Lawrence Halprin, 93, iconic landscape architect

The cause was complications from a fall, said his wife, Anna.

Mr. Halprin used the word choreography to describe his melding of modernism, nature, and movement in hundreds of projects, including the memorial to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Washington, D.C.

As postwar America sprouted suburban malls, urban parks, corporate compounds, and federal urban renewal projects, Mr. Halprin helped forge a new, sharper style of landscape architecture, often as dependent on concrete as on vegetation. Places he shaped include Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco; Nicollet Mall in Minneapolis; a sequence of urban spaces with dazzling fountains in Portland, Ore.; a park atop a freeway in Seattle; and large plazas in Los Angeles.

“He almost single-handedly reclaimed the city as the purview of the landscape architect,’’ said Charles Birnbaum, founder and president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation.

Mr. Halprin was also at home in nature, whose glories he emphasized rather than obscured. His Sea Ranch, a development for 1,500 houses on a 5,000-acre stretch of coast in Sonoma County, Calif., preserved natural contours, views, and open spaces. He planted more than a half-million trees there.

Other projects over his career of more than 60 years included a new town in Oahu; parts of the Bay Area Rapid Transit System; a 1.5-mile walkway overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem; a new pedestrian approach to Yosemite Falls; and Letterman Digital Arts Center in the Presidio of San Francisco.

The Roosevelt memorial was Mr. Halprin’s favorite project, his wife said. Partly because he had loving memories of Roosevelt and partly because of the sheer difficulty of the task. The memorial commission accepted Mr. Halprin’s concept of four outdoor rooms and gardens animated by water, stone, and sculpture in 1974. The project, somewhat reduced in size, was completed in 1997.

Mr. Halprin used that span of time meticulously. He went to a quarry and personally picked some of the 4,000 stones in the walls. He made a drawing of each of the 4,000, so that he could put each one exactly where he wanted it.

“It is modern in its vocabulary, an abstraction based on the natural world, a pattern based on Halprin’s observations of the way humans move about in a given space,’’ Benjamin Forgey, The Washington Post’s architecture critic, wrote in 1997.

Mr. Halprin worked out thorny design issues in spirited workshops with artists on his memorial team. One major issue was whether to show Roosevelt in a wheelchair, which Halprin decided against. Many disabled people and their allies protested.

Roosevelt “didn’t want people to see him in a wheelchair,’’ Mr. Halprin said in an interview on National Public Radio in 1997. “This isn’t a memorial to disabledness.’’

For all his comfort with modern materials, Mr. Halprin often created timeless beauty. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote in The New York Times in 1970 that a plaza Mr. Halprin designed in Portland was “one of the most important urban spaces since the Renaissance.’’

He professed to have little interest in decoration or prettiness, but cared how people moved through a created space.

Partly inspired by his wife - the former Anna Schuman, a dancer and choreographer - he developed a method of landscape drawing he called “motation,’’ from motion and notation.

That process evolved into workshops in which Mr. Halprin gathered designers, community spokesmen, artists, dancers, and others to discover how spaces might generate different emotions. Actual design came next.

“All of Halprin’s designs reflect this passion to give people as many options as possible to go this way or that, to reverse directions, to pause, to start over, to be alone, to meet others, and to experience as many different sights, smells, and sounds as the site permits,’’ Forgey wrote in The Smithsonian in 1988.