Browse Exhibits (28 total)

Founded in 1913, the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning celebrated its centennial in 2013! This exhibition examines the history and guiding principles o the department - innovation, social responsibility, and research through the works of tis students, faculty, staff and alumni. Historical, archival, and cutting edge material from the Environmetal design Archives, Visual Resources Center, and Environmental Design Library were used for this exhibit.

While fairs of the 1930s turned to the future as a foil to the Great Depression, the Golden Gate International Exposition conjured up geographical metaphors to explore the nature of San Francisco's place in what organizers called "Pacific Civilization." The fair proposed a vision of the Pacific as an antidote to the troubled Atlantic world, then descending into chaos for the second time in a generation. Architects took up the theme and projected the regionalist sensibilities of Northern California onto Asian and Latin American architecture. Their eclectic, referential buildings drew widely on the cultural traditions of ancient Cambodia, China, and Mexico, as well as the International Style, Art Deco, and the Bay Region Tradition. Buildings supported the cultural and political work of the fair and fashioned a second, parallel world in a moment of economic depression and international turmoil.

Bernard Maybeck and William Merchant designed a spirited Tower of Youth that, had it been built, would have been a pendant to the Palace of Fine Arts at the PPIE. Timothy Pflueger, by contrast, built a Federal Building that was equal parts New Deal institutional architecture, Art Deco, and a manifesto of regionalism. Brazil and Argentina’s modernity offset the nostalgic historicism of the Pacific Area, while the Pacific House posed as a vessel of neutrality in the midst of a symbolic Pacific. With images of designs by William Wurster, Ernest Born, Arthur Brown, Jr., and a host of other architects, this exhibit shows a cross-section of architecture in a moment of quickening change in the profession and the wider world.

Unless otherwise stated all material on display is from the Environmental Design Archives. 

The Legacy of Donald Olsen – Modern Master

Donald Olsen (1919-2015) graduated with his Bachelor’s in Architecture from the University of Minnesota in 1941. He won a scholarship to Harvard’s Graduate School of Design but had to defer due to the outbreak and the United State’s involvement in World War II. During the war years, Olsen found himself in Richmond, CA where he worked at the Kaiser Ship Yard designing large manufacturing and office buildings as well as housing, railway systems, fire stations, and schools. Once the war ended he obtained his Master’s in Architecture from Harvard and graduated in 1946.

After a brief stint in the office of Eliel and Eero Saarinen in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, Olsen returned to Berkeley where he worked for a brief time for Ernest Kump, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and finally Wurster, Bernardi, & Emmons. In 1954 Olsen began his own practice and remained for decades a much-esteemed and sought after architect. The same year that he began his own practice he was approached by William Wurster, then Dean of the School of Architecture at UC Berkeley, and asked to join the faculty. Olsen’s career lasted thirty-five years, until 1989 when he retired.

Inspired by the teachings of the Bauhaus and curriculum of Walter Gropius while studying at Harvard, Donald Olsen transported the International Style of modernism to the Bay Area. Olsen’s unwavering loyalty to modernism drove his career and allowed him to flourish both as a practicing architect and a professor at UC Berkeley. This exhibit explores the life and career of Donald Olsen from the start of his career with noted firms such as Saarinen, Swanson & Saarinen, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Wurster, Bernardi, & Emmons to establishing his own practice.

Beginning with Olsen's education and influences, this exhibition, organized by project type, includes his work designing residences, commercial and educational spaces, as well as unbuilt projects. All materials in this exhibition come from the Environmental Design Archives’ Donald Olsen Collection.

Although one of the foremost leaders of the movement for modern public housing in the United States, Catherine Bauer often goes overlooked as an important maker and collector of photographs of modern architecture.

This exhibit invites a new understanding of Catherine Bauer’s contributions to the modern housing movement by looking through the lens of photography. Photographs and excerpts from Bauer’s writings at the Environmental Design Archives and the Bancroft Library illustrate how photography was an essential tool in Bauer’s work that continues to offer a perspective on modern housing history in the present.

Collections

Catherine Bauer Wurster papers, BANC MSS 74/163 c, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Catherine Bauer Wurster photograph collection, BANC PIC 1974.029, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

William and Catherine Bauer Wurster Papers, Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley.

Forthcoming Publication

Nicole Krup Oest, Photography and Modern Public Housing in Los Angeles (arthistoricum.net, 2021)

Acknowledgments

Research for this exhibit was made possible through funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

Nicole Krup Oest thanks Chris Marino and the Environmental Design Archives for their support of this exhibition. She also thanks Victor Rini, historian and descendant of a family of Chávez Ravine, and Dr. Raymond Neutra of the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design.