From its unofficial beginning on a San Francisco ferryboat to its current status as a nationally recognized program, the Architecture Department at the University of California, Berkeley, played a significant role in American architectural education. Faculty and alumni from the UC Berkeley Architecture Department have profoundly influenced architectural thought, practice, design, education, and the built environment of the San Francisco Bay Area. Design on the Edge provides insights into the history and development of the department that included such notables as John Galen Howard, William Wurster, Catherine Bauer Wurster, Erich Mendelsohn, Christopher Alexander, Joseph Esherick, Spiro Kostof, Sim Van der Ryn, Dell Upton, and Marc Treib, as well as more recent rising stars such as Michael Bell and Lisa Iwamoto. From its inception, Berkeley’s architecture program enrolled women and minorities; recently, more than 50% of its graduates have been women. Discover how Berkeley’s Architecture Department became the national model for incorporating social responsibility and environmental sustainability into design and design education.

By assembling a wide array of informal reflections, scholarly essays, and writings from a variety of past and current students, staff, and faculty, Design on the Edge will appeal to a broad audience of people interested in architecture, pedagogy, the creative process, and the built environment of California. Its hundreds of photographs and drawings and readable text will engage and entertain.

The images below may be downloaded and used for reviewing or promoting Design on the Edge: A Century of Teaching Architecture, 1903–2003. Copyright for these images is held by the Regents of the University of California. Please credit the Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley, unless otherwise noted. Non-promotional use requires written permission from the Environmental Design Archives.

The Ark was designed by John Galen Howard

For its first 50 years, the UC Berkeley Architecture Department was housed in a small, shingled building that everyone called the “Ark.” It was designed by well-known Bay Area architect and founder of the department, John Galen Howard, in 1906.

Students from 1928

Architecture students in the Ark, 1928.

Picture Courtesy of Prof. Emeritus Richard Peters.

William Wurster, a well-known Bay Area architect, was invited by the UC Architecture Department to bring the program into the “modern” era. He’s pictured here (right) in 1952 with Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus in Germany and later an instructor at Harvard University. (Courtesy of Prof. Emeritus Richard Peters.)

Architecture "1N"

As the new dean of the Architecture Department, William W. Wurster invited innovative and forward-thinking architects and designers to reinvigorate the program and shape a new curriculum. Here, students stand with their projects from Charles Eames’ new course “1N” in 1954.

Picture Courtesy of George Kostritsky.

Well-known European Modernist Erich Mendelsohn, pictured here with his students, taught at UC Berkeley from 1948-1953.

A Beaux-Arts Approach circa 1930s

Student work changed significantly over the years, from a Beaux-Arts to a Modern approach. Note the difference between a 1930 drawing of a “swimming club” (above) by student (and later architecture professor) Vernon DeMars and the image below…

A Modern Approach circa 1961

… of a 1961 drawing of a “professional-commercial center” by student George Winnacker.

Wurster Hall

Having outgrown the Ark, the Architecture Department in 1964 moved to its current home in Wurster Hall. During the first weeks of occupying Wurster Hall, the department had to close its doors more than once because of student civil rights protests on campus.

Courtesy of Prof. Emeritus Claude Stoller.

Over the years, many world-class designers and educators have made their mark on the department either as lecturers or as visiting instructors, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, and Buckminster Fuller, pictured here (center) collaborating with UC Berkeley students and faculty on his “Fly’s Eye” project.

Photo by Maria Moreno.

Architecture students in the famously colorful stairwell in Wurster Hall, 1999, just prior to the building closing for a major seismic retrofit.

More Information

This article was originally published in the May 21, 2010 issue of the CED News

CONTACTS

Waverly Lowell
Tel: 510-643-5655
Email: wlowell@berkeley.edu
FAX: 510-642-2824

Elizabeth Byrne
Tel: 510-643-7323
Email: ebyrne@library.berkeley.edu
FAX: 510-642-8266

About the authors

Waverly Lowell is the curator of the Environmental Design Archives and author of Living Modern: A Biography of Greenwood Common (William Stout Publishers, 2009). She has consulted with design firms and directed the California COPAR survey which resulted in the book Architectural Records in the San Francisco Bay Area: A guide to research.

