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 adaptivereuse 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, publicspirited 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, Halprins office abstracted the topographic undulations of the
citys 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 Roosevelts
presidency.

Memorial rooms
The memorials 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 FDRs 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 nations first memorial designed to be wheelchair
accessible. The memorial was dedicated by President Clinton on May 2, 1997. In

Halprins New York Times obituary, the FDR Memorial was described as Halprins favorite
project.