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Lawrence Halprin

Lawrence Halprin
Born(1916-07-01)July 1, 1916
DiedOctober 25, 2009(2009-10-25) (aged 93)
Alma mater
OccupationArchitect
Spouse
(m. 1940)
Children2, including Daria Halprin
RelativesRuthanna Hopper (granddaughter), Dennis Hopper (former-son-in-law)
PracticeLawrence Halprin & Associates
Projects

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

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:

To be properly understood, Modernism is not just a matter of cubist space but of a whole appreciation of environmental design as a holistic approach to the matter of making spaces for people to live.... Modernism, as I define it and practice it, includes and is based on the vital archetypal needs of human being as individuals as well as social groups.[2]: 9 

In his best work, he construed landscape architecture as narrative.[3]

  1. ^ King, John (October 26, 2009). "Lawrence Halprin – landscape architect – dies". San Francisco Chronicle.
  2. ^ Walker, Peter; Simo, Melanie (1994). Invisible Gardens: the Search for Modernism in the American Landscape. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-73116-9. Retrieved 17 July 2019.
  3. ^ Rainey, Reuben M. (2001). "The Garden as Narrative: Lawrence Halprin's Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial". In Wolschke-Bulmahn, Joachim (ed.). Places of Commemoration: Search for Identity and Landscape Design. Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection. pp. 377–413. ISBN 0-88402-260-9. Retrieved 17 July 2019.

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