Elizabeth Douthitt Byrne is head of the Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley. She has been an art and design librarian for more than 40 years

Betsy Frederick-Rothwell is a graduate of the UCB Architecture Department and a former archivist for the UCB Environmental Design Archives. She is currently a preservation specialist for the U.S. General Services Administration.

Book Details

Hardcover: 320 pages
Publisher: University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, 2009
Language: English
ISBN-13: 9780981966731
Product Dimensions: 9-1/4″ x 11-1/4″
Price: $72 (including tax)
Purchase at: http://www.acteva.com/booking.cfm?bevaID=198393
Proceeds support the Environmental Design Archives

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Press Release [.doc] | Product Description [.doc] | Book Cover [.jpg]

Traveling by car around our country, we are likely to find signs indicating a high point offering us a wider view of the surrounding landscape. Such overlooks may enrich our experience by prompting us to pause and reflect on more than just the physical aspect of what we see. This book offers that kind of overlook from an armchair instead of a car.

In this book Matthew Coolidge, founder of the CLUI, and Sarah Simons, its director, presents the work of a non-profit research organization which, since 1994, has been exploring and exposing the ways we humans have interacted with the earth’s surface in the USA. Whether or not you think such work is important, or even interesting, depends on your level of curiosity about the American landscape and the unusual things in its internal fringes reveal.

The contributors to this book believe that, “The shared space of the earth is physically and metaphorically what unites us, and until we colonize space, what we have here on this planet is all we have to work with. So it makes sense to investigate the human experience from the ground up.”

There are many disciplines dedicated to increasing our knowledge of the earth and its past and present inhabitants. But not all of perception’s spectrum has been explored by scholars, scientists, and other kinds of specialists. These overlooked parts may have the answers to our lingering questions hidden in plain sight.

The CLUI’s mission is to explore the roads not yet taken and to assemble the information found on them to help us understand where we are now. The results are compiled, sorted, processed, and stored in the  Land Use Data Base to be used for research and educational purposes.

Much of the CLUI’s work is carried out as an open source project by a volunteer army whose findings are published in the Land Use Data Base on the CLUI website, ludb.clui.org, and in its printed newsletter, the Lay of the Land. The bus tours, which are open to the public,  encourage reading the landscape for discoveries that further the Center’s research on regional projects. Tour routes are carefully studied and punctuated with stops at the sites and meetings with local experts. Live narration provided en route is supplemented by information on the history and context given in videos of the tour sites.

The book’s six chapters are:

1. Round on the Edges: Let’s Look at Ohio
2. Terrestrial Miniaturizations: Thinking Big in a Small World
3. Subterranean Renovations: The Unique Architectural Spaces of Show Caves
4. Under Water: Intentionally Drowned Towns
5. Practiceland: Places Playing Places
6. Federaland: America’s Internal Fringe.

The titles suggest a fanciful version of the National Geographic, but the tone is very different. As Ralph Rugoff, a contributor to the book observed,

“…Even when describing odd, disturbing, or potentially humorous phenomena, the tenor of these presentations is never dramatic or self-conscious. Texts tend to be straightforward and factually oriented,. . .photographs typically resemble the seemingly authorless images compiled in government and industrial archives. In their tone…the programs conjure the work of a benevolent social science agency. “

The organization espouses no policies and courts no particular audience beyond the attentive spectators who sign up for their guided bus tours to unlikely places.

Tour of a debris dam

The chapters are treasure troves of the little known. But rather than fail in an attempt to review them all, I offer a sampling of their content that I hope will inspire further exploration.

Throughout his busy career in architecture, which stretched from the early 1930s to the 1980s, Cliff May profited from and contributed to the ebullient spirit of the post-World War II era In California, his native state. He designed over 1,000 buildings, most of them houses, which came to symbolize “western living” for a national and even international audience.

