SOM’s design was a quintessentially mid-century American, tower- and-plaza urban renewal scheme of apartments and oﬃces surrounding fountains and parks. But the PDC, under the leadership of its director John Kenward and chairman Ira Keller made a fateful decision, by hiring its own landscape architect to design the parks: Lawrence Halprin and Associates.

Portland and the Renaissance of Urban Public Space

Only days before Forecourt Fountain’s dedication in June, 1970, the Ohio National Guard ﬁred on unarmed Kent State University students protesting the U.S. war in Vietnam, killing four. Days later, clashes between Portland Police and protesters at Portland State University sent 27 students to the hospital during the city’s most violent antiwar protests. The mood at Forecourt’s christening was tense, especially when a cadre of young students collected around the plaza. But as police sternly looked on, Lawrence Halprin grabbed the microphone,

“These very straight people somehow understand what cities can be all about,” he told the students, waving his hand to the city oﬃcials. “So as you play in this garden please try to remember that we’re all in this together.” And with that, Halprin jumped into Forecourt’s waters, suit, red tie and all. So did the students. Soon people were holding hands and dancing in the pools.

Published throughout the world, Halprin’s Portland sequence instantly became pilgrimage site for landscape architects. But built at a time when American inner cities only oﬀered places to work, shop and park, the plazas invited a radical new activity: play.

“As you play in this garden, please try to remember, we’re all in this together.”
— Lawrence Halprin

And, thus, Portlanders played in their public spaces, and in some cases they played to make more of them. In 1967, for instance, just two years after the opening of Lovejoy, a group known as Riverfront for People held a symbolic picnic on the Willamette River’s western bank, kicking oﬀ what would become their successful eﬀort to turn a highway known as Harbor Drive into what in 1978 became Tom McCall Waterfront Park. In 1982, after holding an international design competition for Pioneer Courthouse Square, the Portland City Council changed its mind and voted the square down. The winning architects responded by painting their winning design on the site, successfully rallying public pressure to reverse the council’s vote.

By the 1990s, the city’s embrace of urban forms of nature and theatrical public space had become so accepted that it built another sequence of interconnected fountain plazas – Jamison Square, Tanner Springs Park and The Fields – as the spine of the River District. And in the South Waterfront, Portland restored native ﬁsh habitat along a mile of riverbank less than 125 feet from the city’s tallest residential towers.

Though the history is little known to Portlanders today, Halprin’s four plazas are easily Portland’s most internationally inﬂuential works of architecture. But they’ve been locally important as well, launching a 50-year tradition of building theatrically interactive public spaces rooted in the forms of nature.

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