Reflections on The Sea Ranch

And the value of human interconnection

Despite living in the Bay Area for a few decades, I’d never heard about The Sea Ranch until the pandemic. Driven by the desire to find refuge from the crowds, some friends temporarily relocated to this isolated community on the Northern California coast. My curiosity piqued by this mysterious name, I did some quick googling and it seemed that “The Sea Ranch” was a quirky community with beautiful houses overlooking the ocean. A small seed of curiosity was planted in my mind…

Fast forward a few years later, I was finally able to visit Sea Ranch for a long weekend with my family. What I found there was an architectural time capsule: a pristine, sheltered community of simple sloped-roof houses built around an ecological design philosophy that presents deep questions about how to build de novo communities symbiotic with their environments. And while it was an idyllic recreational experience, I also can’t help but wonder if the philosophy that underpins it isn’t a broader echo of the building constraints that ail us.

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THE SEA RANCH

The founding story

As with most communities that have big aspirations to build de novo from raw nature, you can’t understand Sea Ranch without learning about its founding story.

Sea Ranch was developed and planned in the 1960s. It started as a corporate development effort led by a group called Oceanic Properties. The real estate developers heard that there was a large piece of land on the Sonoma County for sale, and they decided to buy it to develop it into a recreational destination for tourists from the Bay Area. While this could have been another cookie cutter development (similar to those found elsewhere north, east and south of San Francisco), the developers wanted it to be special and so they chose a non-traditional team to figure out how to build this community.

The planners chosen were Lawrence Halprin & Associates working with architects that included Joseph Esherick, Charles Moore, Donlyn Lyndon, William Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker. While in most real estate developments the names of the planners and architects fade away with time, in The Sea Ranch this group of people have become quasi-saints: in my few days there I saw Lawrence Halprin’s name a dozen times. Even decades later, this set of founding planners continues to exert a presence on Sea Ranch’s history.

From the very beginning Halprin & team (I’ll use this short-hand) decided that The Sea Ranch would be special - the location was just too stunning, the raw nature too sublime for it to become a banal real estate development. The team saw an opportunity to make this new community synchronous with its natural environment: instead of bulldozing and forcing a design upon the landscape, The Sea Ranch was going to be built with the environment in mind.

As Halprin writes in “Sea Ranch - Diary of an idea”:

For me, The Sea Ranch became the place where I tested many of my basic ideas on the importance of place as a generation of community design. It was there that I attempted to link the character of natural form to the character of built form and to show how one can derive from the other. It was there that I evolved an integration of the two aspects of design (nature and man-made) into a synthesized holistic combination which expressed both. I hoped that this would become a way of life for all Sea Ranch inhabitants.

Aspiring to a deep-interlinking of the man-made with the natural was to be the defining characteristic of Sea Ranch – it’s root philosophy. But how does one build non-separateness?

The first step for Halprin was to truly understand the environment – to really feel it across all dimensions: “[They] analyzed soils and wind patterns, drainage and forest conditions, sources of water and soil permeabilities, local cultural patterns, local architectural vernacular of barns and sheds build by Russian colonists, aware of the overwhelming force of the prevailing winds from the northwest.”

To understand the land, Halprin built his entire life around it: he camped on the grounds with his family and he’d routinely hike the 11 miles across the Ranch to deeply understand it so to tailor development specifically to each part. The project took over Halprin’s life: “After traveling back and forth from my office in San Francisco for a year I began to identify with this piece of the North Coast and the nature of its landscape - its coves, meadows and timbered slopes. As we planned and designed, the experience of The Sea Ranch began to infiltrate our lives. My family started by camping on the land and then we built our cabin there…”

Halprin’s sketch below illustrates his thinking as he juggled aspects of time and place to conceptualize what Sea Ranch was and what it could become:

Halprin wanted The Sea Ranch to be part of the environment. His aspiration was to create a new community that captured the special character of magical places around the world (what Christopher Alexander would eventually describe as “the quality without a name”) - the special feeling of aliveness and magic that was more common in older towns around the world and is so absent in modern development. As Halprin writes:

Our most difficult task was to find a way for people to inhabit this magnificent and natural system in numbers without destroying the very reason for people to come here. We thought of several options but our overriding concern was always for preservation of the natural system, and the dominance of the landscape as a matrix for living here.

As I thought about how to resolve this issue, a multitude of images came flooding in on me of wonderful places I’d seen in other parts of the world. I thought of the great hill towns of Italy, of the clusters of stone farm buildings in the Chianti region of Tuscany. I remembered wandering amongst the beautiful thatched roofed farm houses of Japan and the similarities between them and the Swiss chalets on the flanks of the Jungfraujoch. I thought as well of the charming early colonial towns of New England.