May’s accomplishments were not confined to architecture, which he learned as an amateur by crafting furniture before turning to building houses. He was a dedicated horseman, a musician who in
college had his own dance band, an automobile collector, an airplane pilot, and a talented self-promoter. He seemed to live the idyllic life projected in his designs.

You might say that Cliff May inherited the archetypical Spanish colonial ranch house, which he adopted as emblematic of the California being publicized as an earthly paradise. His great, great, great grandfather was a member of the Estudillo family, builders of the San Diego adobe house that Helen Hunt Jackson made famous in her romantic novel, Ramona, an enduring best-seller published in 1884.

May’s early houses hewed to the character of the colonial adobes. Although they acknowleged the automobile by makng the garage an important element of the house front, they were low one-story structures with heavy tile roofs, uneven stuccoed walls, and other elements of the pre-industrial Hispanic culture that, while useful, also functioned as decorative features.

Although May had no architectural training, his wife Jean, had taken a college course in the subject. They collected the arts and crafts products produced by the Spanish colonial revival style and copied the furniture marketed in California in the late 1920s. But this nostalgic use of history never interfered with equipping their houses with the latest appliances. May even posed for a photograph scooping ice cream from the freezer of his 1937 rancheria.

The country’s acceptance of the modern ranch house began in the mid-1940s when this new vernacular style was presented as an alternative to the cool and hard-edged International Modernism showcased by Philip Johnson in the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1932 exhibition, “Modern Architecture: International exhibition.” In 1944 Elizabeth Gordon, editor of the widely read magazine, House Beautiful, published a long article showing Cliff May’s house #3 on the cover.

Thus began an advocacy of California living that declared its anti-modernism in such statements as Gordon’s 1946 article description, “A House Can Be Modern and Not Look It.”

Above is the cover of the February 1947 issue of House Beautiful, which featured the Pace-Setter House.

Entering the national quest for the postwar house in the 1940s, Sunset magazine published designs by several young western architects, but ultimately adopted May’s approach as best representing the magazine’s vision for the future with its abundance of “new convenience ideas” that would make housekeeping joyful in tastefully designed homes. In addition to his continuous production of Sunset’s published tract houses, May created the magazine’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California. It was a roughly 30,000 square-foot ranch house–the crowning achievement of his long association with this so-called “Laboratory for Western Living.”

Below is May’s drawing of the proposed Sunset Magazine headquarters building in Menlo Park.

Although May’s ranch houses remained talismanic, their design was never frozen in time. In the mid-century decades the houses merged gracefully with Modernism, exchanging the overtly colonial features of the early work for the light-filled, open-plan house with glazed walls that minimized the separation of inside and outside and integrated the garden into the whole.

Photograph by Joe Fletcher

Gregory’s book follows this trajectory with gorgeous photography and detailed descriptions of the buildings. Excerpts from original publications recapture the changing colors and graphic styles of the times.

Author Daniel Gregory is highly qualified to guide readers through Cliff May’s work and the period’s history. Gregory was employed at Sunset for twenty-seven years. He served as a senior editor for fifteen of those years and is well versed in the history of the magazine. His grandparents built a seminal ranch house in 1928, designed by William W. Wurster. While Wurster never made a career of designing ranch houses, his influence on Northern Calilfornia architecture has a somewhat parallel course to Mays’s. Gregory’s account of the family “farm”, as they called the Santa Cruz property, enriches our understanding of the times.

Although Sunset magazine still publishes designs for living, Cliff May’s ranch houses no longer spread new wings over the California landscape. Instead, they are being restored and landmarked, as befits the legend they embodied.

Long Now: Works in Progress by Alexander Rose, executive director of the Long Now Foundation and project manager for the 10,000 Year Clock.

This small book is about a big subject: the history of a 10,000 Year clock–its concept, its sponsors, its makers, and the evolution of its design. According to Rose, the original idea was to build a clock on a monumental scale that would be completely mechanical and would track time for 10,000 years.  The clock makers’ goal in creating the clock was to inspire and encourage long-term thinking.

