Walking past the fountain he designed, skipping across the stepping stones he designed, strolling across the courtyard in the plaza he designed, we come to his office, located in the city — that he designed.

OK, it’s a stretch to say that Lawrence Halprin designed San Francisco. But his magnificent gardens, plazas, parks and structures are ubiquitous throughout Northern California to a degree rivaling Michael Caine’s omnipresence as a nominee for Best Supporting Actor.

Walking through the front door of his subterranean office in Levi’s Plaza (which he designed, of course) feels like stumbling into a bizarre workshop manned by technicians crafting a world for Barbie and Ken-sized inhabitants. Three-dimensional replicas of bushes, trees, hills, archways, garden paths and even Franklin Roosevelt in a wheelchair are sprinkled throughout the office amongst Halprin’s employees, who crouch over massive, chalk-white drawing tables bathed in florescent light. The portions of their tables not shrouded in blueprints are decorated with even smaller replicas.

At this point, many of you may be thinking, “Who is this Lawrence Halprin?” A full list of the landscape architect’s creations would take more space than we’ve got in this paper (and probably next week’s issue too), but, to abridge, he’s designed the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, D.C.; San Francisco’s Civic Center Plaza, Justin Herman Plaza and Ghirardelli Square; U.C. Berkeley’s Sproul Plaza; and The Sea Ranch on the windswept Sonoma County coast.

Oh, the Ben Yehuda mall in Jerusalem? That’s his work too.

And, as evidenced by the three-dimensional model occupying most of a gargantuan drawing table and Halprin’s own bulletin board-sized sketches taped to the walls, he is taking on the Campus for Jewish Life in Palo Alto.

A massive undertaking with a budget hovering around $200 million, the campus will house Palo Alto’s JCC, nearly 200 units of Jewish Home senior housing, and probable offices for a plethora of smaller Jewish organizations (leases have not yet been finalized). Groundbreaking for the nine-acre site is anticipated for late 2006, with completion scheduled for 2008.

It was the senior angle that piqued the 89-year-old Halprin’s interest. He still shakes his head when recalling the nursing facility where his mother-in-law died (“Just awful … just awful”). The idea of making a “wonderful place” for Jews in their final years to “live a real life, a creative life” took on personal relevance.

“This is not a big park. It’s going to be very dense and very much a town in and of itself,” says Halprin, whose speaking voice still bears ever so slight a trace of his hometown, Brooklyn, where he was once a promising pitching prospect for the hometown Dodgers (he chose, instead, to pitch a tent on a kibbutz).

He waves his hand over the multicolored model, pointing out details down to the manner of vegetation that will line each individual courtyard.

“This is a multigenerational community. It’s not just a ghetto for older Jewish people. It’s got a child-care center, things for teenagers, a soccer field, indoor and outdoor swimming pools. It’s a real town. It does everything except politics.”

Listening to Halprin detail the nuts and bolts of his design is a truly illuminating experience. He quickly and eloquently illustrates the mechanical difficulties of proper drainage and installing ramps (in order to prevent dangerous grades, a ramp can only rise one foot vertically for every 10 horizontally).

But this isn’t just a technical discussion about runoff or zoning requirements. Halprin is also an artist — and people must live and thrive within his works of art.

Inspired by his wife, the dancer Anna Halprin, he stresses the “choreography” of his designs; unlike a building where people are primarily sedentary, his outdoor landscapes are designed with movement in mind.

His outfit befits an artist at work in the studio. He wears a sky-blue work shirt and faded jeans held in place by wide, tan suspenders. Though he carries a black, plastic cane, he doesn’t hesitate to ambulate around the office, and does so at a rapid clip. He wears laceless, black athletic shoes, a bolo tie, black-rimmed glasses, a Moshe Dayan-like patch over his right eye and, more often than not, a mischievous grin.

“Have you ever been to Europe?” he asks, smiling and gesturing toward the model’s central courtyard with the top half of his cane.

“This is like a European rather than an American town center. And there are a lot of ideas here to express to people that you have something of the qualities of Israel. You have a tower, which will tell you where you are in this community, and you can see things from up there. There’s a restaurant where people eat outside. There’s a main fountain with a stage in front. And here are some amphitheater-like seats,” he says, analyzing his own model.

