Browse Exhibits (9 total)

Planning the City Beautiful

One hundred years ago, Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett published a vision of Chicago that reflected the early stages of big city planning. The City Beautiful Movement, spurred by Baron Haussmann's remaking of Paris in the 1860s, was intended to create a rational, classical city to replace the crowded, unplanned Victorian city common in the 19th Century. The 1909 Plan for Chicago, although never fully realized, is heralded as the apex of the City Beautiful Movement which found echoes in plans for the San Francisco Civic Center, Oakland's City Center, the Sunol Water Tower Temple, and urban planning from Manila to Canberra, Australia. This exhibit explores the City Beautiful Movement as manifested in the San Francisco Bay Area, and subsequent attempts to make its wide boulevards, Beaux Arts buildings and neo-classical domes welcome to urban inhabitants.

Environments for Entertainment

As Americans' leisure time has increased during the century, we have filled it with all manner of diversions.  This exhibit highlights the buildings and landscapes in which we seek respite from the stresses of daily life.  Grouped thematically as things to watch, play, eat and buy, the focus is on spaces sucha s theaters, restuarants, playgrounds, country clubs, stores and sports facilities.  Original sketches, photogrpahs, drawings and rare books are included in the material on display provided by the Enviornmental Design Archives, Visual Resources Center, and Environmental Design Library.

The figures that inhabit architectural and landscape renderings are not the actual focus of the drawings. Homeowners, children, pets, shoppers, and condo-dwellers are included to convey the scale and functionality of a proposed design. They humanize and create an emotional appeal in what might otherwise appear to be sterile environments and allow the client to imagine how a space will be used. From the watercolor Victorian to the scalie hipster, this exhibit features more than a century of designers’ representations of people from the Environmental Design Archives.

Designing for a country not one’s own often results in projects that reflect the geo-political and economic factors at the time. Issues of diplomacy, colonialism, post-war reconstruction, new and old political allies, and resources such as rubber and petroleum and who manages them are only a few of the forces that compel the clients commissioning design projects. This exhibit features designs, landscapes, and planning projects on six continents by designers based in the San Francisco Bay Area and held by the Environmental Design Archives.

In some sense investigating “designing in foreign lands” is an exercise in following the money. Governments are the clients for embassies, developers contract commercial centers and resorts, businesses commission corporate facilities, and municipalities fund parks, schools, and master plans. International competitions also encourage designers to submit schemes for overseas projects. Other influential factors may be expertise in a particular building type such as Ernest Kump’s proficiency designing community colleges or clients requesting an architect or landscape architect from their home locale to design a project for them.

These projects, whether planning, landscape architecture, or architecture, both raise questions and provide insight.  Do they reflect cultural preferences? Do they engage local building materials and techniques?  Does plant selection reflect climate more accurately than building design, because it must?

Curator: Waverly Lowell
Exhibition Committee: Emily Vigor, Miguel Nieto, Esther MacKenzie, Chris Marino, Jason Miller

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.