Lawrence Halprin’s new outdoor theater in Stern Grove’s Concert Meadow

Posted on September 17th, 2008 by Sally B. Woodbridge
Environmental, Landscape Architecture |

PLANNING THE NEW THEATER

Nearly fifty years later, Halprin attended a concert at the invitation of Doug Goldman, President of the Stern Grove Festival Association and great grandson of Rosalie Stern, who established the SGFA in 1938 and presided over it until her death in 1956. Later, while discussing the theater’s condition with Doug’s father, Richard Goldman, Halprin sketched a concept for a possible theater scheme on a cardboard lunchbox. The three men left the concert agreeing that the SGFA must address Stern Grove’s deteriorating conditions if it was to continue to serve large audiences while also preserving the natural setting.

In 2001, SGFA retained Halprin’s firm to determine a conceptual direction for the theater.  Concept in hand, Doug Goldman approached the city with a proposal that the SGFA raise funds for a new theater.

In fact, the Parks and Recreation Department had already identified the entire park landscape – the 31-acre Stern Grove and the adjacent 33 acre Pine Lake Park – as a site in need of a Landscape Improvement Plan.

With funds from the SGFA, Halprin began a plan for the entire 64 acres that included a design for a new theater space to be named the Rhoda Goldman Concert Meadow after Mrs. Stern’s granddaughter.

The Improvement Plan, published in 2003, identified six phases of needed improvements totaling nearly $37 million. The SGFA began raising $15 million for the Concert Meadow and attendant areas. With design work starting in the winter of 2004, the goal was to complete design and construction drawings, the city review, and construction of the new theater in time for a June 2005 concert.

Committed to building the theater in stone, Halprin’s office began study models of rows of 3-foot deep stone seats interspersed with rugged boulders. Although sculptural, the boulders also functioned as markers for stepping the rows of bleachers down the valley’s natural 2.5% longitudinal slope.

Smaller boulders provided an ingenious solution for a safe and graceful transition from the 18-inch high seats to the adjacent risers of the access stairs.

But, to arrange the boulders artistically while solving the practical problems required careful management of their selection, arrangement, and installation. Halprin also designed several stone “ziggurats” to evoke the mystical qualities of the stone monuments of prehistorical cultures.

Rather than remold the landscape for the semi-circlular seating of classical theaters or the fan-shape favored now, Halprin’s scheme retained the stage in its historic location at the foot of the south slope, preserved the vegetation on all four edges of the concert meadow, and stretched a 400-foot-long bank of bleachers along the base of the ravine’s northern hillside.

The new backstage building, dressing rooms, green room, and restrooms are tucked into the southern hillside concealed by vegetation. A metal structure, with the branching forms of a tree, frames the stage and supports lighting, sound equipment, and a removable sailcloth canopy. In front of the densely packed bank of 6000 bleacher seats, curbed grass terraces gradually become part of the meadow. By confining the stepped seating and staircases with their required ADA handrails to the steep bleachers, the scheme avoids obtrusive structures jutting into the meadow.

Halprin consulted Edward Westbrook, a stone masonry contractor with QuarryHouse in San Anselmo, California, about finding a stone to use for both the seat walls and boulders that would match the park’s historic walls.

Westbrook found no reliable North American source that could provide stone in the quantity, color and character that the Stern Grove project needed. But, traveling in Shandong Province in China, he found a granite quarry that could meet the requirements. After seeing photos and samples, Halprin approved the selection.

Following a lengthy review process with clients and officials and on-site modifications of a full-scale mock-up of a typical section of bleachers sent from China, costs were set that determined the number of linear feet of stone seating that could be built. Halprin’s staff produced clay models of the large stone ziggurats and drawings of protypical boulders. From the photographs of 300 boulders similar to those in the drawings, Halprin and his staff selected 175, which were located by number on the construction drawings. The quarry then began to fulfill the order and shipped 80 per cent of the stone in time for construction to begin in September 2004.

Reviews of the theater were glowing and an estimated 13,000 people attended the inaugural concert, covering the bleachers, ziggurats, boulders, terraces, concert meadow and even distant lawns.

Today, the summer concerts are still one of the city’s major attractions. Even when no performances are taking place, the Concert Meadow meadow is well populated. Understandably so. The descent into the  ravine provides an escape into a nether world where, as Lawrence Halprin intended, enchantment awaits.

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