City Choreographer constitutes the most comprehensive monograph to date on the well-known landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, whose often-dramatic designs for fountains, plazas, and interconnected pedestrian pathways helped to change the faces of various American cities during the 1960s and 1970s. From the perspective of current planning policy and preservation, this monograph is timely insofar as a number of Halprin’s best-known works, notably Denver’s Skyline Park (1974) and Minneapolis’s Nicollet Mall (1968), have recently been destroyed or altered beyond recognition. Other Halprin landscapes remain in a state of disrepair or planning limbo. Part of the purpose of the book, reiterated in the introduction and conclusion, is to make a plea for the ongoing relevance and importance of Halprin’s design methods (perhaps more so than his built projects) for the shaping of contemporary urban form. As Alison Bick Hirsch notes: “The vocabulary, methodology, and intentions of Halprin’s open-ended scoring approach have only...
University of California Press