Yosemite Valley from
Tunnel View at Midday, 2013; photo by David Iliff, Creative Commons License
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On October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed
legislation establishing the country’s third national park at Yosemite.
Congress had recognized Yosemite as worthy of protection since 1864, when in
the midst of the Civil War it granted the magnificent and awe-inspiring
Yosemite Valley and “the Land embracing the Mariposa Big Tree Grove” to the
State of California “inalienable
for all time.”
Passage of the 1890 act had followed persistent lobbying by conservationists, including the legendary naturalist John Muir and the magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson. They successfully campaigned to protect about two million acres of the High Sierra. But protection proved difficult alongside the demands of commercial interests, and campaigns for increased safeguarding became an ongoing focus.
Since 1895, John Muir had advocated receding the Valley to
the federal government. While the government struggled to provide policies and
protocols in Yosemite Park, the State of California had neglected the lands
under its protection since 1864. Finally, in 1905 the state re-granted the land
to the federal government, which formally accepted its management the following
year. A decade later, when the National Park Service was established in 1916,
Yosemite—“at the heart of America’s nascent national parks movement,” as the National Geographic has observed—was formally protected
under a national park policy of preservation.
Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur’s 1931 statement
holds true today: “One hundred years from now, as people look back on our use
of this continent, we shall not be praised for our reckless use of its oil, nor
the weakening of our watershed values through overgrazing, nor the loss of our
forests; we shall be heartily damned for all these things. But we may take
comfort in the knowledge that we shall certainly be thanked for the national
parks.”
Preservation and
Landscape Architecture: Lawrence Halprin in Yosemite
One of the
Valley’s major attractions is
Yosemite Falls, North America’s tallest waterfall. Descending over 2,000 feet
from the Valley’s rim, its significance is evident in the human history of
Yosemite: the Ahwahneechee, one of Yosemite’s native populations, inhabited a
village near the base of the falls.
By the early 1990s, as in other areas of Yosemite,
overcrowding, cracked pathways, and an overrun, noisy parking lot characterized
deterioration and detracted from the area’s beauty. In 2002, the National Park Service
commissioned the celebrated landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) to
redesign the approach to Yosemite Falls from the Valley floor.
Renowned for
his reinventions of public space, with a focus on how people move through them,
Halprin’s works drew heavily from the natural environment. “We have emerged from nature and we are her children,” he wrote.
A member of
the Sierra Club, Halprin had strong personal and professional connections with
Yosemite, bringing his children there for a month every summer when they were
young. During these forays, he recalled in an oral history interview, “I
learned more and more each time about this theory that nature makes itself into
forms that nobody would have been able to think about. And that I needed to
think about form making through energy in my designs.”
Though it is
not always apparent, landscape architecture can play a significant role in
wilderness preservation. Halprin’s renovation, the Yosemite Conservancy has
noted, was “designed to enhance the wilderness experience and conceal the hand
of design.”
For his
Yosemite project, Halprin decided “to carry some of the qualities that I think
about all the time, and that is that people should feel shifts in hiking, to
sometimes sit, sometimes modify, sometimes see sun, sometimes see shade,
sometimes walk around, and walk through a meadow, and to make this an
experiential equivalency of what you really want to feel in a design. And so,
all the way through, we took this not as one jammed walkway or hiking trail,
but a trail which was almost like a symphony, stopping, moving, looking,
listening, so on.”
Halprin
conducted workshops at Yosemite to learn how best to serve visitors’ needs. As
he explained: “One of the things that I make a big point of how design should
be, how designers should get at things . . . is to do workshops with the people
who are going to inhabit these kinds of places. And a workshop is not a way of
having people learn how to design. It’s how to learn how to do things that are
going to be accomplished . . . but it’s their voice, because all of us are in
charge of the environment, every single one of us in this world.”
The resulting environmentally sensitive redesign and
renovation—a three-year, $13.5 million project—included new trails, walls,
bridges, benches, a shuttle stop, restroom, and the removal of the parking lot.
Covering 52
acres, the project also featured restoration of native plants, braided streams,
disability access, and interpretive displays about Yosemite’s history and
Native American culture. As the Yosemite Conservancy has observed, Halprin, along
with the National Park Service and the Conservancy, embarked “on an ambitious
campaign to not only restore this area, but to set a new standard in landscape
design and the visitor experience.”
Learn more about Lawrence Halprin and his projects in CHS's forthcoming exhibition Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–1971, opening on January 21, 2016.
Learn more about Lawrence Halprin and his projects in CHS's forthcoming exhibition Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966–1971, opening on January 21, 2016.
Shelly Kale
Publications and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org
Sources
Cultural
Landscape Foundation® Pioneers of American Landscape Design® Oral History
Series: Lawrence Halprin Interview Transcript © 2009 The Cultural Landscape
Foundation; https://tclf.org/sites/default/files/pioneers/oralhistory/Halprin-Transcript.pdf
John Isne, Our National Park Policy: A Critical History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press for Resources for the Future, 1961)
Leslie
McGuire, ed., “In His Own Words; Profile: Lawrence Halprin FASLA, 1916 to 2009, from
Lawrence Halprin, Notebooks
1959–1971” (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1972); http://www.landscapeonline.com/research/article/12990
National Park Service, “Yosemite: Enabling Legislation,” http://www.nps.gov/yose/learn/management/enabling_leg.htm
Erik Skindrud,
Yosemite Falls: Where Nature Meets the
Crowd, http://www.landscapeonline.com/research/article/5409
National Geographic, “U.S. National
Parks—In the Beginning,” http://travel.nationalgeographic.com/travel/national-parks/early-history/
Yosemite
Conservancy, “The Campaign for Yosemite Falls 2005,” http://www.yosemiteconservancy.org/visitor-enrichment/campaign-yosemite-falls-2005
On October
1, Yosemite National Park celebrates its 125th anniversary with a series of
events, including a large public ceremony in Yosemite Valley: http://www.nps.gov/featurecontent/yose/anniversary/events/125th-anniversary-yosemite-national-park/index.html
YOSEMITE 125th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL OFFER!
Cover art by Thomas Killion
|
Winner of the Digital Book Award’s Best
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50% off Yosemite: A
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20% of your purchase goes to support the Yosemite Conservancy’s work
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Free for CHS members: email info@calhist.org and write “FREE EBOOK” in the subject
line. www.californiahistoricalsociety.org
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