On the seats is a Hebrew inscription specially chosen by Halprin from a poem by Chaim Nachman Bialik regarding the environment. Archways between buildings shadow narrow corridors, reminiscent of the Old City.

And, like his work on the Ben Yehuda mall, Halprin is keeping cars off campus. The entire campus is on a 16-foot “podium” — that is, the cars are kept in a parking garage beneath the Euro-Israeli walking gardens above (hence the drainage difficulties).

Unlike the complex Halprin just completed for George Lucas in San Francisco’s Presidio, the Palo Alto campus has more of a “city” feel than a “park” theme. So the trees, rather than being planted in soil piled higher against the lower floors of buildings, are in planter boxes.

Halprin doesn’t have to stretch to include Israeli references in his architecture. Israel has played a huge part in his life, both as a young man picking fruit and a more mature man designing plazas and pedestrian malls in Jerusalem.

And Halprin’s musings about potentially hurling for the Brooklyn Dodgers aren’t merely an old man’s fancy; he was a two-time schoolboy player of the year in New York City in the 1930s.

“I didn’t throw very hard, but I had a lot of stuff,” he says with a laugh, glancing at a sepia-toned newspaper photo of himself as a teenager in his Poly Prep uniform.

Ballplayers weren’t paid millions of dollars in those days, however, and Zionism was something of a family tradition in the Halprin household; his mother headed Hadassah for many years, and also was heavily involved with the Zionist Organization of America. So it was goodbye Ebbets Field, hello Dead Sea.

After high school, Halprin spent several years in Israel, picking oranges and, before he turned 20, helping to found Kibbutz En-Hashofeth. But despite his parents’ Zionism, they also hoped their son would earn a college degree. So Halprin left Palestine and enrolled at Cornell University to study agriculture, with the intention of working on the kibbutz for the rest of his life.

He was married and working on a doctorate in agriculture at the University of Wisconsin when his wife made a suggestion that would forever alter the landscape of his life. A friend of a friend was an architect about 20 miles from Madison in Spring Green, and he was hosting a gathering. Why don’t they go?

That architect was Frank Lloyd Wright.

“Over his door was a big sign that says ‘What a man does, that is who he is.’ And I walked around in his magnificent garden that he had built there. I could hear trumpets playing, psychologically. I came back and said, ‘That is what I want to do for the rest of my life,'” Halprin recalled, a faraway look in his eye.

He stunned his instructors by asking to switch his doctorate from agriculture to landscape architecture, mid-stream. He stunned them again with his immediate adaptation to the new subject, so they obtained a free ride for him at Harvard without his even asking for it.

Halprin ended up in San Francisco courtesy of a Japanese Kamikaze pilot. The architect served as an ensign on the destroyer USS Morris, which fought its way from Leyte Gulf all the way to Okinawa, where it provided cover for the amphibious invasion.

The suicide pilot literally split the Morris in half (Halprin keeps the before and after photos of his ship up in his office, a few centimeters away from snapshots of his children and grandchildren.) During the battle, Halprin moved a sick sailor into his own bunk, which turned out to be ground zero for the Kamikaze’s impact. Even more than 60 years later, Halprin still feels horrible about the cruel way things turned out.

After clamoring off the smoldering ship, Halprin was eventually sent to San Francisco on survivor’s leave.

“And I said, ‘What the hell, this is such a nice place, I’m not going back to Brooklyn,'” he recalls with a laugh.

Brooklyn’s loss, Northern California’s gain.

Halprin spoke with j. the day before his 89th birthday party, which was held in the newly redesigned Stern Grove. Halprin had previously observed the outdoor theater he designed filled to the metaphorical rafters at a Lucinda Williams concert that kicked off the summer’s Stern Grove Festival, but this was to be a small, private affair, in concert only with nature.

When asked what keeps him coming into the office every day, he flashes a smile akin to a magician’s upon being queried on how the rabbit got into that hat.

“What else would I rather do? I just love what I’m doing. It’s the core of my life, making things, making these places,” he says.

“I design city centers. And, if you think about it, this is an incredible art form one practices in order to make people’s lives wonderful and exciting. And it excites the hell out of me.”

cover illustration: cathleen maclearie

‘This is what I love to do,’ says CJL’s chief architect