Lawrence Halprin, Freeway Park Viewing Base, 1976Freeway Park is like a craggy mountain on its head; the summit is at the bottom. You climb down elaborate descending stairs to stand on a narrow plane with a bracing view. But this isn't a vista. You face an ugly metal screen. A thin slice of waterfall rushes in front of it, falling from the top of the park. Through the water and the metal, you can see the subject you came all this way to look at: cars flying by under an orangey electric light, inside the concrete tunnel of Interstate 5. It's as if the park were here first, and then the city sprung up around it, interrupted it, completed it.
This fellow's photographs of Freeway Park and Halprin's other works are terrific. Mr. Mudede loves Freeway park, too.
