Suburban Still Life

Another upcoming highlight to our class will include a visit by Linda K. Johnson, a dancer and performance artist most known locally for both the work recently at South Waterfront and the ongoing series of dances that celebrate the local legacy of Anna and Lawrence Halprin and Portland fountains entitle "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin" which is a regular annual performance in the city (more here from Portland Architecture as well).


:: City Dance - image via Portland Architecture

Back in 1999, she was involved in a curated installation related to the UGB. From the ORLO site: "Spanning Boundaries” was a series of site-specific art works, performances and a one-night symposium into the exploration of Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary (UGB). Growth issues are a provocative topic throughout the nation and each artist created installations along its edges. In this intriguing visual juxtaposition of site/non-site art, “Spanning Boundaries” created a broad civic dialogue about community identity, individual rights, historical antecedent and the future of Portland’s growing metropolis."


:: image via Orlo

Johnson's installation entitled 'The View From Here' included site specific performance work at Riverside/Clackamas, Bella Madrona/Sherwood, Broughton Beach/Marina Drive, Dabney State Park/Troutdale, Springwater Corridor/Powell Butte and Jackson Bottom Wetlands/Hillsboro.

A quote from the book Urban Sprawl, by Gregory Squires "The UGB has even attracted the attention of artists, surely a rarity for a land use regulation. Dancer and performance artist Linda K. Johnson set up camp for 36-hour stints at four different points on the UGB, living in a fence-like tent supplied with a TV set and Martha Stewart dishes and bedding. She quickly replaced her specialized choreography with straightforward chats with visitors, pulling opinions from yuppies, school kids, construction workers, and architects. Out of the resulting "suburban still life" came new, complex understandings of the way that the UGB has affected "every single solitary aspect of the way we livie... traffic, education, taxes, our desires and housing and architecture." For Johnson - and for many other Portlanders - the growth boundary has become "a different viewfinder to see the city through" (Gragg 1999).

Quest for the Livable City

For an upcoming seminar class that myself and my colleague Brett Milligan are teaching in the Winter Quarter at the University of Oregon Architecture Program here in Portland, I've been doing a good bit of research on our local planning. Look for some upcoming posts here and at Brett's blog FAD on the topic of Portland's Urban Edge.


:: Portlands Urban Growth Boundary

The class will investigate the phenomenon of the Portland Urban Edge in . One recent resource that I picked up from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy is an hour-long documentary called 'Quest for the Livable City', part of their Making Sense of Place Series.


:: image via Northern Light Productions

I just finished watching the DVD and it's a great overview of some of the pros and cons of our unique system of land use planning, a passable primer for understanding the edge in a number of ways. Check out a quick trailer here:

Where the Revolution Began

The passing of Lawrence Halprin has close ties to an upcoming book that is being released this weekend celebrating his legacy in Portland. This Saturday is a chance to celebrate the legacy of Halprin in Portland, with the release of 'Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space'.



On Saturday, December 5th, at 2pm, join us for the release of a book celebrating the world-renowned Portland fountain plazas designed by Lawrence Halprin. The event will be located at the Ziba World Headquarters Auditorium (map) at 1044 9th Ave NW. A quick rundown of events:

Introduction by: Portland Parks Commissioner Nick Fish

Lecture performance by: Ron Blessinger, violinist, Third Angle Ensemble, with dancer/choreographers Linda K. Johnson, Tere Mathern, Cydney Wilkes, and Linda Austin.

Screening of: The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin. A documentary about the September 2008 performance in Halprin’s Portland plazas.

::

About the Book:
Some additional information about the book, from a press release issued by the Halprin Landscape Conservancy:

"Between 1963 and 1970, Lawrence Halprin and Associates realized the Portland Open Space Sequence: a quartet of public plazas in Portland, Oregon, that redefined the city and set a bold new precedent for urban landscape architecture. Comprised of Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and Ira Keller Fountain), plus the lesser-known Source Fountain, the plazas are a collage of striking concrete forms, gushing water, and alpine flora that, in their seamless mix of nature and theater, created a playful metaphorical watershed coursing through the central city."


:: image via Halprin Landscape Conservancy

"Where the Revolution Began (Spacemaker Press, $29.95) is the story of how these plazas came to be. Born of the creative experimentation and collaboration between the late Halprin and his wife, pioneering choreographer/dancer Anna Halprin, the Portland Open Space Sequence came to life in the unlikely setting of the Portland’s first scrape-and-rebuild urban renewal project. But Halprin defied the conventions of both American urban renewal and midcentury modernism, designing the kind of inviting, exuberant public space not seen since Renaissance Rome’s Trevi Fountain and Piazza Navona.

The book is an outgrowth of “The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin,” a performance that took place in the plazas in September 2008 as part of PICA’s annual TBA Festival. The book’s release, the performance, and screening is a celebration of Halprin, who passed away October 25 at age 94.

For Lawrence Halprin, one of the 20th century’s most influential landscape architects, the Portland plazas were the first step in a career-long exploration of sequential works of landscape design, from the Haas Promenade in Jerusalem to the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. For Portland, Halprin’s work marked the beginning of a tradition of remaking the city around interactive public spaces, such as the famed Pioneer Courthouse Square. And for landscape architecture, the plazas laid the earliest foundations for the ecologically and socially responsive urbanism on the rise today.

Replete with historic photographs and Halprin’s notebook drawings, Where the Revolution Began is a historically complete document of how this pivotal moment in urban landscape history came to be, from concept to fruition.

All proceeds from sales benefit the Halprin Landscape Conservancy, a nonprofit organization devoted to educating the public and preserving the Portland Open Space Sequence."

Essays by:
John Beardsley is the director of garden and landscape studies at Dumbarton Oaks and is the author of Earthworks and Beyond: Contemporary Art in the Landscape and Gardens of Revelation: Environments by Visionary Artists.

Janice Ross is a professor in the Drama Department and director of the Dance Division at Stanford University. She is the author of Anna Halprin: Experience as Dance and Moving Lessons: The Beginning of Dance in American Education.

Randy Gragg is editor in chief of Portland Monthly magazine and has written on art and architecture for Architectural Record, Metropolis, Preservation, the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and numerous other publications.

Contemporary photography by:
Susan Seubert regularly photographs for National Geographic Traveler, Geo Saison, and the New York Times, among other publications. She was a 1999 recipient of Life magazine’s Alfred Eisenstaedt Award.

Funding generously provided by:
Oregon Arts Commission/National Endowment for the Arts
Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts
Portland Development Commission
Portland Parks & Recreation
Schnitzer Care Foundation
Russell Development Company
And many others.