While many people have advocated long-term thinking as a good use of our time, no one has proposed a length of time such as this one, which would seem to require another term to handle its recondite nature. No Matter. If we want the phrase “long term” to be taken seriously, it helps to attach it to a project that is well beyond us.

Photograph by Rolfe Horne

The book details the evolution of the clock’s design in words and graphics linked to the exhibition in The Long Now Foundation’s Museum in San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center. Some of the exhibition’s objects represented in the book can be activated by staff members in response to visitors’ requests. In the case of the chime generator, the experience is particularly rewarding because the Tibetan bell gongs that sound when the generator is turned on seem to echo the Pythagorian “music of the spheres.”

In addition to the book, a high quality video on an iPod available at the reception desk provides another aid to understanding what the exhibition is about. In the video Alexander Rose narrates a tour of the museum divided into brief segments that are easy to follow.

The book also profiles the clock’s sponsors and makers. Danny Hillis,  the lead designer and clock project founder, has held the position of vice president of research and development for Walt Disney Imagineering, the research and development arm of the Walt Disney Company. In 1993 he made a proposal for the monumental clock, which the songwriter and composer, Brian Eno, named “The Clock of the Long Now.” An article by Hillis in Wired magazine, which suggested a clock that would last over 10,000 years, led directly to the founding of the Long Now Foundation in 1996 by Hillis and other futurists, including Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Esther Dyson, Peter Schwartz, Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, and Mitch Kapor. Chris Anderson, Michael Keller, Rogerf Kennedy, Kim Polese, and David Rumsey joined the board later.

Other foundation works-in-progress described in Rose’s book include the Rosetta Project and the monthly seminars about long term thinking hosted by Stewart Brand. The series is now in its 6th year; its schedule is listed on the foundation’s web site, www.longnow.org.

Photograph courtesy of The Long Now Foundation

Perhaps the strongest evidence of the seriousness of the clock project was the purchase of a site in eastern Nevada adjacent to the Great Basin National Park. The high desert mountain site satisfies the clock sponsors’ requirement that its home be remote enough to make serious travel necessary and that the site itself be awe inspiring. T he property’s 250-some acres of private land extends vertically over a mile from the valley floor at 6,000 feet to the 11,000-foot peak of Mt. Washington. The white limestone cliffs harbor
historic mining tunnels, which may be used to house the clock in its final form.

Photograph courtesy of The Long Now Foundation

A rare stand of Bristlecone pine trees, some over 4,000 years old, testifies to the site’s potential for long-term habitation. The designers are studying the site to find the best way of providing access to it and to do the underground work of housing the clock.

Daunting as this task may seem, the clock makers are determined to carry it out. After the clock has been installed it will be maintained with, in Hillis’ words, “bronze age technology.” That is to say that the clock’s works will be so easy to understand that even untutored visitors to the clock, will be able to learn how to maintain it.

Naturally, this agenda will take time. But in the meantime interest in the project will be maintained by visiting The Long Now Foundation’s headquarters in Landmark Building A at Fort Mason Center.

Why make an atlas for designers? By definition an atlas is a collection of maps, charts, and visual plates that systematically illustrate a subject. Thorpe states that it was the visual nature of atlases that inspired her book because no matter how eloquent a text may be, design audiences are not engaged by printed words alone.

The book’s message is about how design in all fields can move toward the goals of sustainability; the integration of information about design and sustainability rewards users with a rich range of ideas, concepts, and facts presented in a sophisticated format that is itself thought-provoking. As with other kinds of atlases, the varied text does not converge on one conclusion. Rather, readers take what they need to make their own.

Ingredients, not recipes, presented with verve and clarity, make the atlas useful for the design disciplines. Economic and cultural elements of sustainable design, rarely discussed in the context of ecological issues, have their own chapters, which are divided into sections related to design issues. Although long-term sustainability is the objective, the 21st century landscape is the one within which design must perform for the foreseeable future. The most important concepts and ideas about sustainability are presented in terms of its ecology, economy, and culture.

