Lawrence Halprin

Lawrence Halprin (July 1, 1916 – October 25, 2009) was an American landscape architect, designer and teacher.

Beginning his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, California, in 1949, Halprin often collaborated with a local circle of modernist architects on relatively modest projects. These figures included William Wurster, Joseph Esherick, Vernon DeMars, Mario J. Ciampi, and others associated with UC Berkeley. Gradually accumulating a regional reputation in the northwest, Halprin first came to national attention with his work at the 1962 Seattle World's Fair, the Ghirardelli Square adaptive-reuse project in San Francisco, and the landmark pedestrian street / transit mall Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis. Halprin's career proved influential to an entire generation in his specific design solutions, his emphasis on user experience to develop those solutions, and his collaborative design process.

Halprin's point of view and practice are summarized in his definition of modernism:

In his best work, he construed landscape architecture as narrative.

Halprin grew up in Brooklyn, New York; and as a schoolboy, he earned acclaim playing sandlot baseball. Being Jewish, he spent three of his teenage years in Israel on a kibbutz near what is today the Israeli port city of Haifa.

He earned a B.A. at Cornell University; and he was granted a M.A. at the University of Wisconsin. Then he earned a second bachelor's degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where his professors included architects Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. His Harvard classmates included Philip Johnson and I.M. Pei. A visit to Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Wisconsin, had sparked Halprin’s initial interest in being a designer; and his formal training began in classes with Christopher Tunnard.

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