The Man with the Plan

The black and grey Bentley snaked south out of Los Angeles along the Santa Ana Freeway, shook free of the traffic, and began to climb fast on a mountain road through the open country. At the wheel was a shapely brunette beauty--secretary, assistant and part-time chauffeur to the man in the back seat listening to Mantovani on a built-in stereophonic tape recorder. The car stopped on the mountaintop, where a friend was waiting; the man got out, a trim 6 feet with heavy-lidded blue eyes and an actor's dash. The wind riffled his wavy, iron-grey hair as he gazed out over Irvine Ranch, the miles and miles of grazing land and citrus groves rolling down to the Pacific.

"Right about there we're going to put a city of 100,000 people," he said, pointing. "At the heart of it will be a thousand-acre campus for a university with 27,500 students. There'll be a university town with a mile or so of hotels, shops, restaurants and theaters. We'll have different kinds of housing--all income levels--churches, a couple of golf courses. Surrounding the university town will be many other communities, here, there and along the coast. And over there will be jobs--places for men to work. We expect to have about 300,000 people living and working here by 1980. There'll be plenty of room for them; this place is six times the size of Manhattan."

The Monuments. The handsome man who can play such a godlike game is neither conqueror nor commissar, but one of a new breed of artisans arising in the world: the regional planner. The regional planner orchestrates vast areas of wilderness with cities, villages, farms and forests to serve the needs of men.

As the planet teems with more and more humanity, his work, with its multiple disciplines--including history, sociology, engineering, botany, geology, hydrography and, above all, architecture--is becoming more and more a pressing necessity.

Immense projects are sprouting around the world--a city for 500,000 refugees outside Karachi; two complete mining towns at Puerto Ordaz and Ciudad Piar, Venezuela; a new port area for Mombasa, Kenya; a French satellite city outside Toulouse to house 100,000 people--in which the planners are doing as much as the politicians and statesmen to determine how men will live tomorrow. And the planner who has the most to plan with is the man in the Bentley: William Leonard Pereira, 54, an architect from Chicago who is pinning more and more of the state of California on his drawing board. Pereira's name is unknown to most Americans, and of course among professionals he hardly ranks with Athenian Constantinos Doxiadis, planner of Islamabad, the huge new capital of Pakistan. Nor does he rate with such a giant as the French architect who calls himself Le Corbusier, or with prestigious Oscar Niemeyer and Lucio Costa, designers of Brazil's new capital, Brasilia. Seventy-five-year-old Le Corbusier--having published theoretical plans for doing over Barcelona, Bogota, Algiers, Antwerp, Buenos Aires and Paris--is watching a city he designed rise in India on the flat Punjab plain 150 miles north of New Delhi. Brick and concrete Chandigarh, new capital of the Punjab state, will hold 500,000 people when completed (urban services become inefficient when cities get any bigger, "Corbu" thinks), and the city's first phase, housing 150,000, is more than half finished. Chandigarh's basic plan is a series of sectors less than a mile on a side with capacities varying from 8,000 to 20,000. Its major weakness: public buildings are so far apart for monumentality's sake that Chandigarhians are hard put to get from one to another.

Family Squabble. Like Chandigarh, Brasilia, hundreds of miles from nowhere, is being built from scratch. As the new capital of a proud nation, it also bears the overtones of a monument. Brasilia is in fact an expensive showpiece with more ingenuity than humanity; crossroads--hence traffic lights --have been eliminated, but there are not enough parking spaces near government buildings. Housing for officials smacks of the ghetto. If you are in the Air Ministry, you not only work together all day, but you also live in the same compound with your colleagues at night.

California's Bill Pereira is dealing with no monuments, no national sentiments, no cities-in-vacuum. He has had the luck--helped by hard work and great skill--to fall into something truly unique: the chance--and the challenge --to build a huge new community alongside the urban disorder of the boom town of the boom state in the boom country of the world. It is a golden opportunity, and no one is more aware of the fact than Pereira himself.

