Larry Halperin, an Icon among Landscape Architects, Lost in Mid-career at 93
October 28, 2009 Lawrence Halprin, Landscape Architect, Dies at 93 By DOUGLAS MARTIN 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. . . . 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.
. . . Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic, wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that a plaza he designed in Portl…