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WILLIAM PEREIRA
By Ray Watson
Nestled inland from the Pacific Ocean midway between Los Angeles and San
Diego, the City of Irvine is internationally acclaimed as the most successful New Community developed in this century. Conceived in 1959 by William Pereira as a university community to accompany a new campus of the University of California, Irvine was born in 1965 and the campus and the city have grown up together as part of an historic alliance that continues to this day.
The transformation of the Irvine Ranch from its agricultural heritage to one of this nation’s best known new urban communities is a tribute to the long term stewardship of the Irvine Company and William Pereira whose original vision set a course the company has faithfully followed for over forty years. While Pereira’s original charge was limited to 10,000 of the ranch’s 93,000 acres the principles he espoused for planning the new university town soon became the guiding urban goals for the entire ranch. Mixed use residential, business and commercial villages connected by regional roads, bikes trails and open space corridors.
Portions of the ranch have become parts of neighboring cities such as Newport
Beach, Costa Mesa, Laguna Beach, Santa Ana, Tustin and Orange. But in each case the same care and thought that he urged for the future University City was given to the parcels that were claimed by the municipalities that surrounded the ranch and would soon become neighbors of the new city. This is as much a story of the urbanization and interrelationship of a substantial piece of a metropolitan region as it is the development of one of its towns.
The fundamental vision that shaped the original alliance between Pereira’s ideas and the company’s future was set out in a modest pair of documents he produced under intense pressure in 1960. In six short paragraphs, he laid out his “Concept of Community.” The vast, vacant Irvine Ranch offered Pereira a unique opportunity. The chance to create a new city that would meet all the needs of the university. His concept combined the best elements of the towns that had grown around great universities such as Oxford, Heidelberg, Stanford, and Harvard.
Pereira understood that to create a place that was more than just a university town, he had to encourage other sources of economic activity that would interact creatively with the university and the region. “The result,” he wrote, “is a lively, many-faceted community that is both varied and interesting.” He envisioned
a vibrant community where the needs of students and faculty were a primary concern, where famous scientists moved easily from their labs to local high tech industries, where artists and artisans flourished alongside business and professional people. “Ideally,” said Pereira, “the new city will be a place in which the majority of these people can work, sleep, eat and enjoy beauty in their surroundings without the need to travel many miles for any of these daily needs.”
In the years since then, the Irvine Company has continued to seek community in whatever form it may take. The result is a city that has won more design awards than any other planned community in history. It has been called the most livable suburb in the United States, one of the safest cities in the nation, and a great place to raise a family. The University of California, Irvine has vaulted into the top ranks of public research
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institutions, becoming the 1st university ever to win two Nobel Prizes in a single year. And the Irvine Spectrum– a 5,000 acre center for business, technology, and research– has emerged as the high tech hub of Southern California.
We architects are perennially concerned with the consequences of urban sprawl and with the lack of a sense of place that comes with living in a nice cul-de-sac lost among millions of look-alike subdivisions spilling across the landscape. Planners and sociologists worry about the loss of community that accompanies sprawl, and the difficulty residents have participating in social, civic, and political activities beyond their own neighborhood.
Pereira’s vision made sprawl the enemy and attacked these concerns head on. By accepting his challenge to build a new town, the Irvine Company committed to look beyond the practice of simply selling agricultural land to developers who would cram the lots with single-family subdivisions, apartment complexes, and shopping centers. The company knew from the outset that this would be an exciting and extremely difficult challenge.
Addressing the crucial issue of annexation or incorporation, Pereira asked a question that might have been posed by our nation’s founding fathers: “By what means can the new community secure the governmental and legislative representation, the required services and the sense of identity necessary to establish and perpetuate its ideals?” It is the sort of question that goes to the heart of what it means to live not just in a community, but also in a democratic society.
And the fact that Pereira didn’t limit his vision to either physical form or social/political structure has encouraged us to continue to address all of these issues in everything we’ve done since. Developing the Irvine Ranch has become a four-decade long process of seeking ways to create a fulfilling sense of “places” and “communities.”
At one time, this varied, vibrant cluster of urban villages was a ranch with more cows than people. The Irvine Company ran the second largest spread in the continental United States, a sprawling agricultural enterprise that grazed cattle and raised asparagus, tomatoes, and oranges on 93,000 picturesque acres that stepped gracefully from the Santa Ana Mountains down to the Pacific Ocean. By 1960, times were changing. The pressure to develop this pristine expanse was becoming impossible to ignore. An immensely successful agricultural enterprise, the Irvine Company had no experience in real estate, and it certainly had no idea how to develop a new community.
The stunning transformation of this vast arid ranch into a sophisticated mix of housing, commerce, and culture didn’t happen by accident. It all began with the land and a vision of what it could become. The land had been here forever. The author of the vision, a brilliant young architect and planner named William Pereira, arrived in the late 1950s. He was the right man, in the right place, at the right moment.
