Pereira Gave County Shape and a Vision : Late Architect Believed in Orderly Growth, Open Spaces

I am convinced that Orange County is the best laboratory for the future in the nation, if not in the world. . . . Orange County is destined to be a great force in the West.

--William L. Pereira in a 1978 essay

When William L. Pereira was handed 93,000 acres of virgin Orange County to mold according to his vision of the world, he knew he had the opportunity of a lifetime.

“In recent years, we here in California have become rather expert at abusing our land and our resources,” he said in 1963. “Here we have a tremendous opportunity to point people’s tastes and expectations in another direction. And we can do it--the sheer size of the place makes almost anything possible.”

The place was Irvine Ranch, and the master plan that Pereira created for the vast expanse of land sealed the international reputation of the Chicago-born architect, who died of heart failure last Wednesday at the age of 76.

Pereira is widely viewed as the architect of the Los Angeles look, and a catalogue of his work in the sprawling metropolis includes some of the area’s showpieces of planning and design--such as the Malibu campus of Pepperdine University, the CBS Television City building, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Marineland and Los Angeles International Airport.

Elsewhere, he is known for the design of the Transamerica Corp. tower in San Francisco, Cape Canaveral, the set design for the burning of Atlanta during the filming of “Gone With the Wind” and several large-scale projects in foreign countries.

But regardless of these successes, Pereira left perhaps his greatest imprint on Orange County. It is a legacy so strong that local officials contend there would be no county as it is known today without the hand of William L. Pereira.

“I don’t know of anyone who’s had more of an effect,” UC Irvine Chancellor Jack Peltason said. “He was the master planner who, more than anyone I know of, designed the environment of this part of Orange County--central and southern.”

“Many people have said that if not for him the deal (to locate the university in Orange County) would not have been made, and that would have left us with a very different situation here,” added Roger Seitz, the Irvine Co.’s vice president for urban planning and design.

Although Pereira’s projects ranged far and wide, he spent 30 of his 50 professional years working closely with Orange County.

The architect had a hand in the design and planning of more than 60 buildings in the county and created master plans for an estimated 200 square miles, including three colleges, the countywide airport system, a sprawling industrial site for Lockheed, the 93,000-acre Irvine Ranch and 4,000 acres of Union Oil Co. land around Fullerton and La Habra.

Those projects cover almost one-third of the habitable land in Orange County--or more than six times the acreage of Manhattan, as Pereira himself once noted.

The key to Pereira’s architectural vision was an appreciation for the economic and environmental forces inherent in orderly growth. He once said that his idea of regional planning was “to design plans to satisfy the future.”

Two of the main themes in Pereira’s work were the importance of open space in congested urban areas and the need to mold development to the environment.

“One of the tragedies of this country is what we’ve let happen to our open spaces,” he said in a 1969 interview. “Everyone seems to have a compulsion to own his own piece of land and do with it what he wants. We weren’t content to stay on the seashore six days when we settled America, and now we’ve butchered some of the most beautiful land on the face of the earth, denuded it and covered it with the ugly, wasteful, peanut butter-like spread of urban sprawl.”

Each of Pereira’s master plans attempted to combat these tendencies, and that theme seems particularly evident in his vision of Orange County.

Shaped Irvine Ranch

Although he built several structures here before embarking on the master plan for UC Irvine, Pereira’s work on the university launched his major efforts in the county and eventually gave him the opportunity to shape Irvine Ranch.

In 1957, the regents of the University of California asked Pereira to recommend a suitable university site south of Los Angeles. After four months of scouting and study, Pereira chose the Irvine Ranch area. Both the regents and Irvine Co. officials eventually agreed to the site, and Pereira went on to design master plans for the university and the ranch itself.

At the university, he proposed a broad, open plaza for every academic building and a 30-acre park at the center of the campus. Moreover, Pereira arranged the buildings so that none would block views of the surrounding hillside. The campus was created according to a circular design, with the park in the center and the academic buildings radiating out from it like spokes from the hub of a wheel.

“That plan, which was produced 20 years ago, still is remarkably appropriate for the continued development of the campus,” said William Parker, associate executive vice chancellor of the university. “It’s his (Pereira’s) vision, it’s just so accurate. He had a vision for what a modern university should look like.