The introduction defines sustainable development versus development as we know it. Sustainable development enables environmental and social conditions that support the well-being of humans indefinitely. To give meaning to the term, “indefinitely,” Thorpe invites readers to imagine designing a functional object that will endure and be useful for thousands of years. Yet, however inspiring this thinking might be, it is unlikely to take place unless an enlightened clientele for sustainable design appears to support and fund it.

Development without the modifier, sustainable, has implied well-being achieved through economic progress in tandem with industrial development geared to technological change, usually in the short term. Sustainable development functions like ecosystems, which support themselves over a very long time period with life-sustaining products and services. This development may invest in art forms and cultural norms embodying systems of belief that sustain our well-being even though the economic value is hard to quantify and less related to the ecological origins of sustainability.

The three main themes of the atlas, subdivided into related topics, follow:

ECOLOGY

Ecology’s key sustainability issue is the overwhelming of nature’s systems by human systems. The challenge for designers during the historic period of industrialization was humanizing machine-made, mass-produced products. Today’s challenge, harmonizing human and natural systems, will best be met by learning to see hidden connections between the two. We need a holistic approach to materials that will not limit their usefulness, and we need appropriate production tailored to needs instead of mass production in the one-size-fits-all mode.

ECONOMY

Technological acceleration has driven our economic goals not only in the private sector–the free market–where design is usually found, but in the public and nonprofit sectors as well. Designers have successfully expanded the market for the mass production of machine-produced goods by giving them consumer appeal. But just how this activity has increased our sense of well-being is unclear.

What is clear is that design has played a significant role in shaping the objects and images in our increasingly visual culture. The power of the visual images that stream our way is such that viewers routinely try to achieve what is shown to them as convincingly real no matter how fantastic it is.

CULTURE

Design’s success is often judged by its commercial success. Designers’ jobs may even be determined by whether their work meets marketing projections–never mind that this short-term focus puts an emphasis on ease of use that may actually limit the product’s usefulness. Commercial pressures have turned designers into pushers rather than enablers, a role they need to shed in order to support sustainable development.

So, how can design begin to change our dependence on the market-based means of well-being that stem from our reliance on the visual sphere of material goods? Many concepts that support cultural sustainability—a sense of time and history, open source design, and the acceptance of nature as part of culture–appear impractical when viewed in the context of commercial pressures. To move toward sustainable development, Thorpe advocates recognizing that the three systems of change–technology, policy, and behavior– interlock. Designers have a role in all three systems. They explore, invent, and apply new technologies in architecture, fashion, and products.

Feedback on designers’ work typically comes from sales: consumers either buy or don’t buy. Disgruntled owners of new products that don’t work satisfactorily must wait for the next versions; they have no way to register their wishes in advance except in market surveys, which are rarely broad enough to reflect all the audience’s concerns.

Perhaps we should have feedfront to make design less of a one-way stream and to engage users in the vital process of design. For instance, open source design, most familiar in the development of computer operating systems, allows users to act as designers by providing rapid feedback on imperfect prototypes. Thus designers may quickly see their work in newer and better systems.

Although the virtual form of computer-based design removes it from the field of physical artifacts, Thorpe points out that designers are increasingly involved in supplying information about form rather than the forms themselves. Design companies now exist that permit viewers to make online modifications of products they intend to buy by giving them a choice of, say, the shapes or graphic motifs for t-shirts and other clothing. Graphic design and photography make multiple contributions to design in other fields.

In the design of physical artifacts the ability of users to access construction and repair information could enable the interaction possible in open source computer technology. New features and components of physical artifacts could be backward compatible so that users don’t have to buy the new version to get the newest capabilities.

Which products/artifacts would benefit from the open source process. Thorpe’s answer is any artifact that has a reasonably large number of users. Still, a strong motivation is necessary for this level of engagement. Most of us probably don’t want to be involved in the design of our toothbrushes or safety pins, but other artifacts—bicycles, electronic communication devices–would likely generate the kind of interactive discussion our digitally connected society makes possible.

Thorpe’s last proposal for exposing design to other professions and perspectives and to make it less beholden to private sector patrons is to bring design as a profession into the field of sustainable development as in non-profit organizations, governmental, and educational institutions. Organizations devoted to sustainable development usually lack the tools designers have to combine human factors, technology, style, and function into an attractive package. Linking them would benefit both sides.

