Architectural Record 2015-04

Lyndon Turnbull Whitaker (MLTW), whose design for the
famous Condominium One brought them wide acclaim. Just
the idea of a condo in the country was radical; the original
plans called for others, but this 10-unit building was the
only one realized. Designed for a high, exposed outcropping,
the building is a series of strong, clustered orthogonal
forms—but with shed roofs—that march in a procession
down a slope overlooking the sea. Built around a courtyard,
no two condos are alike. In his essential book The Sea Ranch:
Fifty Years of Architecture, Landscape, Place, and Community on
the Northern California Coast (2014, with photography by Jim
Alinder), former MLTW principal Donlyn Lyndon, FAIA,
describes how he and his partners—Charles Moore, William
Turnbull, and Richard Whitaker—experimented with the
design of the complex volumes by stacking sugar cubes
from the office coffee service. The exterior was clad in
vertical redwood boards, left to weather like the old ranch
barns, while the multilevel light-filled interiors, with their
stunning views, revealed the heavy timber structure in
ways that were both powerful and playful.
In contrast to the rustic majesty of Condominum One,
which won the AIA Twenty-five Year Award in 1991, Esherick
designed six modest houses, in a loose composition along
a sheltering hedgerow in the meadow. With roofs sloping
into the wind, they are deceptively simple. The smallest,
he built for himself: its footprint is a mere 875 square
feet, but with the ingenious creation of multilevel spaces,
it feels both spacious and cozy. In a laudatory article about
the Sea Ranch in November 1965, architectural record
described how the bioclimatic studies of wind and solar
radiation had inspired the structures’ design.
Yet Esherick’s houses were a little out of step with the
era. While some critics applauded the simple wood-clad
timbered dwellings—cousins of the Bay Area’s regional
modernism—they were hardly considered cutting-edge. As
the late critic Donald Canty points out in an essay in Lyndon’s
book, these buildings of natural materials, designed in
response to the environment, were at odds with the sophisticated
“object” houses of high modernism. Canty reports
that a colleague at Architectural Forum, where he was then an
editor, dismissed Esherick’s work as “stick architecture.”
Not that Halprin and his colleagues would have been
likely to care about such criticism. In the early days of the
Sea Ranch, their utopian ideals were still playing out.
The communal values—with residents coming together
for consensus on common issues—were expressed in the
interdisciplinary workshops that Halprin and his wife,
the choreographer Anna Halprin, now 94, held at the Sea
Ranch, where the couple built a house, designed with Moore
and Turnbull. Anna created dances that involved ordinary
people to whom she gave movement instructions, and in a
project called Driftwood Village in 1968, participants
danced around simple structures on the Sea Ranch beach.
Photographs documenting that event and others like it
were shown in an exhibition at the Graham Foundation in
Chicago last year and make the Sea Ranch look like a
countercultural summer camp for grown-ups.
But there was a paradox. For all the open, egalitarian
philosophy behind the community, there was, inevitably, the
scent of elitism wafting through the Bishop pines. Not only
was it composed of second homes, but it was caught up in a
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