A Life Spent Changing Places

A transplanted Brooklynite, Lawrence Halprin began his professional career in San Francisco in 1949, and his work over the next 60 years spanned the country, from Oregon to Virginia. Among his publications are The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment (1969) and The Sea Ranch: Diary of an Idea (2003). Laurie Olin is Practice Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and Principal of the Olin Partnership, a landscape architecture firm in Philadelphia. He is coauthor of La Foce: A Garden and Landscape in Tuscany and Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Foreword by Laurie Olin Preface PART I Chapter 1. Family and Tribal Heritage Chapter 2. The Grand Tour Chapter 3. Poly Prep Chapter 4. Return to Palestine Chapter 5. My College Career Chapter 6. World War II PART II Chapter 7. Beginning My Career Chapter 8. The Israel Thread Chapter 9. Growing Pains Chapter 10. The Rebellious Sixties Chapter 11. A Time for Introspection Chapter 12. A Transitional Search Chapter 13. After the Show Was Over Chapter 14. The New Millennium Chapter 15. Reflections Index Acknowledgments

"Richly illustrated with hundreds of never before published photos and sketches, this deeply reflective book by Halprin covers the personal and professional, and in the process sheds light on how the maverick designer helped give places life, while they did the very same for him. In the process, Halprin illustrates how he helped to change the perception and practice of landscape architecture." (The Huffington Post) "The remark that 'every great artist inhabits a genre and remakes it' could find no better proof than in . . . the life and work [of Lawrence Halprin]. He produced a series of masterpieces of iconic stature: Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Sea Ranch on the north California coast; the Lovejoy and Ira Keller Fountain sequence in Portland, Oregon; Freeway Park in Seattle, Washington; the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.; and Stern Grove Theater in San Francisco, to name some of the best known. He knew plants horticulturally and could use them architecturally. Many of his greatest works were executed with humble, ordinary building materials: concrete, asphalt, stucco, wood, soil, and plants. . . . [His ideas have] been so heavily copied and thoroughly absorbed into the vernacular of late twentieth-century urban development that they now appear as cliche. At the time, however, he and his staff were designing and building a new kind of public space." (Laurie Olin, from the Foreword)