“The nature of the disciplines, the growth of the campus, its relationship to the community, the need for open space, the character of the architecture--all of these components remain valid today,” Parker said. “When this campus grows to 30,000 students someday (it now has 13,500), that concept of a central park will become a major unifying feature.”

In addition to creating the university’s master plan, Pereira designed five of its main buildings, including Crawford Hall, Steinhaus Hall and the library. Although university spokesmen are enthusiastic about their school’s appearance, the 1982 work, “A Guide to Architecture in Los Angeles & Southern California,” gave the school mixed reviews.

“The barren hills have been planted, and eventually the current newness will wear off, though now the buildings and other man-made features seem somewhat stark,” wrote David Gebhard and Robert Winter, co-authors and Southern California professors of history.

“As with other Southern California campuses of the U. C. system, the architecture is at best a disappointment. . . . One would hardly visit the campus to view great monuments of architecture, but the total picture and the master plan are well worth a look.”

The original plans for Irvine Ranch--which landed Pereira on the cover of Time magazine in 1963--called for green belts scattered throughout 11 communities on the southern sector. In one community, University Park, 185 of the 910 acres were designated as open space, and everywhere an attempt was made to link these communities with the adjacent natural landscape.

Pereira designed the central 25,000 acres of the Irvine Ranch to be primarily agricultural. The northern 33,000 acres--mostly rugged mountain terrain--was to be preserved for recreation, with only limited housing to be built sometime in the relatively distant future.

While the major framework of Pereira’s plan is still in place today, the specifics have been changed, the Irvine Co.’s Seitz said.

“The specifics of the hillside and flatlands have been altered through time,” Seitz said, adding that “the agricultural area is undergoing development, but the role of open space to tie the community together has not been lost.”

Changes Were ‘Inevitable’

According to Barbara Gray, who has been with William L. Pereira & Associates for 43 years and is the firm’s director of research, the architect was not disturbed by changes in his plans.

“I think he foresaw that it was inevitable,” Gray said. “It’s the way things go. He just hoped that it would go in a healthy, positive way. I know he wanted as long as possible (to preserve) the presence of as much agricultural area as the Irvine people themselves.”

However, Julius Schulman, Pereira’s architectural photographer for more than 40 years, disagreed. “Of course he (Pereira) was upset,” Schulman said. “But what could he say? He did all he could do. In those days (the 1960s), as things developed, there was nothing he could have done about it.”

Elsewhere, Newport Center, which is part of the Irvine Ranch master plan, still bears Pereira’s identifiable stamp.

In the middle of Newport Center is the Fashion Island shopping center, which is surrounded by a sea of parking lots. The lots are ringed by Newport Center Drive, and office buildings radiate out from that ring. Pereira himself designed the Irvine Towers, the Pacific Mutual Building and the Wells Fargo Bank building in the complex.

‘Correct but Dull’

As with other plans, the Fashion Island concept has sparked some criticism.

“In many ways it is the picture of the ideal ‘modern city’ which was promoted in the 1920s and later,” Gebhard and Winter wrote about the area. “Like other modern cities of the post-World War II decades, this one is correct but decidedly dull. It makes one wonder whether it is really possible in our age to design a pleasant, workable environment based upon a machine view of the ‘70s.”

Architect Albert Revino told a reporter in 1969 that Pereira’s “structures are certainly good, but then he gimmicks them up with fancy facades and unnecessary gimmicks. It’s paste-on architecture and that’s bad architecture.”

While critics have been free with their barbs about Pereira’s work, none deny his impact.

To Gray, Orange County without William Pereira could have been “an eternal spread of nothing--houses forever. As it is, (Irvine) is a very vital city. . . . I think the places around it have developed in accordance with the fact that it is a center of learning and a university-oriented town.”

Pereira’s influence is likely to continue. Indeed, Santa Ana city officials are considering a plan that the architect had proposed to transform the depressed Logan-Lacy area into a new “city within a city.”

Other projects launched by Pereira’s company are already under construction, such as the Nelson Laboratory just off the UC Irvine campus.

“We are still working with UCI and the Irvine Co.,” Gray said. “The firm is going to continue and carry on his traditions in every way.”