Mauling the Mall? Don't Change The Bricks

Lawrence Halprin, the renowned landscape architect who designed the Downtown Mall, urges the city not to change the size of the bricks as part of its proposed $7.5 million renovation.
Photo Credit: Dave McNair

Reached at the California studio where he’s busy working on his memoirs, the 92-year-old landscape architect says he was unaware of the current plan to update his 1976 Charlottesville Mall design. Still, it wasn’t unfamiliar news. Quite a few of his landscapes have been renovated and altered over the years — and in 2003, the same year he received the National Medal of Arts from President Bush, the nation’s highest honor for artistic excellence, his Skyline Park in Denver was demolished.

“My immediate reaction is anger,” Halprin told the New York Times after that demo. “Then it’s ‘gee whiz.’ We were like scouts in war, working on point to induce people to move back to the city.”

Halprin, perhaps now best known for his sprawling memorial to FDR in Washington, says he has “fond memories” of his Charlottesville project, and he recalls the success of workshops among city planners and citizens.

“I’ve always been proud of my design for the Downtown Mall,” says Halprin. “It remains close to my heart.”

In recent years, Halprin has been widely recognized as a trend-setter for his work shaping public spaces. His Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco is widely cited as the first big adapted factory to merge public and private realms, and his Park Central Square in Springfield, Missouri, was recently made eligible for the National Register of Historic Places, despite being only 38 years old.

“Normally, places have to be at least 50 years old to be eligible for the register,” says UVA architecture professor Elizabeth Meyer, “but because of Larry’s reputation and status as a master, they’re making an exception.”

In the meantime, we haven’t heard the last from Meyer, who says she successfully spearheaded a campaign to preserve the Dumbarton Oaks gardens in Washington, DC, designed by Beatrix Farrand, the first professional woman landscape architect in the US, which was going to be dug up for an underground library in 1999.

“I’m not going to see this Mall get changed,” she vows.

Source: The Hook, Charlottesville, Va.