Lovejoy Fountain Park – Lawrence Halprin
Interdisciplinary landscape architect Lawrence Halprin used the term Ecoscore to describe a score indicated by features in the natural environment – the path of a river, for example, as it carves through a landscape to create a succession of temporal signifyers. The Ecoscore was a precursor to Halprin’s Motations [movement notations] – diagrammatic representations of movements through time and space using the traditional musical score as a framework.
Ira Keller Fountain – Photo: Phil Gilston
Halprin’s open-ended approach using a personalised ideographic system allowed him to design a range of scores to choreograph the movement of elements in urban parks, plazas and cultural centres. The process he used allowed him to create designs for some of the most daring, exploratory, and potentially dangerous (and therefore exciting) public spaces in existence. His Motations were guides for the intended motion of people through space as well as scores for actual moving parts of the architecture itself – such as water in fountains. Essentially Halprin ‘construed landscape architecture as a form of narrative‘
Motation Drawing – Lawrence Halprin
Score for the choreography of water flow in a fountain by Richard Halprin designed for Seminary South Park
‘I saw scores as a way of describing all such processes in all the arts, of marking process visible and thereby designing with process through scores. I saw scores also as a way of communicating these processes over time and space to other people in other places at other moments and as a vehicle to allow many people into the act of creation together, allowing for participation, feedback and communication’ – from The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment.
Freeway Park, Seattle – Lawrence Halprin
Halprin’s designs offer an alternative to the current era of dreary passive open spaces where leveled patches of well trimmed grass prevail. Spaces such as The Ira Keller Fountain in Portland offer infinite participatory possibilities of small-scale psychogeographic choreography.
Ira Keller Fountain – Photo: Phil Gilston
Ira Keller Fountain – Photo: Phil Gilston
‘The space is choreographed for movement with nodes for quiet and contemplation, action and inaction, hard and soft, yin and yang. The second basic approach was to bring into the heart of downtown activities which related in a very real way to the environment of the Portland area – the Columbia River, the Cascade mountains, the streams, rivers and mountain meadows. These symbolic elements are very much a part of Portlanders’ psyche…. Finally these places were for the first time designed to be used to be participatory – NOT just to look at – they say COME IN, not stay off….Visually the Ira Keller Fountain suggests a remembered, stylized, simplified, sense-memory of some wilderness waterfall canyon experience you never quite had.’ – Walt Lockley.
Ira Keller Fountain
Further explorations:
Architecture/Dance: Choreographing and inhabiting spaces with Anna and Lawrence Halprin – Peter Merriman [PDF]
In his own words: Lawrence Halprin
Fountain Stage in Manhattan Square Park
Representing Motion: Landscape Urbanism on Notation Systems in Architecture
Notation Systems in Architecture – Premjit Talwar [PDF: 1970s thesis from MIT]
Other notations at Dataisnature:
The Musicality of The Two-Way, Magnetic-Electric Thought-Wave Universe of Walter Russell
Jorinde Voigt – Network Dynamism