All of these wonderful places had a certain character, an organic wholeness, an almost mystical one-ness with the earth out of which they seemed to have grown. They all were of a piece, they exuded simplicity, they all nestled into the ground and had a similarity of materials which linked them together into a whole, they all breathed together and seemed to live together easily and naturally. Perhaps the most memorable feature of all of these hauntingly beautiful places was that the whole place, rather than any one building or house, had a memorable and unified personality. [NB: This could almost be verbatim out of Christopher Alexander’s books]

I realized then that it was this character that I hoped we might achieve at Sea Ranch; a feeling of overall “place”, a feeling of community in which the whole was more important and more dominant than its parts. If we could achieve that - if the whole could link buildings and nature into an organic whole rather than just a group of pretty houses - then we could feel we had created something worthwhile which did not destroy, but rather enhanced the natural beauty we had been given.

This was Halprin’s goal and in many ways his team was remarkably successful: Sea Ranch does have “a certain character, an organic wholeness, an almost mystical one-ness with the earth out of which they seemed to have grown.”

To ensure that Sea Ranch conformed to this vision, Halprin & team developed a set of plans and zoning restrictions to help ensure conformity:

Since we were striving for an integrated village-like overall character I looked for a way to keep all buildings in a clear character relationship to each other. One way we thought to do this was to establish a stable of compatible, talented architects from which to choose. We reasoned that in this way we cold avoid an overview design committee. That solution, however, seemed too limited and controlling and in the end we were left with the idea of allowing for choice within agreed upon zoning type restrictions. These restrictions would be monitored by a design committee, not on the basis of taste but as a way to insure conformance with the agreed upon criteria.

This zoning process has resulted in strict rules and guidelines for what can and can’t be built at Sea Ranch and for the most part this means that development has been quite limited. Here is an example of the original “Locational Score” that determines what can/can’t be built in different parts of Sea Ranch:

A visual tour

So if that’s the philosophy, what does Sea Ranch actually looks like? Let me provide an annotated visual description based on Berkeley’s Journey to the Sea Ranch (a comprehensive archive of Sea Ranch’s development):

The Sea Ranch occupies ten miles along the scenic northern coast of California, about three and a half hours north of San Francisco.

High bluffs, crashing waves and abundant wildlife populate the coastline.

Above, the land opens out into vast meadows of tall grass and colorful wildflowers. Cypress hedgerows string out along the site, leading back to a dense forest.

Amidst the natural beauty are clusters of buildings, weathered gray with sloping rooflines.

These structures were built with the intention to live lightly on the land, to work with nature rather than against it, and to maintain the character of the natural surroundings with their color and texture.

Being in Sea Ranch feels a lot like camping but instead of staying in a tent, you are staying in beautiful houses nestled in meadows, forests and the craggy cliffs. Without any fences between houses and trails, you feel connected to nature and open to the strong wind, waves and echoes of the infinite that extend in every direction. This is Halprin’s dream.

As you can see in the photographs above and below, the houses are almost impossible to differentiate from the landscape: the broad meadow opens to the sky with the dense forests as backdrop. The houses and trails are there but almost imperceptible. Nature is clearly the main actor and the humans but side-characters as the majestic natural play unfolds on this part of the California coast.

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EMBRACING HUMAN INTERCONNECTEDNESS

Halprin & team wanted to build a community in which the whole was more important and more dominant than its parts. They wanted to create a community that enhanced the natural beauty they had been given, and I think in many ways they really did succeed.

However, during my visit to Sea Ranch I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of loneliness. I had similar feelings to when I visit a beautifully designed office building that has been overly-planned to perfection: while the individual pieces are beautiful, it still lacks a certain aliveness. In their desire is to not destroy nature, I fear that The Sea Ranch erred towards being overly-constrained.

The area around Sea Ranch is like much of the West Coast - rural and empty. Over the last few hundred years there was never a large active population or community in this entire region. Beyond the native population, the first Europeans that settled the area were the Russian fur traders building Fort Ross. When the fur trade dried up, its population declined. The next big development was the timber trade, however, that too went away once new mills made the old methods economically infeasible. Since then, there hasn’t been any new economic engine to drive development in the area. There are no reasons to build good roads, no reasons to build new schools, no reasons to build ports… There was no new potential economic engine to attract people… nothing, that is, until The Sea Ranch.

The goal of The Sea Ranch was never to build a new town nor economic hub. From its inception it was meant to be a recreational community – a new “utopia” in Halprin’s words. Under that definition, this limited amount of development was a success. And yet I keep wishing Sea Ranch could be more; Sea Ranch has set the foundation for a beautiful ecological community and I can’t help but think that if it was able to be less restrained, if they allowed more development, it could expand to allow more people to experience and contribute to its flourishing.

My desire is contrary to Halprin’s intent. Even with the limited development that Sea Ranch did have, Halprin was already starting to become unhappy. Writing in his 1995 book he bemoans “special interest” that want to change Sea Ranch’s direction; he decries that “some of the new architecture is mediocre and not up to the early high standards.” He is sad that some of the people moving to Sea Ranch don’t share his same sense of community and “… as time went on, the succeeding waves of people flawed the experience for [him].”

