Processing natural time: Lawrence Halprin and the Sea Ranch ecoscore

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Susan Herrington and Sonja Duempelmann for the opportunity to present a draft of this essay at the 2012 Society of Architectural Historians Landscape History Chapter Symposium, and Albert Boeke and George Homsey for their personal insight into the Sea Ranch master plan. I am also indebted to Bill Whitaker and Nancy Thorne of The University of Pennsylvania Architectural Archives, and Marc Treib and Waverly Lowell for their guidance and assistance with research at The Environmental Archives, The University of California, Berkeley.

Notes

1. Lawrence Halprin, The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (New York, George Braziller, 1969).

2. See Halprin Notebooks: The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, Halprin Collection 014.

3. Lawrence Halprin, ‘The Gardens of the High Sierra’, in Landscape, XI/2, Winter 1961–62, pp. 26–28.

4. Ibid.

5. Lawrence Halprin, ‘The Shape of Erosion’, in Landscape Architecture, 52/2, January 1962, pp. 87–88.

6. See: Donald Canty, ‘Origins, Evolutions and Ironies’, in Donlyn Lyndon and Jim Alinder (eds), The Sea Ranch (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004), pp. 22–23; Lawrence Halprin, The Sea Ranch … Diary of an Idea (Berkeley, CA: Spacemaker Press, 2002); Kathleen John-Alder, ‘A Field Guide to Form: Lawrence Halprin’s Ecological Engagement with the Sea Ranch’, Landscape Journal, 31/1–2, 2012, pp. 53–75; and Kathryn Smith, Al Boeke, Oceanic Properties Vice-President: The Sea Ranch, 1959–1969. Berkeley, CA: Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, and the University of California, Berkeley, 2008.

7. George Homsey, Personal interview, 19 June 2011. Homsey, who worked with Esherick on the Hedgerow Houses, recalled that the Halprin and Esherick offices were aware of each other’s work, but carried out independent wind studies. Peter Dodge handled the analysis for Esherick, and this work reflects the sloped profile seen in the final design of the hedgerow houses. The landscape-scale wind studies by Halprin’s office helped site these buildings in the landscape.

8. For further discussion of Richard Reynolds and his site analysis see: John-Alder, 2012.

9. Victor Olgyay, Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism (New York: Princeton Architectural Press,1963). Olgyay developed bioclimatic analysis in the 1950s. Design with Climate was published the same year that Lawrence Halprin & Associates began design work on the Sea Ranch. Reynolds kept a project folder full of diagrams from Olgyay’s book. See Architectural Archives, The University of Pennsylvania, Halprin Collection 014, Box 281, Folder 014.I. B.971.

10. Homeostasis refers to the ability of organisms to regulate and maintain a relatively uniform internal environment through self-regulated and self-correcting exchange with the external environment. Homeostasis deals with the organism as a whole system, and considers exchange across multiple levels of organization. It also describes the maintenance of living systems over time, and considers this regulation in terms of equilibrium and balance. In this essay homeostatic regulation refers to processes in physiology, ecosystems, and cybernetic feedback exchange. For further discussion of homeostasis, including the difference between open and closed systems, and negative and positive exchange see: Walter B. Canon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1932, 1963); Eugene P. Odum, Ecology (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963); and Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications (New York: George Braziller, 1968).

11. Olgyay, 1963, p. 84. Olgyay used a diodon transformation from On Growth and Form to argue ‘the forces of nature have a direct effect upon the formation of objects’. See: D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917).

12. See: Richard Dwan Reynolds, Effect of Natural Fires and Aboriginal Burning Upon the Forests of the Central Sierra Nevada. Masters Thesis, The University of California, Berkeley, 1959. Carl O. Sauer was a Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley from 1923–1957 and a Professor Emeritus until his death in 1975. http://grad.berkeley.edu/lectures/list_series.php?serieslookup=Sauer

13. Reynolds’ ideas clearly fell on prepared ground. As indicated by sketches and commentary in his Notebooks, Halprin was interested in human habitation of the land. For instance, a notebook entry dated 10September 1961 describes the ruins of a logging cabin in a small canyon in the California hills and its slow disintegration back into the land. The important point here is that Reynolds’s documentation of the impact of successive patterns of human habitation upon landscape process and morphology provided Halprin with an expanded definition of human-induced landscape change. See: Lawrence Halprin, Notebooks 1959–1971 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), p. 61.

14. Carl O. Sauer, ‘The Morphology of Landscape’ in University of California Publications in Geography, Vol. 2, No. 2 (12 October 1925 and reprinted 30 November 1938), pp. 19–54.

15. Ibid., pp. 36–37.

16. Ibid., p. 20. In ‘The Morphology of Landscape’, Sauer argued for empirical observation over a priori thought, and urged his colleagues and students to study the land using open-minded, inductive processes of reasoning. In this essay, phenomenology concerns relationship of ideas and physical laws. It is defined as a quantifiable process of acquiring knowledge, and in terms of the physical processes, both natural and cultural, that act upon land to shape form. ‘What we see today’, he argued ‘is just a point on a line.’

17. Ibid., p. 46.

18. John Leighly, Land and Life: A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), pp. 147, 320–321. John Leighly, Sauer’s colleague at Berkeley, noted that Sauer promoted an understanding of cultural geography based upon the landscape’s natural order and limits. Leighly also noted that Sauer later repudiated the mechanistic process of organization that he championed in Morphology, as well as his uncritical acceptance of Spengler. Nevertheless, the notions of natural and cultural determinism remained a central theme of his work.

