With the passing of Lawrence Halprin on October 25th, I’d planned to write about Portland’s Keller Fountain in my previous post but could not find my photographs. But now I’ve found some of them. These particular photos were all taken over two separate trips in April and July of 2004. I still remember my first visit to the fountain when I was young, thinking it was the coolest fountain ever and running around, exploring every nook and cranny, climbing up the watery stairs, running behind the water and walking through the upper streams.

I had another awe inspiring experience after getting out from a play at the Keller Auditorium at night and stopping, along with many others, shortly after exiting the doors at the grandeur of the fountain. This was a completely different experience because it was neither warm nor daytime and no one was in the space, but it had this amazing grabbing power of surprise upon seeing suddenly after having been sitting for a couple hours. I could even feel a mist on my face from the water, all the way from the other side of the street.

The magic of Ira Keller Fountain is not only in it’s dramatic design but in it’s highly varied spaces and ability to interact with the water in many different ways. And even with the power of the high volumes of water gushing from the fountain or the depth of the water, people are invited to touch, wade, soak, climb, explore and swim.

One of the things people seem to enjoy the most is jumping into the upper pool at the top of the falls. These are not small pools either, they are actually fairly deep and I’ve seen kids do cannon balls in them. You can see from the picture below just how deep it is.

The amazing part is, for those who visit this fountain in person for the first time always remark, there is quite a height to these falls and there is nothing between the upper pools and the edge of the falls and down to the lower pool. It could seem so easy for someone to fall over the side and yet, to the best of my knowledge, no one has. As it turns out, people can in fact look out for their own safety and exercise some common sense.

The water steps that come cascading down one side of the space are fun to climb up, while other prefer to lounge on the side. Another fun thing is on the opposite side, an area to walk under and behind the cascading water.

images (c) Lisa Town

And for more regarding Lawrence Halprin, there is a great article in the NY Times as well as several videos posted on Design Intelligence.

Me in my park, image via Unpaving Paradise

Last Friday the 18th was the annual PARK(ing) Day event where people from all corners of the globe take over parking spaces and turn them into temporary public parks for the day. This is an especially fun event because it’s not limited to designers, but includes anyone who’s willing to take the day off from work and put together a park to hang out in including local businesses, magazines, food vendors, community groups, artists, musicians, etc. It’s a great way to bring the community together in public spaces to interact, engage and play.

This year I had the opportunity to get together with two friends and fellow landscape architects, Brett Milligan and Jason King, to have a little fun up in Seattle while supporting some fabulous urban void activation headed up by Keith Harris on the People’s Parking Lot in Capitol Hill. A full list of the participating groups can be found here. Here’s just a few of the highlights…

In the middle of the whole event, the Capitol Hill Community Council and Unpaving Paradise, sponsors of the event, teamed up for a lush, tent-covered park. The park become a welcome place to relax since the site was bathed in hot sun for most of the day.

The Seattle Arts and Lectures park titled “Words Matter” featured a table of cookies, tea and inspiring books along with a board that encouraged people to paint, draw and incorporate inspiring phrases in a community art piece. One book on their table that particularly caught my attention was “Wake Up In Brightness”, a book they published that features poetry and prose from students. It was mpressive to see entries from students as young as early grade school years craft such beautiful words.

Brite Collective, an extension of JOIN, provides fun lectures and events aimed at uniting Seattleites through design and igniting inspiration to take part in their creative community. For PARK(ing) Day, Brite held an event called “Negative Space: A Biographical Field Sketch” which included a 1 hour interpretive walk to explore the identity of space, discuss cognitive mapping and sketch in a provided journal.

Hollow Earth Radio, a community-run online radio station, had a tent on-site where they were taking the urban confessions of anyone who was interested in talking. These will then appear on their website at a later date.

Flash Volunteer was there with some green space in support of their pretty cool project that helps bring events and volunteers together in an organized fashion.

This park called “Air Stream” was created by a group of designers who called themselves Signal to Noise. The intention was that the plastic rods along the edge would wave in the wind but unfortunately or fortunately, it was sunny and not at all windy that day.

Our neighboring park by the Seattle-based multidisciplinary firm SvR Design was complimentary to ours with a rec room outfitted with a couch, comfy chairs, a table full of games and a popular ping pong table.

One of our personal favorites was the sweet tunes 12 Hour Notice was pumping out from his pimped out ride. Seriously, the shopping cart was pretty cool, pictures don’t do it justice. He was there in his spot for most of the day, hardly moving. I’m not even sure he ate anything all day. When I went over to tell him how much we appreciated having him on the lot, I also found out that he was incredibly nice.

The only thing that got the mobile dj to sit down was the hour long performance from Toy Box Trio towards the end of the day. They brought with them a concertina, toy piano and tuba that mixed together for an interesting sound with a carnival flair. At one point they even introduced the sounds of an old fashioned typewriter.

Our park titled “4-Play” was split into quadrants of two areas of game play and two areas of vegetated seating, displaying that a park isn’t just made up of recreation or green space but instead consists of a good mix of both.

The games in the park consisted of a much longer twister game made of soft carpet and an oversized connect four game that became the highlight of the park and brought out the kid as well as the competitiveness in many people that stopped by to play a game or two.

In our green space, we had grassing seating “booths” that featured retro carpet dots covering one side for a soft surface to lean against and a poster board on the other side filled with planter pockets of bright yellow in both the national and Seattle PARK(ing) Day posters.

images (c) Lisa Town

At the end of the day an awards ceremony was held that included all parks within the Seattle metro area. Our park won the award for “Most Playful” park and we left Seattle with a prize of some park-based games from two local game shops. It was a fun event and we met lots of wonderful people and it was great to be a part of the local community for a day. Thanks to everyone on Capitol Hill that was involved and to Keith Harris for organizing the memorable event. I’m already looking forward to PARK(ing) Day 2010!

One thing I’ve been pondering lately is how to bring the community into the world of open space design because afterall, it is their space. It’s the people that know what they want but maybe just not exactly how they want it. And it’s our job as designers to help facilitate that process and bring those desires and needs forward, not just to come up with some idea that is placed in the space with no context. So if we are essentially working for the people, we should work with the people.

An initiative in New York City called “People Make Parks” will create a collaborative partnership between communities and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation for captial parks projects. The concept here is to encourage the sharing of ideas between the people who use the park spaces and those that help create them for what will hopefully be a stronger design process ultimately ending in a product that the community can be proud of and feel that they were truly a part of the creation process.

There’s a great interview on UrbanOmnibus with the two people behind this initiative, Anoo Siddiqi of the Hester Street Collaborative and Hillary Angelo of Parternships for Parks.

images via urbanomnibus