For centuries, the rugged beauty of the rolling hills that would become the Irvine
Ranch had inspired everyone who had come in contact with them. And Southern Californians have been struggling to preserve the beauty of that land against haphazard growth since the Spanish occupation in 1769. For much of that time they were fighting a losing battle.
By the 1870s, most Mexican land-grant ranchos were in American hands, and two of the grants and part of a third had been combined to create the Irvine Ranch. By the 1880s the rush was on to subdivide the American-held ranchos, especially those in Los
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Angeles County, and sell them off as residential property. In 1889, Los Angeles County was itself divided. The Irvine Ranch, with 105,000 acres, was one fifth of the newly created Orange County and four times as large as the booming metropolis of San Francisco to the north.
Throughout this flurry of growth, the ranch remained intact, a rare exception as the subdivisions created over the previous decade grew into cities and towns. This was a vast change from the feudal society created by the early Spanish Californians. For them, the land provided identity and stability. They were gentlemen, courtly, feudal barons of land and cattle. While Los Angles County was busy sawing large tracts of land into lots, a new generation of American landholders began to feel the pull of the land. Men like Henry Newhall, George Hearst, and James Irvine held huge tracts of land and resisted the increasing pressures to subdivide. Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, they developed a relationship to the land that was more than just a business venture. As historian Kevin Starr notes in Inventing the Dream, “They felt again the baronial, feudal pride of the dons whom they had displaced. Their children, growing up on the land, grew even closer to it.”
For all their devotion to the land, the pressures on Irvine to subdivide were, by the late 1950s, overwhelming. Orange County had become the fastest growing region in the United States. Los Angeles’ sprawl pressed relentlessly on the company’s northwest border. Public officials openly criticized the Company for not opening the ranch to development.
While the Company’s directors wrestled with their dilemma, the University of California had a growth problem of its own: how to educate thousands of new students generated by the state’s booming growth. At their June, 1957 meeting, the UC Regents voted to build three new campuses, including one in southeast Los Angeles or northern Orange County. The regents agreed that William Pereira should be the Master Architect on the Los Angeles-Orange County site. Known for
his creativity, the 49-year old Pereira had designed several buildings at UC Santa Barbara. Intelligent and articulate, Pereira was strikingly handsome with iron gray hair. Time Magazine, in a cover story on the building of Irvine, described him as “a trim six feet with heavy-lidded eyes and an actor’s dash.” Dressed in black, he radiated austere elegance and an aura of confidence and command.
Pereira and his staff studied Yale, Harvard, Paris, Bologna, and dozens of others to discover what made a university great and how its site contributed to that greatness. When the regents site committee met at Lake Arrowhead on June 19, 1958, to hear Pereira outline his criteria for the ideal location, he stressed the “the spirit and nobility of the site” and the importance of “a sense of place.” He presented 17 sites. The Irvine Ranch was one of four finalists and the one Pereira personally favored.
Irvine was crucial to his vision. Single ownership of the vast Irvine property made it possible to plan not only the campus, but also the area around the campus. Pereira described his vision for “a city of intellect” and “the city of tomorrow,” and the community that grew from that vision would be both. But first, Pereira had to convince the liberal, reluctant Board of Regents and the warily conservative Trustees of the Irvine Foundation that it was in their mutual best interest to build the campus on the ranch.
Pereira had faced difficult challenges before. Urban planning, like architecture and art, begins with a blank sheet of paper, and rarely had a planner begun with a blank
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page as large as the one on which Pereira now sketched his vision. There were dozens of theories about new towns, but most of the ones that had actually been built were less than a tenth the size of the Irvine Ranch– and most of them had failed. There were enormous jurisdictional conflicts. Portions of the ranch were within the planning spheres of seven existing cities, and each insisted on having a say on what the company might do.
With meticulous eloquence, Pereira made his dream come alive and excited the imaginations of regents and trustees alike. Sitting in the cramped corner board room of the ranch’s modest corporate headquarters, the trustees of the Irvine Foundation and the Board of Directors of the Irvine Company could feel the legacy of James Irvine as they weighed their decision. The land was their most precious asset, and no one really wanted to sell.
As Pereira spoke, they came to see a future for the ranch as rich as it’s past. They understood that Pereira was offering them a unique opportunity to turn the great rural enterprise they had built into a great urban community. On April 14, 1959, the Company offered to give the University a 650-acre site with an option to purchase an adjoining 350 acres. Three months later, the Regents passed a resolution suggesting the company and university jointly retain William L. Pereira and Associates as planning consultants to determine if it was economically feasible to establish a university campus on the Irvine Company property and to develop a university community around it.
