Hanna, Robert Mitchell, d. 2003.
 
 
 

Robert Hanna, 67, Architect of Open Spaces in Cities, Is Dead
By WOLFGANG SAXON
 

Robert Mitchell Hanna, who taught urban landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and made it work in places like Battery Park City, died last Saturday in Philadelphia. He was 67.

A nationally known exponent of his field, Mr. Hanna was on the faculty of the university's Graduate School of Fine Arts for over 30 years.

He was a professor of landscape architecture until 2000 and was most recently a lecturer in urban design.

For many years he was a principal in the Philadelphia firm Hanna/Olin Ltd., which in 1995 divided into RM Hanna Landscape Architects and Olin Partnership, both in Philadelphia.

His forte was the shaping of open spaces in an urban setting.

Among the projects to which he made notable contributions were the master plan for Battery Park City and its waterfront and the Westlake Square revitalization in Seattle's downtown retail district.

He was involved in major urban developments as far away as Canberra, Australia, and Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in China.

His work was incorporated in the rebirth of Bryant Park in Manhattan; the University of Washington campuses in Seattle and Tacoma; and the recently finished Pottstown Square restoration, which spruced up the main street for the 200th anniversary of Pottstown, Pa.

Mr. Hanna was born in Deming, N.M., and raised in Seattle. He was a 1959 architecture graduate of the University of Washington and worked with Richard Haag in the transformation of the 1962 Seattle World's Fair grounds into a park.

He received a master's degree in landscape architecture at Harvard in 1967, after which he worked for the Boston Redevelopment Authority.

He started teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969, and in 1974 became the first chairman of environmental design. He had helped to create environmental design as an undergraduate major.

In 1976 he and a university colleague, Laurie Olin, founded Hanna/Olin Ltd., whose first assignment, from I. M. Pei & Partners, was a project for Johnson & Johnson baby products in Skillman, N.J.

Mr. Hanna's survivors include his wife, Beverly Briggs; a son, Robert; and a sister, Hazel Bacon.