Designers should read The Designer’s Atlas of Sustainability, not only because it is a mine of information and ideas, but because the relevant issues are explored and weighed with admirable directness and a sense of urgency that should strengthen their convictions about what they profess and how to do something about it.

CODA

One large-scale application of the open source process could be design competitions for, say, public parks, and buildings. Since the innovative special features of competition entries are considered proprietary in today’s modus operandi, those owned by the various competitors will not be part of the winner’s scheme even though they might benefit the project. If such ideas were shared in a preliminary design phase open to all competitors, their approach would be more holistic even though the outcome would still depend on the varying talents and skills of the individual competitors.

In the design fields the prestige of authorship is tied to ownership. But when the projects don’t function as they should, authorship loses its appeal. Yet, though the winning designs often turn out to have flaws, the competitors discount the risk of failures because winning will likely bring more projects and maybe stardom. Even though feedback in the design phase might prevent flaws, the relative lack of concern for long-term validation of performance has meant that buildings are rarely assessed in respect to their success or failure after they are completed and occupied. If the assessment occurs at all it is usually triggered by litigation rather than interest in performance per se.

Although it is easier to credit a single author than a team that instigates and coordinates the design process, it is certainly more accurate to recognize the collaborative process that not only involves a bigger team of designers but also includes other professionals such as engineers in a variety of fields. Yet few things threaten designers more than the idea of surrendering authorship or artistic control.

Although Thorpe does not advocate the use of the open-source approach to design described above in her book, it occurred to me that it could play an important role in the field of architecture.
I hope readers will weigh in with their reactions.

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library on the University of California’s Berkeley campus opened in March 2008. The EAL is the country’s first free-standing library dedicated to east Asian collections built on a university campus; it was named for Cornelius Vander Starr, an early leader in the insurance industry and founder of the American International Group (AIG), Starr attended UCBe as an undergraduate.

Designed by Billie Tsien and Tod Williams, the building occupies a site on the north edge of the Memorial Glade that is part of the campus’s landmarked Classical Core. The library‘s rectangular form, tiled hip-roof, vertically proportioned punched windows, and granite cladding were mandated in the criteria of the 2002 New Century Plan and derived from the neo-classical buildings in the campus core area. The library’s location across from John Galen Howard’s monumental Doe Library made designing the building to harmonize with the tone of the core particularly important.

Yet, while honoring the criteria, the architects created a building that has more in common with the tenets of Modernism than those of Classicism. Notwithstanding the primary use of poured-in-place concrete and the exterior’s 3’-7”x 7’-10” granite slabs, the library does not convey the sense of a masonry building kin to its neighbors. The 2.25″-thick slabs are treated like giant tiles affixed to the concrete walls. The walls’ separation from the roof gives them a screenlike appearance, and the punched windows with minimal projecting heads contribute to the impression of thinness associated with Modernism.

The defining feature of the long south façade is not the grand flight of stairs that typically announced the entrance to a neo-classical building, but a bronze grille 110 by 32 feet designed in a variation of the traditional “cracked ice” pattern often used in previous eras in Chinese history. This and two other elaborate bronze grilles located on the east and west walls were cast in sand in a foundry in Hangzhou, China. Night illumination increase their magical effect

In addition to their aesthetic contribution, the grilles have the practical effects of lowering energy costs by reducing over forty-five percent of the direct sunlight entering the building and allowing office windows of different sizes to be hidden behind the south wall’s grille.

Cherry wood was used throughout the library interior, often in sections of narrow battens backed by a red fabric, as shown above. Floors are made of bamboo.

Photographs by Jonathan Reo

This densely written and wonderfully illustrated book seeks answers to questions such as: what is wrong with the cities we have created and what can be done to correct our mistakes? The answers that Randolph Hester explores in chapters headed centeredness, connectedness, sensible status seeking, sacredness, selective diversity, everyday future, reciprocal stewardship, and pacing—among others–come from his many years of working as a political and environmental activist, landscape architect, urban designer, and farmer to improve the physical environment through the creation of forms that celebrate everyday life.

