Lawrence Halprin, Landscape Architect, Dies at 93

Lawrence Halprin, the tribal elder of American landscape architecture, who used the word choreography to describe his melding of modernism, nature and movement in hundreds of projects, including the memorial to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, died on Sunday at his home in Kentfield, Calif. He was 93. The cause was complications from a fall, his wife, Anna Halprin said.

As postwar America sprouted suburban malls, urban parks, corporate compounds and federal urban renewal projects, Mr. Halprin helped forge a new, sharper style of landscape architecture, often as dependent on concrete as on vegetation. Places he shaped include Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis; a sequence of urban spaces with dazzling fountains in Portland, Ore.; a park atop a freeway in Seattle; and large plazas in Los Angeles.

“He almost single-handedly reclaimed the city as the purview of the landscape architect,” said Charles Birnbaum, founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

He was also at home in nature, whose glories he emphasized rather than obscured. His Sea Ranch, a development for 1,500 houses on a 5,000-acre stretch of coast in Sonoma County, Calif., preserved natural contours, views and open spaces. He planted more than a half-million trees there.

Other projects over his career of more than 60 years included a new town in Oahu; parts of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System; a 1.5-mile walkway overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem; a new pedestrian approach to Yosemite Falls; and Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco.

The Roosevelt memorial was Mr. Halprin’s favorite project, his wife said. Partly because he had loving memories of Roosevelt, and partly because of the sheer difficulty of the task. The memorial commission accepted Mr. Halprin’s concept of four outdoor rooms and gardens animated by water, stone and sculpture in 1974. The project, somewhat reduced in size, was completed in 1997.

Mr. Halprin used that span of time meticulously. He went to a quarry and personally picked some of the 4,000 stones in the walls. He made a drawing of each of the 4,000 so he could put each one exactly where he wanted it. “It is modern in its vocabulary — an abstraction based on the natural world, a pattern based on Halprin’s observations of the way humans move about in a given space,” Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Post’s architecture critic, wrote in 1997.

Mr. Halprin worked out thorny design issues in spirited workshops with artists on his memorial team. A major issue was whether to show President Roosevelt in a wheelchair, which Mr. Halprin decided against. Many disabled people and their allies protested.

“He didn’t want people to see him in a wheelchair,” Mr. Halprin said in an interview on National Public Radio in 1997. “This isn’t a memorial to disabledness.”

For all his comfort with modern materials like concrete, Mr. Halprin often created timeless beauty. Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic, wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that a plaza he designed in Portland was “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

He claimed little interest in decoration or prettiness, but cared deeply how people would move through a created space. Partly inspired by his wife, the former Anna Schuman, a modern dancer and choreographer, he developed a method of landscape drawing he called “motation,” from motion and notation. He used it to describe phenomena like how many cars can move from one place to another on a freeway and at what speed.

This thought process evolved into workshops in which Mr. Halprin gathered clients, designers, community spokesmen, artists, dancers and others to discover how spaces might generate different emotions. Actual design came next.

“All of Halprin’s designs reflect this passion to give people as many options as possible to go this way or that, to reverse directions, to pause, to start over, to be alone, to meet others, and to experience as many different sights, smells and sounds as the site permits,” Mr. Forgey wrote in The Smithsonian in 1988.

Lawrence Halprin was born in Brooklyn on July 1, 1916. He graduated from Cornell and earned a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin and a second bachelor’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where his professors included Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. During World War II, he was wounded when a Kamikaze plane hit his destroyer.

He met Ms. Schuman at the University of Wisconsin, and they married in 1940. In addition to her, he is survived by his daughters, Daria Halprin-Khalighi and Rana Halprin; and four grandchildren.

A visit to Taliesin East, Frank Lloyd Wright’s studio in Wisconsin, suggested by his future wife in 1939, sparked Mr. Halprin’s initial interest in being a designer. Many years later, he designed a dance deck on their home overlooking the redwoods on Mount Tamalpais.

It was in an odd, improvised shape, because Mr. Halprin knew his wife could not be contained by a rectangle.