19. See: Architectural Archives the University of Pennsylvania, Halprin Collection 014, Box 281, Folder 014.I. B.968, 971, 977, 994–995, and Image Folders 170–175: Sea Ranch (6525) File #1, July 1963 – February 1964).

20. See: ‘Ecological Architecture: Planning the Organic Environment’ in Progressive Architecture, 47, 1966, pp. 120–137.

21. Halprin, 1969. For further discussion of the early history and the multidisciplinary ontology of systems theory in mid-twentieth century landscape architecture see: Margot Lystra, ‘Models and Scores: Interdisciplinarity and Conceptions of Time in 1960s–70s Landscape Architectural Representation’ (Lecture, Society of Architectural Historians Landscape History Chapter Symposium, Detroit, Michigan, 18 April 2012).

22. Ibid., pp. 1–7.

23. Ibid., p. 2.

24. Ibid., p. 113.

25. Ibid., p. 100.

26. Ian McHarg, ‘An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture’, in Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (eds), The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), pp. 328–332. McHarg’s essay was originally published in Landscape Architecture, January 1967, pp. 105–107.

27. Whether or not he knew of Sauer’s classification system, in several key respects McHarg’s methodology echoed ideas pioneered by Sauer in ‘The Morphology of Landscape’. The most notable parallel is the hierarchical natural history classification system. However, McHarg differed from Sauer by assigning performance value to each category within his system. This, in turn, led to a series of land-use prohibitions, which, as noted by may of his critics, tended to overlook those variables that did not support his agenda. The important point here is that The RSVP Cycles incorporated key aspects of both of these methodologies.

28. See: Raymond K. Belknap and John G. Furtado. Three Approaches to Environmental Resource Analysis (Washington, DC: The Conservation Foundation, 1967), pp. 59–75. Students at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University working under Charles W. Harris prepared this study, which argues the significance of McHarg’s methodology was due to its ability to make natural processes alive and meaningful; to reveal the causes and consequences of actions; and to help select the best alternatives for orderly growth and management.

29. Halprin, 1969, p. 98.

30. Ibid. Halprin appropriated this idea from the ecologist Fraser Darling who studied overgrazed landscapes in Scotland. See: Fraser Darling, ‘The Ecological Approach to the Social Sciences’, in Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (eds), The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), pp. 316–327.

31. Ibid., p. 114. It is also fair to suggest that the negative land use scenario detailed in this passage was directed at Albert Boeke, the project manager for Oceanic Properties who managed Halprin’s contract and approved all design decisions for the Sea Ranch. Upon the advice of his civil engineer, Boeke had recently terminated Halprin’s services as a landscape consultant for a proposed new town in San Jose. Reasons cited included a lack of project oversight by Halprin and his promotion and strong support of an ecological drainage plan prepared by Richard Reynolds. See: Architectural Archives the University of Pennsylvania, Halprin Collection 014.I. A., Box 31, Folders 1108–1113, 6445.

32. Ibid., p. 123.

33. Eugene P. Odum, Fundamentals of Ecology (Philadelphia: W. B. Saunders Company, 1959), pp. 3–4,10, and 37.

34. Halprin, 1969, p. 307.

35. Halprin, 1969, p. 3. For further discussion of the relationship between ecology and Gestalt psychology in Halprin’s design philosophy see: Alison Hirsch, ‘Lawrence Halprin: Choreographing Urban Experience’, PhD dissertation, The University of Pennsylvania, 2008; Eva Jessica Friedberg, ‘Action Architecture: Lawrence Halprin’s Experiments in Landscape Design, Urbanism, and the Creative Process’, PhD dissertation, The University of California, Irvine, 2009; John-Alder, 2013.

36. László Moholy-Nagy, Vision in Motion (Chicago: Paul Theobald and Company, 1946), p. 35.

37. Gyorgy Kepes, The Language of Vision (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1944), pp. 12–14.

38. Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), pp. 15 and 37–44.

39. Ibid.

40. Inherent to this discussion is the concept of homeorhesis, or the idea that complex systems return to a fixed trajectory following disturbance, as opposed to homeostasis, in which the system returns to a prior state.

41. See: Architectural Archives the University of Pennsylvania, Halprin Collection 014, Notebook 10: April–December 1964.

42. For further discussion of the artistic and musical influences on Halprin’s score notations, including those of Paul Klee, Anna Halprin and John Cage, see: Alison Hirsch, ‘Lawrence Halprin: Choreographing Urban Experience’, PhD dissertation, The University of Pennsylvania, 2008; Eva Jessica Friedberg, ‘Action Architecture: Lawrence Halprin’s Experiments in Landscape Design, Urbanism, and the Creative Process’, PhD dissertation, The University of California, Irvine, 2009.

43. Halprin, 1969, p. 123.

44. Ibid., p. 3.

45. Notebook 18 (March 1967–July1967). The Architectural Archives the University of Pennsylvania, Halprin Collection 014.

46. Odum, 1959, pp. 257 and 269.

47. The passage is from: Raymond F. Fosberg, ‘The Preservation of Man’s Environment’ in Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (eds), The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969), pp. 333–337. Halprin also quoted essays from this text by Fraser Darling, and Lynn White.

48. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return or, Cosmos and History (New York: Princeton University Press, 1954, 1974), pp. 89–92.

49. D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1917), pp. 493–496. When On Growth and Form was reprinted in 1952, and in an abridged edition in 1961, Thompson’s study of the mathematical basis of form was rediscovered by a mid-twentieth century generation of environmental designers, including Olgyay and Alexander, fascinated by principles of self-organization.

50. Ibid.