Francis Violich, 94; Professor Wrote on Urban Planning

Francis Violich, 94, a professor of landscape architecture at UC Berkeley who wrote three notable books on urban planning, died Aug. 21 of natural causes at his home in Berkeley, the university announced.

Born in San Francisco in 1911, Violich grew up in a home a few hundred feet south of Golden Gate Park. He studied landscape architecture at UC Berkeley and did graduate studies in city planning at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology before taking a position at UC Berkeley in 1941. He was chairman of the university’s department of landscape architecture and environmental planning from 1962 to 1964.

In the late 1940s and ‘50s, Violich helped found Telesis, a volunteer-based group that laid the groundwork for UC Berkeley’s city and regional planning department in 1948 and the formation 10 years later of the College of Environmental Design.

Violich wrote “Cities of Latin America: Planning and Housing in the South” (1944), “Urban Planning for Latin America: The Challenge for Metropolitan Growth” (with Robert Daughters, 1987) and “The Bridge to Dalmatia: A Search for the Meaning of Place” (1998).