Says he: "In recent years, we here in California have become rather expert at abusing our land and our resources. We carve up our mountains not for the purpose of living, but only to drag our car to our bedroom door. Having learned to rely on the T square and the triangle in the uses of land, rather than an understanding of the land itself, we have come to accept with enthusiasm the unprofessional, unappreciative, unskillful butchery of the land that goes under the name of planning. Here we have a tremendous opportunity to point people's tastes and expectations in another direction. And we can do it--the sheer size of the place makes almost anything possible."

Irvine Ranch is the biggest private development project in the world--93,000 acres of open land adjoining the southern edge of sprawling Los Angeles. Originally this vast tract was an amalgam of three Spanish land grants put together in the 1880s by a group of San Francisco investors, headed by Merchant James Irvine. Ever since, it has been kept intact, used, where it was used at all, mainly as agricultural land and citrus groves. In recent years, its disposal has been the subject of considerable squabbling among the heirs. They finally agreed to have it planned as a regional whole, and to rent it out to private builders. Pereira got the design job.

The Spokes. He has master-planned Irvine in three tiers. One, along the Pacific Coast, covering some 40,000 acres, will absorb the first wave of urbanization. Here will be a city, 31 miles south of overcrowded Newport Beach, and the beginning of a coastline dotted with beach clubs and marinas, ocean-centered communities and resort hotels. At the center will be the branch of the University of California on a 1,000-acre campus acting as a gigantic hub with spokes extruding into the surrounding residential area. Vast green stretches and extensive recreation areas, with industries scattered among them for easy accessibility (Ford Aeronutronic and Collins Radio have already moved in), will break up the city. "These communities will not be dominated by the auto," says Pereira. "They will be walking communities where women can stroll to the shops with their children just as their grandmothers did."

The central tier, some 20,000 acres of pasture land and citrus groves, will preserve Irvine's agricultural tradition --partly because of its soil and climate, partly because Pereira feels that agriculture is essential to the economic health of the area. The top tier, 30,000 acres of rugged peaks and ragged canyons--a mountain wilderness of deer, coyote and quail, pungent with sage and stippled with cactus--will be reserved for recreation, and it will take considerable population pressure before any residential development will be permitted.

All over Irvine's residential region, bulldozers and graders, carpenters and builders were busy this week. At Dover Shores, a development on upper Newport Bay, 70 houses of the planned 311 have already been completed (60% of the homesites in this development were sold in two months, for houses costing from $46,000 to $190,000). And earthmovers were digging away at a 160-ft.-high dam that will hold a billion gallons of water to be used by the University of California and the residents of Irvine, Newport Beach, Costa Mesa and Huntington Beach.

Out on Catalina. Irvine Ranch is the biggest job in Pereira's bulging portfolio, but it is crowded by others. On 22-mile-long Catalina Island, which Pereira is completely reorganizing for its owner, Chewing Gum Tycoon Philip K. Wrigley, the grand design leaves room for hardly any autos at all. Local transportation will be generally restricted to electric carts, which will have their own system of cartways, forbidden to automobiles. An electric tram will serve the principal city, Avalon (Pereira staffers are now in Europe studying various types of narrow-gauge railways), and the island will be dotted with small parks within 200 or 300 feet of each other. Outdoor cafes, garden apartments and single-family houses will be designed around open plazas and courtyards, and a new hotel and yacht club will be built. Southern California Edison Co. already is building new facilities at Avalon, so that power will be available when the scheme gets under way.

At Mountain Park, an untouched 11,300 acres, nearly half the size of Paris, within the city limits of Los Angeles, Pereira's design would relegate the automobile to a circular rim-road linking ten villages that cling like jewels to the slopes. To keep even this traffic to a minimum, he suggests monorail and funicular transportation and several heliports for quick, easy access to other parts of the city. Within the villages themselves, everything would be so cozily clustered that the common way of going shopping, or to school, or to sports, or to work (in the light industries and laboratories he hopes will settle there) will be on foot.

Canyons with Roofs. Actual work on the Mountain Park project awaits only the approval of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, which must authorize zoning changes. The commission is studying the daring master plan: houses cantilevered from slopes of hills; factories hidden in "caves"--actually canyons with roofs built over them; high-rise apartments sited on the crests of ridges to provide tenants spectacular views without obstructing the views of others. One breathtaking idea is a bridge crossing a canyon to link one section of the mountain roadway; Pereira suggests that the bridge be paid for with the rents from a hotel suspended under the swooping span.

