… Read moreGardens were a wonderful testing ground for details and a great learning experience for how things are constructed. When gardens were successful they provided great personal joy and led me to some interesting discoveries and friendships.
—Lawrence Halprin, A Life
Today The Sea Ranch on California’s Sonoma coast is known as a rustic community where people live in harmony with their environment. In 2005, landscape architect Lawrence Halprin—who developed The Sea Ranch master plan in the early 1960s—noted that wherever … Read more
Luminous beings are we… —Yoda in Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, 1980
We don’t know if the renowned landscape architect Lawrence Halprin (1916–2009) was a Star Wars fan, but we can say with some certainty that … Read more
![[The Human Be-In, Golden Gate Park, 1967 January 14], photograph by Gene Anthony, courtesy, California Historical Society, CPA-SOL_005](https://experiments.californiahistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/CPA-SOL_005-300x208.jpg)
The “Summer of Love” in 1967 is generally thought to be when everything changed in San Francisco. As with most historic moments, there were many precipitating events which were bellwethers of things to come.… Read more
In 1973 Levi Strauss & Co. left its cozy quarters at 98 Battery Street in San Francisco for the bold, upright world of the new Embarcadero Center, a series of four skyscrapers located near the city’s waterfront. Within a few … Read more
Today we know that the revival of the urban inner city begins with the restoration and re-use of old buildings. Cities that have preserved their old downtowns and industrial districts find in them the seeds to begin anew. Seeking community, … Read more
Is architecture capable of changing the course of history?
On October 1, 1964, in the midst of a growing protest, University of California, Berkeley student Mario Savio hopped onto the roof of a police car in Sproul Plaza, the open … Read more
