CURTIS SCHREIER: At Sea Ranch, the sea was next to you.
But there were no natural harbors.
There was no way to use what the sea was, except to just
enjoy the worlds largest picture window, in some ways.
And that was always the cliff of the design questions.
You know, why not leave it the way it is?
BARBARA STAUFFACHER SOLOMON: Al Boeke was the client.
And he had been an architect in Los Angeles.
And he talked Castle & Cooke
into buying some of California
and developing and spending their money on that.
So they bought ten miles of the California coast,
from Stewarts Point to Gualala.
DONLYN LYNDON: He said, I wanted to do something
in architecture that was more than individual buildings.
I wanted to have to do with being able to make
whole places.
The kinds of materials we used
are rooted in wanting the larger landscape
to be the dominant influence.
And we wanted things to weather and for houses
to become part of the landscape.
And so Al hired Larry Halprin.
SOLOMON: Lawrence Halprin was a landscape architect.
He'd studied in Harvard.
And he was a New York boy.
But he'd also spent all his summers on kibbutz.
When he got a chance to do Sea Ranch, in his mind,
he was making a kibbutz.
Very fancy kibbutz.
ANNA HALPRIN: He made sure that the architects that
worked here understood the philosophy.
LYNDON: We wanted to make buildings that became part
of the landscape
rather than buildings that just sat on the landscape.
HALPRIN: But it was very windy.
It would just knock you over, the wind was so strong.
So Larry built around what they now call hedgerows.
So all along the way, there'll be a hedgerow of trees
that will block the wind.
LYNDON: There are these kind of rifts in the land.
If you go down and look at the bluffs from the beach,
there are incredible places where they're ripped apart
and you can see different layers of earth
coming up and going together.
That's what we were working with.
SOLOMON: The original plan was that the houses were
supposed to very small, wooden, and close to the trees.
They were supposed to leave the meadows big and empty
and forever.
OBIE BOWMAN: So to try to get the buildings at The Sea
Ranch to relate more together as a community,
they introduced this idea of having a major roof form
consistent.
Much in the way maybe an Italian hillside town of 300
years ago might have been.
HALPRIN: He wanted to avoid its
looking like a subdivision.
For example, houses could not become mansions.
That was out.
Buildings cannot be made out of stucco; have to be wood.
REVERDY JOHNSON: The initial construction
done by the developer set the materials and the colors.
Essentially no color.
Redwood goes gray in a salt environment.
It is also a great benefit because sooner or later,
the worst architecture is going to disappear
in that environment.
LYNDON: My relationship to The Sea Ranch started with my
being a partner in the firm Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull,
Whitaker.
We were the architects for the Condominium 1, one
of the three first buildings at The Sea Ranch,
which were designed to set a standard for what buildings
on The Sea Ranch could be.
There weren't many people who had done condominiums
at that point, and it was an exotic new thing.
It was a marvelous new way of thinking
about collective things.
It was the individual and the collective together.
LORD: The Sea Ranch condominium was, of course,
the object, right, of The Sea Ranch.
There was something about the vernacular cladding,
the contrast between the exterior and the interior,
that attracted me to it.
And ultimately for me, it led to coming to San Francisco
in the summer of 1966 as an architecture student,
just on the impulse that California seemed interesting
because of The Sea Ranch.
LYNDON: The condominium has a large structure
like the slope of the land,
but then has these bays and additions and cutouts
that happened because of reaching for a view
or because the wind needs to be blocked
or something about the environment
has informed that geometry.
LYNDON: Its a big structure.
We wanted it to be big, not to look like a barn,
but to have the presence of a barn in relationship
to the landscape.
But then every one of the units is different.
And you dont necessarily read it as unit by unit.
But if you look, one has a courtyard coming out from it,
one has a balcony up on the upper level,
and then another one has a greenhouse.
LYNDON: Its a an interspersing of that big image
of a whole, of a community and the individuality
of the people who make it up.
