Landscape architect, urban planner, teacher, and social visionary: over the course of a sixty-year career, Lawrence Halprin (1916-2009) reshaped the spaces we inhabit and our ways of moving through them. The New York Times called him "the tribal elder of American landscape architecture" and the critic Ada Louise Huxtable credited him with creating what "may be one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance." His bold use of abstract imagery could evoke the landscape of the American West in a sequence of city squares and fountains, while his plan for repurposing an abandoned factory near San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf showed how adaptive use of a historic structure could turn commercial development into urban theater. A man who deeply loved cities, he left as one of his most important legacies the five thousand acres of coastline, hedgerows, and meadows that became Sonoma County's environmentally sensitive and enormously influential Sea Ranch. Featuring more than ninety black-and-white and one hundred color reproductions of photographs, plans, and sketchbooks, A Life Spent Changing Places is Halprin's own account of how a young boy who listened to the fireside chats of FDR on the radio became the man who designed the memorial to that president in the nation's capital. It is a book about the invention and reinvention of an extraordinary man over the span of decades and how he helped to reframe the world around him.

"People 'think' in different ways, and I find that I think most effectively graphically and also that my thinking is influenced a great deal by my ability to get it down where I can 'look at it' and think about it further—the process of thinking with me generates more thinking—the notebooks, in other words, have been not only a way of 'recording' ideas but also of 'generating' ideas...they are ways of running out what I call series of alternative SCORES." These selections from Halprin's personal and professional notebooks take us as far as it may be possible to go within the imagination of another person, especially one whose highly energized originality is moving in several directions simultaneously. Halprin's creativity, as his notebooks attest, springs from his synthesizing instincts: the joining of elements of landscape and cityscape, melding of individual architectural entities with community living patterns. The whole is enlivened by Halprin's awareness in such matters as group and ecological dynamics, participatory art, the choreography and scoring of human movement. The notebooks reveal an embracing of progressively more inclusive environments over the years: "In the early notebooks there is emphasis on gardens and on landscape...the latter notebooks reflect my increasing interest and commitment to the total environment as an integrating matrix for 'community.'" The reader will find here both an abiding interest in the natural environment and an evolving interest in the man-made environment. There are numerous drawings of mountains, rock formations, and waterfalls in California and elsewhere and an increasing concern with cities and how they can best serve man and nature. Halprin records his reactions to a worldwide array of cities—Paris, Venice, Los Angeles, Jerusalem—and displays drawings of their grand aspects and sketches of their intimate features. Other entries reflect the inception and growth process of ideas later to be fully realized in book form (Cities; Freeways; New York New York; The RSVP Cycles) or in built form (the Portland fountains). Still others relate to Halprin's recent involvement with community workshops, group sessions and participatory planning. In short, the full range of Halprin's imagination and professional activities is displayed here: "These notebooks have been—for me—a process...a way of exploring ideas and of 'scoring' the future...they are filled with the trying-out-of-things...of alternative score S which have then been either discarded or recycled into actuality or put aside for other times...they are full of letters either sent or not sent, articles published or never submitted for publication, speeches made or only imagined...an assemblage." The material in this book represents about one-twelfth of the original notebooks and was selected by an associate, Jim Burns, on the grounds that someone close to Halprin's work but at one removed from his total personal involvement could best present a cross section equally accenting past interests and current concerns. The notebook is entirely written in Halprin's very legible hand.