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WILLIAM PEREIRA by Ray Watson

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WILLIAM PEREIRA by Ray Watson 1 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 2 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 3 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.
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