The depressing trends of today’s world: climate change, the loss of cultural and biological diversity, economies that exploit backwaters to create international cities, and the inequities of developing countries, are critical issues of urbanity. Hester observes that, “We sanitize our suburbs, but we still cannot make places where we feel safe. We have lost the balance that makes a city clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”

Through technology, standardization, and specialization, along with freedom from environmental constraints, we have obtained privately many things that were once only available if shared. In Hester’s view, the social cost of privatization which has altered public discourse and limited the exchange of information needed by the public for responsible actions must be addressed by forging new relationships between the community and the environment.

Our lack of ecological literacy has led us to ignore natural factors in urban design. According to Hester, if cities capitalized on their regional characteristics, they would realize significant income from energy, water, and waste disposal processes while providing their inhabitants with amenities and a sense of place. Instead, we have blurred the vegetative patterns, microclimates, air-movement patterns, and hydrologic cycles that distinguish urban areas and robbed them of any special meaning. As a result we have mistakenly labeled the wildfires, energy shortages, and flood damage in urban areas as “natural disasters.”

The ecological democracy Hester advocates is government by the affected citizenry through hands-on involvement. Since the form of our cities influences our daily lives, the creation of meaningful landscapes for our cities requires a participatory, scientific, and adventuresome design process. Though not likely to produce a quick fix, ecological democracy offers a comprehensive way to act and think about the future.

The preoccupation of cities with raising their status to gain recognition and attract tourism to validate it has been, by Hester’s lights, a considerable waste of time, energy, and money. Blurring the line between healthy self-expression and unhealthy striving has produced the malls, markets, festivals, and historic districts, which are cobbled together and often infused with an ersatz history that obviates genuine needs. Design should help people take root by increasing users’ knowledge and experience of everyday features in which they may take pride. Designers should look beyond project boundaries to reveal nearby connections. Indeed, Hester says, “Connectedness in the urban environment is the most fundamental contribution of applied ecology.”

One example of the benefits of looking beyond project boundaries is Big Wild, which Hester’s and McNally’s young firm, Community Development by Design, began work on in 1985. The client, a state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, was originally mandated to acquire land in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area. One Conservancy acquisition, the 1000-acre Mulholland Gateway Park, turned out to lack ecological integrity because of its fragmentation. Effective planning required larger boundaries. But even as more acquisitions enlarged the project area, Hester and McNally found it to be ecologcally connected to national forests two valleys away.

Over the course of the next decade, the concept of a greenbelt around Los Angeles evolved. But since the concept of a large region is too abstract to connect to most people’s daily life, the creation of greenbelts requires incremental implementation. A citywide campaign of education and research in conservation biology was instigated to deepen people’s experience of wilderness.

The story of Big Wild features such dramas as the battle to stop a freeway that would sever a wildlife corridor, the expansion of the Mulholland Gateway Park into a 20,000-acre Big Wild and its connection to the creation of a sustainable habitat for mountain lions.

Many victories are described in this book; enough, in fact, to turn designers into environmental activists. But before enlisting in this growing army they might want to consider what they are in for, to wit: varying success in bringing people together to discuss urban environmental issues and managing their heated interaction, defeats and/or long periods of inaction, improvising ways of bridging the doldrums, and never giving up!

In the Epilogue Hester explains how he has interwoven ecology and democracy into a theory of good city form. His theory, he confesses, is “more like a mass of mating salamanders than a regression analysis.” Urban design theory must adjust to the realities of implementation until it becomes meaningful. This process may be unending.

Always modest, Hester describes his projects as having advanced small increments of ecological democracy; they have put project design in an overall framework with a long term vision.

In the book’s last paragraph Hester reveals the secret of his success: fearless optimism. “Optimism,” he affirms, “will help us to shape healthier places to dwell and create the most fulfilling lives we can achieve. And optimism will keep us cheerful along the way.”

The Book at Amazon…