Hideo Sasaki; Landscape Architect, Educator

Hideo Sasaki, 80, a landscape architect and educator who designed some of the country’s best-known industrial parks, urban spaces and campuses. Born in Reedley, Calif., Sasaki grew up on his family’s San Joaquin Valley truck farm and was working in beet fields in Arizona when he was placed in a World War II internment camp. After attending Reedley Junior College and UC Berkeley, he earned a degree in landscape architecture at the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois. He went on to receive a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Much of Sasaki’s career was based in the Boston area, where he taught at Harvard for more than 20 years, chairing its landscape architecture department from 1958 to 1968, and founded his Sasaki Associates firm. He was known for putting his students directly to work solving design problems along with urban planners and such architects as Eero Saarinen, with whom he shared the Collaborative Medal of Honor from the Architectural League of New York. In addition to the post-World War II industrial parks Sasaki created for commercial giants John Deere and Upjohn, he designed such landmark urban spaces as Boston’s Copley Square, New York’s Washington Square Village and the St. Louis Gateway Mall. In California, where Sasaki maintained a branch office in San Francisco, he and his firm landscaped such complexes as San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center and the Stanford Library. Sasaki served as a judge in the architectural competition for the most recent redesign of Los Angeles’ Pershing Square. He was appointed by two presidents to the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, and in 1971 became the first recipient of the American Society of Landscape Architects medal. On Aug. 30 in Walnut Creek, Calif., of cancer.