On Aug. 6, 1959, the company asked Pereira’s firm to prepare a preliminary master plan. Less than three months later, Pereira delivered a 41-page report, “A
University Campus and Community Study,” that is remarkable for its conciseness,
focus, clarity, and vision. It declared the campus site fiscally feasible and assured the university the campus could be provided with all necessary utilities and roads in a timely manner.
Pereira’s vision went beyond the normal feasibility analysis. Out of this vast expanse of raw land, he plotted a path that would take the company from its agricultural past to an urban future by converting the ranch into a series of planned communities. And in the same grand stroke, he solved the university’s concerns about student growth and answered the nagging question of future development around the campus.
The concept of a University Town dominated the conclusion of Pereira’s first
study, “A Preliminary Report for a University-Community Development.” He rejected
the notion that the town would be an extension of the suburban sprawl that had characterized the region’s growth. Although his career had been dominated by the design of individual buildings, he spent little time establishing architectural and urban design principles. That would come later. Instead, he demonstrated a unique understanding of the social and political issues that create a sense of community and through urban design strengthen it to establish what we architects call a sense of place.
One of the first issues was whether the new town would be part of one of its existing neighbors or a self-sufficient community. He opposed annexation to the two closest cities, Santa Ana and Newport Beach, noting: “The natural desires, needs, goals and aspirations of the surrounding cities do not, in our opinion, appear to be the same as those of the proposed university town.” He proposed that the new town ultimately be incorporated as a separate city because, “An unincorporated community, as a rule, fails to
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generate the kind of civic pride and identification which distinguishes the best university cites.”
Most of my peers who were planning new towns in the sixties opposed self-rule fearing they would lose control to the residents. Pereira’s discussions with city managers convinced him that self-rule was the key to creating a sense of community. Today, forty years after he stressed the importance of self-governance and 28 years after Irvine was incorporated, the civic pride and identification its residents feel is overwhelming. Irvine is not a company town. It belongs to the people who live and work there. That is one of its greatest strengths.
His background would hardly suggest the extent to which Pereira understood the importance of public identity in the evolution of a city. His architectural practice was built on corporate and public clients removed from the grass roots constituency that would judge the success or failure of this assignment. Based on his talks with city managers, Pereira concluded: “The early years in the life of a community are the most trying. During an interim period (perhaps 3 to 5 years) it would be in the best interest of the community to remain unincorporated and under the stewardship of the county.” Six years after the first resident moved into Irvine, the residents, with the support of the company, voted to incorporate.
Pereira had neither the time nor the desire to address every detail of the proposed community. His was a “Tentative Master Plan,” not a final one. Its purpose was to secure support from the university and company and to sketch a framework for a university/community. The crucial question was: Would both the university and the company buy his idea? Unless both agreed, his vision was dead on delivery.
There is a crucial difference between the architect who sets down every detail of his proposed creation and the planner who establishes broad guidelines for the thousands of architects and builders who will actually build a community. Pereira brought the overarching vision that set enduring guideposts for others to follow. And his vision still guides and inspires those of us who toil daily to bring that vision to life. In those two brief documents–just 74 pages–he established a framework for self-governance, school districts, research parks, greenbelts, housing mixes and community. For those of us concerned with continuity, the framework he set down for reinforcing a sense of place with a sense of community has become the ultimate challenge in this modern world of email, jet planes, working parents, and a global economy.
Pereira’s guidelines allowed Irvine’s future citizens to build and expand on his vision. “It is our intention,” he wrote, “that this tentative master plan allow considerable latitude in all of its parts. Its function is to guide development, to set standards, and to enlarge rather than to inhibit the potential . . . a basic land use plan has been drawn, fully cognizant of what exists at present, what is being planned in surrounding areas and what is most likely to evolve in the foreseeable future.”
Given the tendency for universities built in this century to distance themselves from their immediate surroundings, Pereira took as his model the best 19th century European and American universities where the campus and its urban surroundings merge into a continuous community. He knew that relationship would be hard to achieve with a large internationally known research university in a large, dynamic metropolitan region like Los Angeles. But he was confident that if a synergy could be nurtured between the two, each would be the better for it. He urged that, “housing for faculty, students and
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staff, commercial, civic, institutional, professional, recreational and institutional research be permitted to join or penetrate the University area.” The Irvine Company and the Irvine campus continue to pursue that model today. A recent example is the 1998 agreement between the two to create a university oriented research development that bridges the boundary of campus and company land.
His concern for balanced land use dominated Pereira’s recommendations. He thought the university would attract industry and suggested that areas be set aside for research and light industrial facilities. “Experience has shown that in a properly balanced community the industrial population represents 15% to 20% of the total population,” he said. “Only one-third to one-half of these employees will actually live in the community. Nevertheless, from the economic and social point of view, this daily influx of scientists, artists, technicians etc. who will shop in the town center and participate in the numerous activities of the university and the community should prove a great advantage.” That was a prophetic statement in 1959, and a strikingly accurate description of the City of Irvine today, now over 40 years later.
