A Life Spent Changing Places

"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 cliché. At the time, however, he and his staff were designing and building a new kind of public space."—Laurie Olin, from the Foreword