California’s Masterplans. Administration, Education and Architecture in a Cybernetic Climate, 1959–1964

In the span between the higher education policy study, “A Masterplan for Higher Education in California, 1960-1975 and the building of the UC Irvine campus (William Pereira Associates, 1961-65), this dissertation project examines the synergies between bureaucratic and architectural master plans for the higher education landscape in California around the mid-20^th century.

The project traces the history of a calculated future in the methodological overlaps of statistical and spatial planning based on projected data. Its architectural manifestation, the campus, is thereby understood less as a place of learning than as an environment that systematically sought to exemplify and undertake a “reprogramming” of a post-war society undergoing massive, tectonic social change.

Opened in 1965, in the midst of burgeoning student protests at West Coast universities, the UC Irvine project nevertheless became a relic of a cross-disciplinary planning euphoria that, quite literally, counted on being able to “master plan” utopia.