Lawrence Halprin and the Dancing City

The paper focuses on the work of the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, outilining the relations between the natural and architectural qualities of the open spaces he designed and the way people move there and inhabit there. Mainly, the paper describes ten years of his research, the Sixties, when he worked intensely about the seach of a method, then called the RSVP Cycles, gained by doing workshop with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Anna Schumann. The result was on one side the invention of a new kind of notation for drawing the way people move in the space and the design of a masterpiece of contemporary landscpae architecture, that is the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland. Fianlly, the paper opens to some reflections about our contemporary idea of creative behaviours in the urban open spaces, dealing with democracy, invention and control.