Andrea Torreblanca (AT) The urban development of postwar America in California, which gave shape to the suburbs and precipitated the expansion of cities, led some architects to experiment with building alternatives. Many of them considered that the environment should be at the center of these solutions. Can you describe and talk about the environmental turn in this context?

Alison B. Hirsch (ABH) My research has been focused on activist landscape architects. But in contrast to many landscape architects in the postwar period, who were interested in the impacts of suburban development on the public realm, my early focus was on Lawrence Halprin and his wife, Anna Halprin, a choreographer and dancer. They came to California for the freedom of creative possibility. And the two of them had a very interesting artistic symbiosis. But in terms of design, Lawrence Halprin was creating alternatives that were informed by choreographic experiments that Anna was exploring in open scoring—in questions of performance and process, and how that impacted the development of public space in urban environments that were rapidly changing.

Some of her work was influenced by Isadora Duncan, some of it by Martha Graham, but it was much more about freedom of movement and a lot of it was influenced by happenings on the East Coast. Lawrence Halprin was interested in creating guidelines for people to enact a series of cumulative experiences through which they could find some form of common language and then make decisions based on that.

AT I think there is often a misconception about what the environmental is. Many people associate it exclusively with sustainability. But I think in the sixties and seventies, it was focused on tools and process.

ABH In the 1960s there was a landscape architect named Ian McHarg. He wrote a book called Design with Nature, and it was about how design at an environmental scale could mitigate some of the pressures on our cities, on our planet, and foreseeing some of the destructive forces that we encounter today. And that was influenced by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which came out in the early sixties, and was the catalyst for the environmental movement in the 1960s. So, Ian McHarg and Lawrence Halprin, as well as Anna Halprin to some degree, were influenced by these sociopolitical changes that were related to the environmental crisis. At the same time in the sixties and seventies, there were a number of architects and designers exploring a more field-based methodology rather than singular sites and buildings; they were looking at systems, at process, at regionalism in some ways. And so, Halprin, McHarg, even [Christopher] Alexander were influenced by this idea of a field-based approach to design thinking in a much more comprehensive, networked way.

AT In your book City Choreographer, you describe Halprin’s interest in using the notation system as an archetype to create a human environment. And this is interesting in relation to how Christopher Alexander also created his pattern language based on giving people the tools to build their own place.

ABH Halprin, and I would say a fair amount of his contemporaries, were influenced by Jungian psychology. And so, this interest in finding those archetypes or those common experiences, or even common images, was definitely of the time and place. I think it was related to psychology. But it was about finding that prerational state that Anna Halprin was thinking about, about how we achieve authenticity stripped down from all the cultural constructs that we’re creating. I think there was a bit of naivete in terms of finding that universal archetype. But Halprin was looking at environmental process, not just form. He was using a lot of his sketching and his work in the High Sierras and even in Sea Ranch in Northern California, generating processes in geologic time and even questions of sedimentation of the establishment of plant communities and what those processes were able to create through both geologic time and human scale time. And how that process could be used to create a series of forms, images, and dynamics in the urban environment that would provoke universal kinesthetic response. And again, that was influenced by the dancer in his life.

So, in terms of archetypes, I think that’s where the foundation might come from. And the notation system in some ways was connected to that. He created something called “motation,” which was a movement notation system. It was based on dance records, but the intention was to create a graphic score or a graphic composition that could catalyze movement. In the participatory performance space, there was a progressive liberation of the spectator from a passive observer to an active participant. I think that was influenced by countercultural acts of social protests, but also by cultural avant-garde considerations of the same sociopolitical contexts. So, there were marches, sit-ins, and demonstrations that were happening that were very performative at the time. And I believe that Anna Halprin was absorbing that into her work, obviously. And then that work was infiltrating into Lawrence Halprin’s work and that of some of his contemporaries. He and Anna choreographed these long-standing workshops called “Experiments in Environment.” Those were open-ended; they actually took place at Sea Ranch. And these workshops were intended to unleash creativity coming from that prerational state. There was a lot of nudity in those workshops and a lot of free love. But the actual workshops that were HUD [Housing and Urban Development] funded were similarly intended to get people out from behind their desks and to interact directly with their urban environments.

AT This is so interesting. I mean, how do you articulate this relationship between performativity in your research project?

ABH My work in historical research on the 1960s and 1970s definitely creates a foundation for how I continue my research today. All my work is related to the body performativity and questions of land and landscape. I do that through looking at the urban and beyond urban landscapes through sociopolitical forms of occupation; through looking at human experience and human action, and how that catalyzes a kinesthetic awareness of space in terms of sociocultural practices, like rituals in the urban and beyond environment, and how that creates cultural meaning.

And so, my work now is very influenced by some of those practices that Anna and Lawrence Halprin were doing in the urban environment, about understanding the immediacy of one’s environment, of doing walks with community members, of unleashing community and social histories, and having a real political lens on how design is then yielded.