Profile - Lawrence Halprin

Lawrence Halprin (b. 1916) Landscape Architect and Theorist
By Elizabeth K. Meyer

Born on July 1, 1916, Lawrence Halprin was raised in Brooklyn, New York. After graduation from high school, he lived for several years in Israel on a kibbutz. In 1935, he began his studies in Plant Sciences at Cornell University where he also played varsity baseball with hopes of playing professionally. After graduation, Halprin pursued advanced studies at the University of Wisconsin receiving a Master of Science in horticulture in 1941. During this time, Halprin married Anna Schuman, a dance student whose work played a significant role in Halprin’s ideas about landscape movement as well as his developing new graphic techniques to represent landscape experience.

While living in Wisconsin, Halprin has recounted visiting Taliesin East, Frank Lloyd Wright’s home-studio and deciding to study architecture focusing on landscape. He entered the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1942, studying with landscape architect Christopher Tunnard whose book Gardens in the Modern Landscape (1938) Halprin credited with confirming his interest in landscape design. During his studies at Harvard, Halprin was also inspired by professors Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, and was “vitally influenced” by the writings of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, a Hungarian artist and Bauhaus educator who immigrated to the United States in 1937. This particular influence is readily discerned in Halprin’s articles and books about process, space-time, and motion from the early 1960s through the late 1990s.

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Wikipedia Link

Sea Ranch...Diary of an Idea, by Lawrence Halprin

Profile - Nakano Associates: Landscape architects

by Nicole Kidder

“If I wasn’t a landscape architect, I’d be a rock ’n roll star!” says Kenichi Nakano, who still jams with three members of the original seven-piece R&B band he started at the University of Washington. “It’s a great way to blow off steam.”

Down time is important to 64-year-old Nakano, who has built one of Seattle’s most successful landscape architectural firms from the ground up. Born in the Tule Lake Internment Camp in California – the World War II relocation center where people of Japanese descent were incarcerated – Nakano was raised in Tacoma until he settled in Seattle after high school.

“I don’t remember much about the camp, but my family’s experiences definitely influenced how we grew up,” Nakano says. “When the war broke out, my dad was getting ready to go to college. He never got to go, so he insisted on all three of us boys attending.”

Initially an architecture and fine arts double major, Nakano eventually decided to specialize in landscaping. Influenced by the beautiful Japanese garden that his grandmother tended in her back yard, Nakano found himself drawn to scenery that was culturally, spiritually and ethically sensitive.“Landscape architects don’t just plant gardens. We develop site designs, assist in construction plans and give input on strategic urban planning,” explains Nakano. “A landscape is functional, aesthetic, symbolic. It is composed of the fundamental elements of the earth – tree, water, stone – and evolves with the changing seasons, progressing through growth and transformation, life and death.”For this reason, Nakano is excited to see the industry growing.

“When I started (the landscape architecture) program at UW, we only had 10 students. Now, there are 80. I saw a commercial on TV the other day where one of the characters said he was a landscape architect. When you hit mainstream media that means you’ve arrived!”

In 1993, Nakano retired from 20 years of teaching at the UW to start his own firm, which employs several of his former students. Armed with a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design, a one-year fellowship to the Urban Design Studies in Rome, and projects such as Seattle’s Gas Works Park and the Downtown Metro Tunnel under his belt, he embarked on a mission to blend cultural and environmentally sustainable elements into the parks, college campuses, community centers, libraries and transit centers he has created in dozens of neighborhoods throughout Puget Sound.

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