Halprin’s broader goal was to recreate the magical communities around the world – the Tuscan hillside, the New England village – and while he succeeded in many ways, I think he missed one of Alexander’s main insights: the way you build aliveness is through the process of development over time - things have to evolve and grow to become alive. As Alexander writes:

In traditional society, the evolving building was always in some degree allowed to go where it wished to go, or where it needed to go. Traditional society allowed its objects and buildings to be unpredictable in their details, and therefore genuinely allowed them to unfold. But in the more typical, more heavily mechanical production of our modern society […] the end-product is fixed too early and too rigidly. For a variety of reasons – legal, financial, and procedural – under modern conditions the thing is fixed too exactly, too far ahead, and has far too little freedom to unfold. Because of social and legal norms introduced in the second half of the 20th century, the end-product was more and more often required to be exactly like the blueprints - the plan, the master plan, the drawings, or the design- and no longer allowed to deviate from them. It thereby shut off, nearly altogether, the possibility that useful testing or adaptation could occur. But when adaptation and feedback are working, the result must be unpredictable. There must be tacit recognition that the end-result is not yet known.

This is the missing piece of The Sea Ranch plan: it’s not allowed to grow… By forcing it to be the founders’ vision, it is constrained from reaching full aliveness.

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After spending a few days in Sea Ranch, I grew accustomed to not seeing many people. My sense of human density was reset. Driving back on Highway 1 was a process of rediscovery: the first town with more than one store seemed so large! An hour later, arriving in Bodega Bay - a town of one thousand people – felt like arriving in a huge hub of human activity: there were multiple restaurants one could choose from, dense strings of houses, street lighting and common infrastructure, ice cream shops and gas stations! So much opportunity! Further down the road, arriving in Petaluma felt like the largest of metropolis - it had anything one could ever need and more… This process of progressive economic unfurling continued until suddenly I arrived on the Golden Gate Bridge and saw the majesty of San Francisco in the distance: the skyscrapers glistening in the sunlight, yachts racing around Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge’s white suspension structure on the horizon, and more proximate masses of tourists and cars on the bridge in both directions. I couldn’t help but think that on the Golden Gate Bridge alone, there were probably more people walking than there are in the entirety of The Sea Ranch. Human interconnection was everywhere. Arriving in San Francisco, I marveled at the human ingenuity and wealth that could build such a structure - hundreds of years of development and human attention progressively building this human hive.

To truly let the world be full of life, to truly let human flourishing unfold, we need to make room for interconnection. We need to be comfortable building towards an end-result that is not yet, and can never be, fully known.

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Postscript:

Here are some other interesting parts of Sea Ranch’s development that didn’t fit into the post above.

The Hedgerows of Monterey Cypress

One of Sea Ranch’s defining features are its large hedgerows of Monterey Cypress. The houses are built around these rows of cypress and they provide the boundaries between different parts of Sea Ranch.

“On the windswept coastal meadows early ranchers had planted dense hedgerows of Monterey Cypress as windbreaks.” These trees were planted in the early 1900s and they provided some of the most important erosion control tools for the area.

Ironically, the natural landscape Halprin’s original plan was built around were these rows of human-planted trees.

Additionally, these trees provided inspiration for the dominant architecture of Sea Ranch itself - the steeply sloped roofs:

We derived lessons from analyzing the wind erosion of these existing trees and how they were shaped into specific and constant slopes and pitches. In this natural way, wind was controlled in the lee of hedgerows. We realized that these same slopes could establish for us the appropriate roof slopes for new buildings and that these roof slopes could provide protection.

Sea Ranch Graphic Design

In addition to the architects, this project also had its own graphic designer: Barbara Stauffacher-Solomon. The logo for Sea Ranch and it’s typography stand-out to any visitor. After driving hours to get here from San Francisco, the first thing you see when you arrive is a large sign that says “The Sea Ranch” carved into a huge sloped wood totem that marks the official entry to the property. The same 1960s/70s typographic aesthetic extends far beyond the signs of Sea Ranch - you see it in the community recreation centers and in the Sea Ranch Lodge. The graphic design adds a whole other layer onto the architectural:landscape symbiosis.

The Chapel

In the middle of a meadow in Sea Ranch, there is an odd looking snail-shaped building that catches your eye as you drive north. This is the Sea Ranch Chapel.

As the placard in front of the chapel states, it was created to “honor Kirk Ditzler, who regarded art as the intermediary between the physical and spiritual worlds… The roof form was inspired by the shell of a sea snail. A sculpture in the landscape, the chapel stands as a curvilinear counterpoint to the right angles of most Sea Ranch architecture.”

The chapel itself is quite small and feels dated. However, the coziness makes it feel like a sacred little nook of the forest. The wood cravings and detailed shingle-work make it feel rustic and full of life.

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