The classic image of Sea Ranch captures a series of timber-clad gables breaking like saw teeth through a sea of wild grass. The architecture is defined by its landscape: not the heat haze and pollution of L.A.'s sprawl, but the cold, wild coast of northern California which lies three hours beyond San Francisco.
Sea Ranch was influenced by two social themes: the optimism of post-War California and a burgeoning sense of environmental consciousness during the Sixties. You might say it began with a few well-heeled creatives who designed weekend retreats for themselves, far from the noise and hustle of the Bay Area, but it embodied wider changes in society.
The project was orchestrated by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, who selected a site on the ocean’s edge and drew up the masterplan in 1965. At that point, Sea Ranch consisted of rough grazing which had never been developed. Houses are clustered around shared open spaces, set back from the sea cliff’s edge, each of them clad in redwood and no higher than 16 feet. There are no streetlights, no lawns, and cars are deliberately hidden away. 
The community has its own shop, sports club, open-air swimming pool and even a 3000 foot airstrip. While private flying is popular in the US, the home of Cessna, Piper and Beechcraft, it's still the preserve of a fortunate 1%. That underlines Sea Ranch's exclusivity: these are not cheap holiday lodges, and even today there are only a few hundred permanent residents spread over several thousand acres. Driving from the centre of San Francisco to Sea Ranch up Route 1 takes around three hours; a flight from SFO (San Francisco International) to CA51 (Sea Ranch airfield) takes around 40 minutes in a Beech Bonanza, and I’m sure would be a pleasant way to get there.
Sea Ranch is also defined by what it isn't. It’s not tract housing, nor a gated community of McMansions, nor anything like Disney's town of Celebration. Halprin's strict design code, emphasis on shared space and credo of living harmoniously with Nature attracted a particular kind of person: to begin with, many were Arts graduates from the University of California. According to Becker and Fletcher’s book, many of them still live in the houses they built decades ago.
Several books have been published about Sea Ranch over the years, but this is the best overview I've seen. It's illustrated with a mixture of archive and contemporary photographs along with Halprin's design sketches. The site analysis diagrams, brought to life by coloured pencil rendering, explain the landscape concept very effectively. The text is in-depth, and the project's participants speak at length about the project's gestation and discuss its successes and failures.
As a result, The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism, includes the human interest, personal reminiscence and well-informed retrospective analysis needed to bring its subject matter alive. We learn something about the personalities – many of them most colourful characters – who have directed the Sea Ranch’s course for the past half-century.
Prestel has a broad architecture list, and The Sea Ranch was published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It's a quality piece of book production, a quarto hardback printed onto heavy art stock with glazed covers and a cloth spine. Graphically it captures the Modern spirit in which Sea Ranch was created.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch. Half a century later, Sea Ranch doesn’t quite look like Utopia. Halprin’s masterplan succeeded, but more slowly than he hoped. Sea Ranch is a rare 1960’s example of environmentally-conscious architecture, yet as an archetype for community creation, it failed. Like Siedlung Halen in Switzerland, it’s a unique experiment admired by architects – but difficult to replicate anywhere else, so you are left with the sense that The Sea Ranch was a beautiful anomaly when it was begun, and is even more so today in Trump's America.
The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism Joseph Becker, Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher Prestel ISBN: 978-3-7913-5784-3 (Hardcover) £45.00