Pereira sets great store by open spaces. He holds that the history of any civilization is written in its treatment of open spaces--Athens' Agora, Rome's Forum, the broad sweeps of Paris in the 19th century. And what of the 20th? Says Pereira: "While the auto was supposedly freeing the individual and his family from the asphalt jungles, our open spaces have been overpowered in much the same manner that the tropical jungle eventually mastered the great cities of the Yucatan. Take parking lots. A great deal of our open land has been withdrawn to provide parking lots. Nothing is more ugly. Parks and other open spaces restore the land to the pedestrian. These open spaces must be connected by a pedestrian way."

At Irvine, promises Pereira, "I expect to practice what I have been preaching.

The parks are there, the green ways are there, the pedestrian veins and arteries connect them." The university, says Pereira, "will be a real link between town and gown, a place intimately connected with the center of learning."

Girl Stalker. This lover of open spaces grew up within a block of one of the biggest urban open spaces in the U.S.--Chicago's Lake Michigan. "I can't remember when I didn't want to be an architect," says Pereira. As a boy, he was seldom without a sketchbook in his hand; at twelve, he had a part-time job as a sign painter. He worked his way through the University of Illinois painting scenery, illustrating menus and lecture notes for a duplicating company, picking up odd art jobs. He majored in architecture, minored in physics, bore down heavily on history, and rationed his time between so many projects (he was captain of the fencing team) that he wore himself down from 175 Ibs. to 130. He graduated in June 1930--straight into the Depression.

After pounding Chicago's pavements for three months, Pereira found a job at the Chicago architectural firm of Holabird & Root, was assigned to help plan an $8 billion public redevelopment project. His salary: $90 a month. It was hardly enough for courting, but Pereira lived it up when he could. One night, when he was dancing at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, a stunning brunette passed his table. "I'd never seen anyone to compare with that beauty," says Pereira, "and I still haven't." He began haunting the city's nightspots in hopes of getting another glimpse of her. Four months later, he spotted her in an office building, bribed the elevator man to get her name, and began stalking her in earnest.

She turned out to be Margaret McConnell, a fashion artist for Marshall Field's department store and a top photographer's model (she was the Coca-Cola girl of the period and the first girl to appear in a color photograph for Camel cigarettes). It was two months more before Pereira managed to start a conversation with her on a bus, and four years after that they were married. Today they have a son and a daughter: Bill Jr., 25, and Monica, 16.

A View of the Veins. Pereira decided to strike out on his own in architecture. He stalked new business as he had stalked Margaret. Hearing that a new TB sanatorium was to be built in Waukegan, he spent three months reading books on hospitals, talking to doctors, studying disease rates and nurse-patient ratios. His high-pressure expertise so snowed the selection committee that he won the job over many a more seasoned architect. Entering no fewer than 25 industrial-design competitions at Chicago's 1933 exposition, he won 22. When a Balaban & Katz movie theater offered to spend $5,000 on drapery and upholstery, Pereira remodeled the entire theater for the same price. Later, Barney Balaban gave him $18 million worth of work on the chain's theaters.

It was Margaret who took Pereira to California. He followed her to the coast when she had a brief fling in the movies. Out West, he felt immediately at home. "I looked around at the colors, the terrain, the architectural opportunities, and I knew this was going to be the place," he says.

Assignments began to pour in as soon as he and his wife settled in Los Angeles in 1938. One of the first was to design a new studio for Paramount. In preparation for it, Pereira characteristically learned so much about the movies that he became Paramount's art director--and won a 1942 Oscar for his trick photography in Cecil B. De Mille's Reap the Wild Wind. Later, as a full-fledged producer, he made two successful films for R.K.O.

Even the war helped Bill Pereira along. He became a civilian camouflage expert for the Army, and again and again he flew up and down the coast from Canada to Mexico. "I got a view then of the tragedies of helter-skelter planning, of the impossible traffic, the sprawling disorganization," he says. The plans of the cities were turned over to him, and "suddenly there I was staring at the veins and arteries of our cities, looking for the flaws, counting the mistakes."

