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
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
![Lawrence Halprin, Yosemite Studies, 1970, watercolor over photocopy on paper; courtesy of the Halprin Family Archive and Edward Cella Art + Architecture “Studying the granite formations, rivers, lakes, and waterfalls [of Yosemite] and their evolution has formed the basis of my design philosophy.” —Lawrence Halprin](https://experiments.californiahistoricalsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/21161_h500w820gt-300x186.jpg)
On October 1, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed legislation establishing the country’s third national park at Yosemite. Congress had recognized Yosemite as worthy of protection since 1864, when in the midst of the Civil War it granted the magnificent and … Read more
August 16, 2015, concludes the 78th Stern Grove Festival—the annual outdoor performing arts event sponsored by the City of San Francisco—at the historic Sigmund Stern Recreation Grove south of Golden Gate Park.
As the season closes, we recall the history … Read more
