The Sea Ranch at Fifty

Photo courtesy Lawrence Halprin Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Landscape architect Lawrence Halprin conducting a Driftwood City Discussion at Sea Ranch during a July 5, 1966, workshop.

Fifty years ago, a breathtaking, 10-mile-long, mile-wide strip of the California coast, 105 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was declared a privately-owned model community and opened for radically eco-friendly residential development. Owned and managed for 42 years as a sheep ranch, the new town was named The Sea Ranch (the The is mandatory).

Al Boeke, manager of The Sea Ranch for its new owners (Oceanic Properties, a division of Hawaii-based Castle & Cooke), enlisted the advice and support of Larry Halprin (who died in 2009), now regarded as the countrys most idealistic, farseeing, nature-loving landscape planner, to come up with a strict set of guidelines to prevent his dream development from turning into one more piece of suburbia-by-the-sea. Halprin, in turn, picked two architectural firms he trusted to realize his ideals, and demonstrate to subsequent designers, builders, and homeowners what could be done the integrate their buildings with this unique setting. Joseph Esherick was the most respected architect of the Bay Region Tradition at the time. MLTW (Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker) was a young Berkeley-based group of friends who had designed a couple of small but remarkably innovative houses in northern California, which had attracted Halprins favorable attention.

MLTW was invited to design what was called Condominium I: an interlocked redwood cluster of 10 individual homes under one common roof sloping down to the sea, punctured by mineshaft modern towers facing south. Each distinctive unit manipulates a common kit of parts, and has a different orientation to the ocean.

Finished in 1965, Condo I seems to grow out of the land, like a pile of elegantly shaped and assembled wooden boulders facing rock formations that rise out of the sea, forever washed and sculpted by climbing ocean waves. It went on to become the most famous building of its time in the country. Eshericks contribution was a family of six natural houses tucked under one of the many old cypress hedgerows that divide the grassy meadows, perpendicular to and behind the steep oceanside bluffs. They were designed in such a way that one is almost unable to say where landscape ends and building begins, particularly now that the hedgerows have grown to embrace the houses. Some even had sod roofsa conceptual statement found in later Sea Ranch housesto help hide their intrusive existence. As Esherick wrote, The ideal kind of building is one you dont see. Along with Eshericks welcoming village store, bar, and post office (signposted with Barbara Stauffachers stylized rams-head logo), these model buildings reflected Halprins kibbutz-bred ideals of an egalitarian, democratic community, with people and houses living lightly on the land.

Fifty years later, there are about 1,800 houses and 1,300 permanent residents at The Sea Ranch, California, 95497. Many non-residents also own property here, which makes them members of The Sea Ranch Association (TSRA), which became the legal owner of about half of the original 3,500 acres. When people buy a lot at The Sea Ranch, they simultaneously become members of the Association and legal owners of a parcel of the commons land open to all memberswhich includes many acres of legally protected ocean-fronting hedgerow and meadow land, as well as forested land east of the highway. Oceanic Properties saw its $27 million investment on the Sonoma County coast driven underwater by a nearly 10-year-long moratorium on building new houses and (effectively) selling new lots, the result of a 1972 California law designed to keep the states public coastline open to all. Oceanic decided to sell its unsold share of The Sea Ranch to the incorporated non-profit owners association it had created. Many of the nonresident owner/members today use their properties as second or vacation homes, which they rent out to visitors between their own stays. In recent years, some houses here have changed hands for a million dollars or more.

After generating a great deal of controversy and hostility (and many lawsuits) among property owners, the moratorium was ended in 1981-82 by a complex compromise agreement, which satisfied few. Even after 1982, disputes continued, occasionally becoming hostile and divisive. What have they been arguing about for more than 30 years, in what was intended to be a challenging but Utopian demi-paradise?

Many of Halprins original guidelines have been respected, and a common (perhaps too common) design language did emerge, one of irregular but simple wood-faced buildings that merged with or at least respected the landscape and their neighbors. But Halprins hopes for clustered housing, which left clear the meadows and bluffs, were overridden early in the day by Oceanic Properties decision to realign building lots to obtain maximum ocean views. By the end of the 1960s, Halprin had been dismissed by Oceanic. In 1969 Boeke quit, leaving planning and management in the hands of less idealistic administrators. This, as architectural critic and editor Donald Canty wrote in 2003, marked the beginning of the end of the heralded Sea Ranch plan.

Both Halprin and his principles for the development of The Sea Ranch had been all but canonized, if often disregarded, by 1983, when he held the first of three day-long workshops to re-educate residents about those principles, discuss benign, malign, and unavoidable changes over time, and (he hoped) put a stop to unorthodox and wayward growth. Halprin conducted similar workshops in 1993 and 2003. Sea Ranch residents apparently need to be reminded of the founders ideals once a decade.

Excerpt from:
The Sea Ranch at Fifty