Life with Chuck. After the war, Pereira signed on as professor of architecture at the University of Southern California but went on designing--department stores, medical and research centers, the aircraft test site at Edwards Air Force Base. Busy Bill Pereira was doing well enough.

In 1950 he thought he saw a way to do better still. Hearing that his University of Illinois classmate, Charles Luckman, had been fired from his $300,000-a-year job as president of the U.S. branch of Lever Bros., Pereira could not resist the chance to recruit an old pal. Off went a letter to Chuck, accompanied by a package containing the plans Luckman had made as his final school project--for a monastery. "For 20 years I've had my eye on this guy," wrote Pereira to Luckman. "That's why I've saved this. I think he's mature enough to return to the fold. How about it?"

Chuck Luckman turned out to be just as good at selling architecture as he had been at selling soap. Within five years, the firm of Pereira & Luckman exploded from an office with a dozen architects and a $15 million volume of business to a firm with about 400 employees and more than $500 million worth of work on the boards. Together they worked on Cape Canaveral's rocket-shooting complex and the breathtaking Los Angeles International Airport, and designed the CBS Television City in Hollywood.

Like a Factory. But eight years after the partnership began, Bill Pereira abruptly broke it up. Given the differences between the two, it is surprising that the association lasted as long as it did. Though trained as an architect, Luckman was a slick businessman with a flair for supersalesmanship; to Pereira, on the other hand, architecture was simply a profession. "The businessman who hires us," he once said, "doesn't need another businessman to do the work--he needs an architect."

Said Pereira after he left the firm:

"It was like working in a factory. Everybody was standing in line with projects for us to do, like a line of railroad cars waiting to unload. I don't say we were doing inferior work; I just know I wasn't doing my best."

Luckman bought Pereira out for a reported half million dollars, and Pereira set up shop on his own. He did not lack new clients. The split with Luckman was hardly completed when the Lockheed Aircraft Corp. asked Pereira to master-plan a $50 million research center, and from then on he had all the jobs he could handle.

The Red Barn. Some were for large land projects such as the design of 5,000 acres of residential and commercial development at California's Bishop Ranch; others involved simply the architectural design for individual buildings. (One of his best is the new headquarters of the Hunt Foods Co. at nearby Fullerton.) Currently under construction on Wilshire Boulevard is the Pereira-designed Los Angeles County Art Museum, biggest to be built in the U.S. since Washington's National Gallery in 1941. This $8,000,000 structure, financed through the efforts of Department Store Magnate Edward W. Carter, will feature three soaring pavilions arranged on a central pool of water. Pereira's new museum for cinema and TV is going up not far away. Both are part of Los Angeles' current cultural expansion, of which the biggest monument is the $24 million music center being built, half by municipal funds, half by private contributions collected --in one of the great virtuoso performances of U.S. fund raising--by Dorothy Buffum Chandler, wife of Newspaper Publisher Norman Chandler (the Times-Mirror Co.).

When the regents for the University of California asked him to find a 1,000-acre site for a new branch of the university, Pereira and his staff spent four months researching the nature of the university throughout history. Eventually he took the regents on a tour of 23 sites, ending with the one he liked best: Irvine Ranch. Both the regents and the Irvine Co. agreed. And Irvine, impressed by Pereira's design ideas decided to let him try his hand at a master plan for the entire ranch.

Staff headquarters for the Irvine project is Urbanus Square--a remodeled red barn in the midst of the ranch's rolling greenery. Inside, the white plaster walls are covered with brightly colored plans, maps and projections, and the huge floor is crowded with big tables holding clay models of structures, topographical miniatures, sketches of things to come. At one side is a conference and dining area, dominated by an ever-burning fireplace and well stocked with books, records and liquor. Pereira wheels out a couple of times a week to visit his planners in the red barn, calling them together for "crits"--a term (from critiques) that carries over from his years of teaching. There may be a dozen or more crits a day on various aspects of the project.

