Palo Alto has a new big man on campus.
The Taube-Koret Campus for Jewish Life has germinated from the pipe dream of Palo Alto-area Jews to a well-funded and smoothly run building project. And with the building plan off and running, Lawrence Halprin, the preeminent landscape architect who laid out the future campus, has opted to step aside.
At 90, Halprin — the designer of the Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco’s Civic Center and Justin Herman Plazas among many, many other projects — felt he could not be the “architect of record” for a project that may not be completed until he’s close to a centenarian.
Shelley Hebert, the campus’ executive director, described Halprin’s departure as a mutual agreement. The architect was in his late 80s by the time he joined the project, so this wasn’t an unforeseen development.
“I think we felt any involvement by Lawrence Halprin would benefit the project and we were right about that,” she said.
“We wanted him to be the visionary and he was. We were tremendously fortunate and hugely grateful to have that opportunity.”
Set for completion in the next several years, the future campus will house a Jewish Community Center, a senior living facility and many other Jewish institutions.
Halprin is on vacation for the month of August, but his longtime associate, Dee Mullen, told j. that at this point in the architect’s career “what we tend to do often in projects is stay seriously involved through design development … we left this project on mutually positive terms.”
Halprin and architect Rob Steinberg have crafted a meticulously detailed “matrix,” which Hebert anticipates will still largely resemble the future campus. But Halprin’s designs are not set in stone, literally or figuratively.
“Shapes of things changed,” said the new landscape architect of record, 36-year-old Willet Moss of CMG Architects.
For example, Halprin designed an amphitheater in concrete, but Moss (as is befitting a man of that name) added some greenery and drew up plans for a small lawn and grapevines.
Moss — who recently won the Rome Prize, the Heisman Trophy of landscape architecture — said the concept framed by Halprin and Steinberg is virtually unchanged.
“For example, Halprin’s office predicated the framing of [outdoor] spaces on their observations about Israeli and Mediterranean city forms. Plants are more like objects in that environment as opposed to some kind of pervasive green thing here,” he said.
Moss described taking over for Halprin as a “daunting challenge” but also an honor.
Hebert said the campus would still have a Halprin feel: “One big idea is a midrachov, a main street from one end of campus to town square. And that has not been changed. The other big idea is for the campus to combine intimate, private outdoor spaces suitable for our senior residents with much larger spaces for community gatherings.”
Even at his advanced age, Halprin attacked the campus project with intensity, panache and style. He personally “walked” j. through a large cardboard model in his San Francisco office, drawing detailed diagrams to illustrate the drainage mechanism he planned to employ. Hebert still remembers a similar guided tour through Halprin’s tabletop model; the architect grabbed a batch of homemade rugelach she’d baked and began using them as campus buildings.
“When we first started out, we thought landscaping design meant plants and flowers,” she said. “What Lawrence Halprin and now Willet show us is true artistry. Landscape design is not something you just add on after everything else is done.”