Today, the City of Irvine the neighboring communities built on the ranch are home to over 10,000 businesses and companies employing over 225,000 people. The Irvine Company has put land aside for commercial and industrial areas, and as the university became a great research center and the high tech revolution discovered Irvine, Pereira’s vision of how each would enrich the other has become a reality. His optimism in his preliminary report was enhanced by the Irvine Company’s decision to revise its previous offer of a 650 acres gift to now include the full 1000 acres desired by the university.
Encouraged by the positive tone of Pereira’s report the Regents and company quickly responded. On Dec. 11, 1959 the Regents, in association with The Irvine Company, authorized Pereira to proceed to phase II and “to prepare a refined University Community master plan which will serve as a framework for development and a basis for firm agreements between the University of California, The Irvine Company, County authorities, utility agencies and others concerning the placement of the new campus on lands of The Irvine Company.”
Under intense pressure, Pereira produced the study in six months. The second phase, which the company and university authorized in December of 1959, cost only $33,000, less than a minor environmental impact statement today. Pereira delivered, the second phase by mid-April 1960. The report introduced only one new idea, but it was an important one: the concept of “Inclusion Area” housing addressed a problem the university was experiencing on other campuses. As private development grew around the campuses, particularly at UCLA, the cost of housing rose to a level that made it unaffordable to young faculty and staff. Pereira suggested the company set aside 660 acres of land for housing affordable to “staff, faculty and married students.”
At the time he made the suggestion, Pereira had a commitment from the company to provide the housing. What he didn’t have was any idea how either he or the company, or anyone else, could provide the pricing assurances he promised. But a promise it was. It may have been the icing on the cake that brought over those University Regents who were concerned about building a campus on the southern fringe of their site search.
One of my first assignments upon arriving in September of 1960 was to assess the feasibility of this commitment. After exploring housing alternatives on other campuses
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and realizing the company had no control over future fluctuations in interest rates, taxes and costs, I recommended that the company offer to sell land to the university restricted for the same purpose. The university bought 510 acres, with the affordable housing restrictions, for $5000 per acre, well below market value.
Today there is a residential community of over 600 dwelling units primarily occupied by faculty members within walking distance of the campus. It provides housing at prices young faculty can afford. When they sell the price is determined not by the market but by what they paid plus an increase for inflation. The ability of new faculty members to find affordable housing has become a perquisite that materially enhances UCI’s ability to recruit faculty to what has become, as Pereira predicted, an expensive area to buy a home.
As short as his Phase II study was, I can’t over emphasize it significance. It clearly tipped the scale in favor of locating the campus on Irvine land. And it provided the Irvine Company with the vision and direction it had been struggling to find. On June 21, 1960, Irvine’s shareholders unanimously approved the offer to give the University 1000 acres of land for a new campus and for the company to build a town around it.
It was Pereira’s vision that drew me to the Irvine Company from Northern
California. It changed my career and my life. Here was an opportunity to help plan and develop a new town around a new campus of my Berkeley alma mater. Here was a company I had never heard of that had no real estate background let alone any experience in building a new city. But the vision was too compelling to pass up and company officials assured this young architect they meant to stand behind their commitment.
Of course, no one was certain what that meant. Fortunately, the Irvine board had no idea how many others with similar dreams had made similar promises only to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the challenge. I felt reassured by the fact that Pereira wasn’t a visionary with his head in the clouds. He had a very pragmatic side, and he understood that this couldn’t be a utopian dream. He had provided the inspiration. Now it was up to the company to transform his vision into the brick and mortar from which communities would emerge.
Historically, a master plan simply defined land uses, roads, utilities and supporting infrastructure. The company quickly realized they were talking about being a master builder. They didn’t use those words early on, but that’s what they committed to in 1960. Once the University agreed to go ahead, Irvine had to scramble to supplement their agriculture staff with people like me. We became the in-house planners and master builder. Pereira was the consultant and my job was to act as liaison with him, and to try to translate his vision and the broad guidelines he established and make them work on the ground and get them approved by the various governmental bodies.
The number or quality of buildings his firm actually designed can’t measure
Pereira’s contributions. They are few in number compared to the thousands that comprised the eventual transformation of this historic ranch. His contribution is the enduring strength of the idea he wove 40 years ago in those two simple documents. The idea of building a new town, rather than extending the residential suburban sprawl that characterized Southern California’s growth of the previous decade, was an idea that fired the imagination of both the University of California and the Irvine Company.
Pereira saw an opportunity and seized it. He had no idea whether the company had either the skills or the inclination to bring his vision to life. But their inexperience
