The landscape architecture of Lawrence Halprin has been well documented, and justly so. Take one example: the Ira Keller Forecourt Fountain (1970-71) in Portland, Oregon, a public courtyard made of waterfalls and stacked concrete platforms that prompted the otherwise implacable New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable to proclaim it “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.”

With Lawrence Halprin, "Alternative Scores - Drawing from Life," we get to see some of his unexpected artwork and sketches, rarely seen before in public. Halprin was one of America's leading urban designers and landscape architects in the post-World War II period. Educated at the Harvard Graduate School of Design undder the likes of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, he eventually setlled in the Bay Area during the 1940s and made his career there. He became famous for the environmentally sensitive master plan of Sea Ranch, a residentail community along the Sonoma County coast, in the 1960s, and he was responsible for some of the redesign of downtown Los Angeles in the 1990s. 

This week, you can: learn about the landscape 'choreography' of Lawrence Halprin; see the embellished Southern California version of Spanish Colonial Revival; spend the weekend at Watts Towers; parade through car-free streets in Santa Monica; and explore Cuban culture, low and high-tech.

A waterfall flows in downtown Portland, Ore., ribbons and rivulets of water cascading over slabs of rough, reddish concrete into pools filled with wading children in the summer. Down a tree-lined path, great planted hills pop from the sidewalk. A stepped basin opens up between buildings, looking like a natural spring bursting through the pavement.These bold environments, strung across an eight-block section in the city center, were designed by the modernist landscape architect Lawrence Halprin and his firm between 1965 and 1970, and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2013. They are celebrated, along with more than two dozen other parks, pools, and gardens, in "The Landscape Architecture of Lawrence Halprin” an exhibition in Washington commemorating Mr. Halprin’s centennial that runs through April 16.

Utopia Rules at Sea Ranch, a Community Born of '60s Idealism: With its gentle footprint on the California coast, simple wood houses and almost dictatorial aesthetic strictures, it feels as modern today as it did 50 years ago. 

Experiments in Environment: The Halprin Workshops, 1966-1971