Morning Workouts. Pereira's main office, starred by 60 architects and experts, is on Los Angeles' busy Wilshire Boulevard--a de luxe garret with a skylight in the peaked ceiling, black leather chairs, white marble coffee table, and a king-sized desk awash with reports, sketches and papers. He spends most of his time there in an interminable round of conferences and phone calls, always with a cup of steaming black coffee at his elbow. The hectic pace leaves him little time for riding or for sailing, which he used to love. These days his only exercise is at 7 a.m., when he staggers out of bed for half an hour of pushups and weight lifting. Breakfast is the only meal he regularly eats with the family, for his wife never expects him home for dinner. "There's always something prepared for me in the refrigerator," says Pereira, "so food is no problem."

For a man so successful in planning the lives of others, Bill Pereira's own life, he admits, "is not particularly well ordered. My personal plans get fouled up all the time," he says. He decided early not to design individual dwellings ("It seemed to me that the average house buyer must be a pain in the neck"). He made a notable exception when he designed his own home--and here one of his best-laid plans went completely agley.

Built on about a third of an acre in the center of Los Angeles only a few minutes' walk from his office, it is enclosed by a stone wall and designed around a sweep of palm trees--one of which grows up through the roof. There is a 90-ft. swimming pool, a dining area that can be three separate rooms or a single one big enough to seat 120 people. Each of the four bedrooms is designed to do double duty as a study, each has complete privacy, and each is near the kitchen. And the big thing about this investment of some $250,000 is that it was designed to be run without a maid. "With all those double-duty rooms," says Planner Pereira, "I thought we could each pitch in and do the minimum cleanup work that's needed." He thought wrong. The maid's name is Bertha.

Beasts in the Jungle. Pereira is head and shoulders above what one critic calls "the great beasts of California's architectural jungle--those cutthroat competitors who are grinding out one flashy banality after another." But Pereira is by no means alone. Several of his contemporaries are involved in outstanding examples of regional planning --most of it in California, with its wide-open spaces and zooming population.

Twenty-four miles east of Sacramento, Architect Victor Gruen has master-planned a 9,800-acre project called El Dorado Hills, which in 15 or 20 years will be a network of twelve villages with a combined population of 75,000 in apartments, as well as houses ranging in price from $20,000 to $100,000. Each village will be centered around a single recreational activity--boating, golf, riding, swimming.

Another big Gruen project is a brand-new community called Laguna Niguel, 48 miles south of Los Angeles, in which about 40,000 people will live, work and play on 7,100 acres of rolling range land. The approach of Laguna Niguel's developer, Cabot, Cabot & Forbes of Boston, illustrates the difference between modern real estate development and old-fashioned lay-it-out and put-it-up methods. Before Master Planner Gruen was called in, the location, population growth, family income and industrial potential of the site were analyzed by two market analysts and placed under close scrutiny by the Stanford Research Institute.

Architects Whitney Smith and Wayne Williams are master-planning 80,000 acres to be called California City, in which more than 8,000 families have already invested some $15 million. Outstanding features completed: a municipal airfield, a 27-acre, man-made lake with marina, boats, and an island on which a smaller lake is stocked for fishing, a night-lighted golf course and driving range, a shopping center, two motels, a restaurant, two swimming pools, and a Congregational church. And Los Angeles Architect Welton Becket is building a 260-acre Century City on the old 20th Century-Fox lot near Beverly Hills, which will contain 20 office buildings, 20 high-rise apartment houses, an 800-room hotel, a large regional shopping center and a resident population of 12,000 (a working population of 20,000).

Need for the Men. "The urge to urbanize," says Bill Pereira, "was probably the first thing man followed when he began to use his mind." The new satellite cities and communities that Pereira and his colleagues are creating are vistas of the future in the U.S. and models for export to tomorrow's more affluent, more crowded world. And with the need for them comes the need for the men who can make them.

"Curiously, history records very few examples of regional master planning," says Pereira, "where not only the new towns but the interrelated land uses of the surrounding areas are planned together. Even today, most big planning projects consist either of creating a new community in a relative void--such as Brasilia--or replanning part of an existing city, as with the usual urban renewal project. The prospect of planning from scratch an entire complex within a major population center rather than hundreds of miles away from it--and to do it under private rather than governmental auspices--would seem to most planners an impossible dream.

"Well, we have that dream right here."

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