Angela Danadjieva at last week's Halprin Sequence rededication (Brian Libby)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
Last Thursday was an event known as the Big Splash, celebrating the completion of restoration work for the Portland Open Space Sequence, comprised of four works by the great landscape architect Lawrence Halprin's firm: the Source Fountain, Lovejoy Fountain, Pettygrove Park, and the showstopper, the Ira Keller Fountain (originally called the Forecourt Fountain or the Auditorium Forecourt Fountain). There was live music, dance and even a parade. But there's no doubt who stole the show: Angela Danadjieva.
The Open Sequence was first approved by the Portland Development Commission as part of the South Auditorium urban renewal district that also included the rebuilding of Civic Auditorium (now Keller Auditorium) in 1968. Each fountain, as conceived by Halprin represents a different part of Oregon's majestic natural landscape: Source Fountain is above the timberline, Lovejoy Fountain and Pettygrove Park are in the middle, and Keller Fountain represents dramatic waterfalls. Yet once we get beyond these basic concepts, the true design of the Keller Fountain came from another member of Halprin's firm: Danadjieva.
A Bulgarian immigrant born in 1931 who came to the United States in 1965, when she and Ivan Tzvetin won first prize in an international design competition for the San Francisco Civic Center Plaza. Though their design ultimately was not built, Danadjieva's talents caught the eye of Halprin, whose firm was based in San Francisco. He offered her a job, and she accepted — on the condition that Halprin guarantee her creative freedom.
Danadjieva was a natural talent, but her diverse training served her well.
Her father, a civil engineer and amateur painter, had taught her to draw at an early age while her mother, a music teacher, taught her composition. Danadjieva studied architecture at Bulgaria's state university in Sofia, earning a degree in 1960. But as she explained in a 1988 interview, the degree program there actually involved not just architecture but urban design, city planning, landscape architecture and interior design as well.
Danadjieva's first job out of architecture school was actually not in the building industry but in the Bulgarian film industry as a set designer and later an art director. She even won a Golden Rose award, the Bulgarian equivalent of an Oscar, for her set design for the movie 1961 film The Captured Squadron, which also took first prize at that year's Bulgarian International Film Festival.
As recession hit Bulgaria and Danadjieva was idle, she and her romantic partner at the time, Ivan Tzvetin, entered a design competition in Cuba for a Bay of Pigs memorial. Their submission came in second, which came with a $3,000 prize. Danadjieva used the money to enroll at perhaps the world's most acclaimed architecture school at the time, the Ecole National des Beaux Arts in Paris. After three years of study, she went to work for a Paris firm. That's where she was when Danadjieva and Tzvetin entered the San Francisco design competition that would change the course of her career.
Keller Fountain notebook sketch (Halprin Landscape Conservancy)
Given that Lawrence Halprin was one of the most acclaimed landscape designers of the latter half of the 20th century in America — and arguably #1 — it would be a mistake to discount his contribution to the Keller Fountain design. After all, Halprin conceived the Open Space Sequence itself. As Randy Gragg notes in his book Where The Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space, the first two plazas in the Sequence, Lovejoy Fountain and Pettygrove Park, "were unprecedented in the history of American landscape architecture," with Lovejoy a metaphorical mountain cascade "falling through a series of fractured geometries and into hide-and-seek pools," and Pettygrove with its exaggerated berms interspersed with elm, copper beech and tulip trees: a place of "softness and repose." As writer John Beardsley notes in another essay from the same book, Halprin "used a language of streamlined forms, asymmetrical geometries, and spatial ambiguity characteristic of much high modernist art," but he also "articulated some of the earliest and most forceful environmentalist challenges to modernism," calling for a more human-scaled and naturally-inspired urban park and landscape design.
As it relates to the Keller Fountain specifically Gragg also notes that Halprin's notebook sketches of it, dating to 1964, before Danadjieva joined his firm, "clearly set forth the main elements: a proscenium stage, water, and a backdrop of chiseled, columnar forms."
But those notebook drawings are actually published in Where The Revolution Began, and while it's certainly true that all the pieces and key concepts are there, it's still not exactly the Keller Fountain as we know it. One drawing shows a series of asymmetrical mountainous forms and another looks down at the block from above, with the basic forms of its layout.
Yet it very well seems to be arguable that in taking that brief and rough outline from Halprin, Danadjieva made it sing. Perhaps unsurprisingly given her formative years in the Soviet Bloc and in the Bulgarian film industry, there is something faintly Constructivist about the Keller Fountain design, recalling the artwork of Kazimir Malevich and El Lissitzky in how it reduces the geometry to something simpler.
Keller Fountain notebook sketch (Halprin Landscape Conservancy)
I guess what I'm trying to say is I think Danadjieva brought clarity to Halprin's concept. Instead of a mishmash, there's a greater uniformity of forms. It's not to say the big mountainous pieces are all the same size, but they're more like Russian doll components, each with the same contours. It's as if Danadjieva took the baton from Halprin's rough sketch and created a kind of visual pattern language. You can call her an editor of Halprin's vision or you can call her a co-designer. But even if it's just an editing role, as any filmmaker will tell you, sometimes the edit is everything. In this case, it wasn't exactly everything, but there seems little denying that Danadjieva's designer-artist fingerprint is discernible, just as Halprin's is.
In her remarks at last Thursday's Big Splash event, Danadjieva talked about a desire to help people be healthy. The design, she explained, gives people a respite from the noise and traffic in the city. In that 1988 interview in Landscape Architecture, she also talked about the culture shock upon coming to America of how much automobiles dominated urban life. One descends into the Keller Fountain park, with the white noise of the falling water blocking out much of the sound of automobiles, and the mist created by the water creating a kind of micro-climate that in summer months is cooler and maybe even cleaner air to breathe.
Footage of last week's Keller Fountain rededication (Brian Libby)
But most of all, Danadjieva radiated joy and gratitude. Maybe it was in knowing that she was part of creating a timeless masterwork, and seeing Portland re-affirm its love for the Keller Fountain design at nearly the half-century mark. But maybe it was also in having her own moment in the sun. That's not to say in any way that Danadjieva was denied credit by Halprin or press and historians. It's widely known that she was the lead designer. But because she is a survivor, it was Danadjieva who got to take the stage and address the Portland crowd in front of the fountain last week, and presumably for the first real time.
This celebration wasn't about Danadjieva per se. It was about the Sequence: its greatness and what a treasured thing these fountains are in our urban fabric. In countless societies, springs and waterfalls are places of spiritual pilgrimage, seemingly possessing some small bit of magic or at least engendering awe. At a time when we are both more and less ambitious about parks and greenspaces, envisioning a Green Loop but cutting maintenance budgets for the parks we do have—and like the time of the Sequence's conception, the late 1960s, a time of great division—it matters to re-affirm that this great public space matters.
Advertisements
Comments