MARRY GRIFFIN: Architects are always fascinated
with wishing there was a way
to do modular housing or more affordable housing,
and so the idea of a kit of parts, which really was
fundamental to the condominium
that it was a 20 x 20 space, each space had an aedicula.
LYNDON: All the while, the salespeople were still not
very happy about condominium as a notion.
The salespeople would get somebody who was coming to Sea
Ranch to think about the place,
and would take them into the condominium
and take them into the different units,
and theyd get all excited, and then they'd say,
"But if you buy a piece of land
you could have anything you wanted."
JOHNSON: The one exception in my mind, most successful
other than Condo 1 were the Clusters and the Walk-ins.
Obie did a superb job on the Walk-in Cabins.
BOWMAN: They were the cheapest things you could buy
on The Sea Ranch.
We had a really strict budget.
The target budget was $10,000 a cabin.
I started out thinking of a square,
to be economical, because the cube has the least
amount of surface area,
so we're going to have less material,
it's going to build you a more economical approach.
So they are very much a cube, with a truncated
or sliced off form to create a sloping roof.
Well in the redwood forest, I really felt that it would
feel most appropriate if there was a vertical aspect
or extension into that.
The top of the Walk-ins
is skylit, which works just wonderfully, because when
you look out horizontally,
you're looking out at a telephone pole factory almost,
it's just trunks.
When you look up it's greenery,
and you don't even get much sky in the redwood forest,
but that's where all the beauty is.
GRIFFIN: When The Sea Ranch was first started,
I think everyone thought all the houses were going
to be pretty modest and available to many people.
Over time, it changed.
The scale and the experimental quality
of some of the houses.
That sort of shifted somewhat.
And I think as you drive north on the Ranch,
youll see that the houses get bigger.
Some of the original diagram of the meadows
and the hedgerows gets compromised, and suddenly youll
go, Howd that house get out there in the meadow?
And The Sea Ranch became a much more conservative place
over time.
And so originally, we would see way more Condominium 1
iterations here, and way few single-family houses
like were sitting in, if the original ideas had really
held.
But because sales fell off and the complications
over the access to the coast and all that,
the plan did get eroded.
SOLOMON: Initially, I think there were no restrictions.
It was desolate, and somehow, they just bought it.
Later they had lots of troubles
with restrictions because they wouldnt let people
on their beaches.
JOHNSON: The plan was always to have a park at the north
end of The Sea Ranch in exchange for any public access
through.
JOE BODOVITZ: The original plan for Sea Ranch had
something like 5,200 buildable lots, which would have
made it the largest community on the coast between San
Francisco and Eureka.
Super architects designed these great wood houses,
and the idea was you didnt need a lot of policing
because there wouldnt be public access.
So all the access for ten miles of coast
was one small county park.
And that struck Sonoma County coastal environmentalists
as such an outrageous act
that that rallied support up and down the coast.
JOHNSON: The state decided that through the Coastal
Commission, there needed to be a change with respect
to the entire coast, the purpose of which
was to provide coastal access to the public
and they wanted the size of the project cut down.
Eventually the confrontations of the various parties
infected the entire environment.
It did become a more suburban development.
But the end result has not been as negative
as many people feared.
The access points to the coast are from parking lots
adjacent to the highway and the coastal trail turned out
to be very beneficial for the owners at The Sea Ranch.
As I go back and look at various points in the history
of the project, I think attitudinally,
you are much closer to where Larry and Al wanted
the project to be.
It may not be quite the same in the built character.
But in terms of the commitment to the ideals,
I think the commitment is pretty strong.
LYNDON: The myth is that it fell apart, which turns out
not to be entirely true.
The myth is that it needs reaffirmation, which is true.
And there will be people who will become
the new active guardians and stewards of the landscape.
JOHNSON: Utopia never's going to work.
You like to get close to it, but you can't be upset
that you didn't get there.