For the latest Bay Area visit, I decided to visit a couple of Lawrence Halprin urban landscape designs that I could walk to from the Embarcadero BART station.

Prior to traveling, I perused my trusty Lawrence Halprin guide which I had purchased some years back from The Cultural Landscape Foundation (TCLF).

Embarcadero Plaza (formerly Justin Herman Plaza), 1972

The photos below were taken at Vaillancourt Fountain located in the downtown San Francisco waterfront, in Embarcadero Plaza (formerly Justin Herman Plaza), where Market Street meets The Embarcadero. The Hyatt Regency Hotel is at the edge of the plaza, adjacent to the other four highrise towers of the Embarcadero Center. Across The Embarcadero is the Ferry Building, and the eastern end of the California Street cable car line is on the other side of the Hyatt Regency Hotel.

The following description is excerpted from TCLF website:

This four-acre brick plaza, reminiscent of an Italian piazza, is located at the eastern terminus of Market Street, the city’s major boulevard. It was completed in 1972.

The focal point of the plaza is a 40-foot-high concrete fountain, intentionally placed off axis with Market Street. Named Québec Libre! by its sculptor Armand Vaillancourt, the fountain is composed of rectangular steel and concrete arms that bend and twist, creating a grotto behind the waterfall where visitors can interact by moving under and through the structure. Water cascades, sprays, pours, and seeps from multiple sources in the fountain, which was conceived to counter noise from the adjacent highway. The Embarcadero Freeway was demolished after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, allowing the site to open up and enabling redevelopment all along the Embarcadero.

The fountain is not operational today and there is discussion of future redevelopment. I wish I had seen it with water flowing, spraying and cascading!

Levi’s Plaza, 1982

The following description is excerpted from TCLF website:

Intended as a campus for Levi Strauss, Inc., where its workers could relax and have lunch, and as an open space for the enjoyment of the local Embarcadero community, the park was dedicated on April 8, 1982, to “the employees of Levi Strauss.” Conceived as two distinct entities, Halprin’s design includes a paved plaza enclosed by four-to-ten-story buildings (by architects HOK and Gensler + Associates), as well as (to the east of the plaza) a pastoral park with a series of cascading waterfalls and a meandering stream. Although the park is situated along the heavily trafficked Embarcadero, it is quiet and calm, sheltered by a hedge along the eastern boundary with grassy knolls, mature canopy trees, and curving paths giving it a sense of seclusion.

In the plaza, a fountain acts as a focal point and incorporates a hulking piece of carnelian granite at its center, personally selected by Halprin during his research on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C. The granite for both projects was supplied by the same quarry. Until 2003, Halprin’s office was located adjacent to the park, on Battery Street, and during this time Halprin consulted on all aspects of the park's design and management.