OpenStreetMap (new tab)

Google Map (new tab)

Building History

Los Angeles architect William Pereira worked during the early 1960s on a comprehensive master plan for the huge Irvine Ranch property, a plan that included a new city as well as the university campus. Completed in 1963, Pereira's University of California, Irvine, Master Plan reflected the architect's interpretation of Ebenezer Howard's ring-plan garden city. A relatively complete realization of Pereira's conception took place over the next 30 years. Writing in 1990, author John Parman described the architect's original utopian vision: "The 1963 master plan was part of a larger scheme for developing the mammoth Irvine Ranch property in Orange County, southeast of Los Angeles. What Pereira envisioned was nothing less than a new city--one in which the university would play a central role. To tie town and gown, the architect proposed a town center, comprising the civic buildings of the nascent city of Irvine and housing for 10,000 residents, linked to the campus entrance by a pedestrian bridge. For the campus, he proposed a wheel-and-spokes plan that owes much to Ebenezer Howard's garden cities: a circular park ringed by six quadrangles, which are connected to the center by radiating malls. Pedestrian circulation is provided by an inner ring, a half-mile in diameters, linking undergraduate-teaching buildings, and an outer ring (or 'ring mall') connecting more specialized facilities. Pereira shrewdly located the utility runs in the rings and spokes, but the success of his plan may be due more to the fact that each university department has its own quad, thus minimizing the turf battles that regularly occur on other campuses."

In 1990, however, after much building had been accomplished by campus architect David Neuman during the 1980s, some of Pereira's original ideals remained unfulfilled. Parman concluded: "Much of Pereira's vision has been realized, at least in diagram. Aldrich Park, as the central park is now called, is a 'sacred' (restricted from development) arboretum, unadorned even by the futuristic campanile Pereira planned for it as a focal point. The quads also follow the broad outlines of Pereira's plan, although they lack his promised grand vistas to the surrounding panoramic views. While the rolling topography of the campus prevents such vistas, the informal landscape and the often misguided placement of buildings have made it harder to see the geometry. During the last years of its association with UC Irvine, the firm Johnson Fain & Pereira began to look forward to campus development. After Pereira's death, the firm questioned the basic tenets of his plan and even proposed to overlay an orthogonal grid on the campus in an effort to improve access, orientation and movement." (See John Parman, "Utopia Revised," Architecture, vol. 79, no. 1, 01/1990, p. 66.) As Parman concluded Pereira's master plan had some notable strengths and weaknesses. It maintained open space at its core, and provided departments with enough room to define their own quadrangles. It attempted to link the commercial amenities with the campus, to provide students with shopping and entertainments nearby. Its rigid structure, frozen in time, however, negated the organic growth of "fine-graned, self-organizing patterns of development characteristic of more vital, pedestrial-oriented settings" to emerge. (See John Parman, "Utopia Revised," Architecture, vol. 79, no. 1, 01/1990, p. 66.)

PCAD id: 1132