Where the Revolution Began

Photo by Joseph Readdy on Flickr

Portland writer/editor Randy Gragg will speak about the influential work of Lawrence and Anna Halprin at 6:00 PM on Thursday, April 23, in Room 115 of Lawrence Hall on the University of Oregon campus. Gragg's talk, entitled Where the Revolution Began: Lawrence and Anna Halprin and the Reinvention of Public Space, is sponsored by the UO Department of Landscape Architecture.

Between 1963 and 1970, Lawrence Halprin designed a series of fountain plazas in downtown Portland, Oregon that forever changed the design of public spaces in the U.S. Merging water, sculpture and theater, they provided something rarely seen since the renaissance: urban places for civic play. Randy Gragg will explore both the designs' origins in the era's activist politics and in the highly experimental danceworks of Halprin's wife, choreographer Anna Halprin. He will also present excerpts from a series of recent performances that, in the same radical spirit of the Halprins, used dance and music to foster the plazas' preservation.

Gragg is a writer, editor, and organizer who has worked in the Northwest for the past 25 years. Most recently he developed and is now editing a new magazine called Portland Spaces, a home design magazine about all the places we call home, from the house to the neighborhood, workplace and city as a whole.