Two ways to spotlight the idyllic architectural development on the Sonoma Coast

Along California’s Highway 1, past Bodega Bay and Jenner, 100 miles north of San Francisco, the rugged coastline is at times barely visible. Along the curving road, unpainted wood homes can be spotted through the trees and meadows. This part of the Northern California coast feels both earthy and otherworldly.

It is here that the Sea Ranch concept, a radical architecture experiment, aimed to become a model community with a commitment to “live lightly on the land.” It was conceived in the mid ’60s by developer Al Boeke with a group of architects, graphic designers and landscape architects. SFMOMA‘s exhibition “The Sea Ranch: Architecture, Environment, and Idealism” tells the story of this beacon of modernism using original architectural drawings and sketches, photography, and a full-scale replica of one of the first living spaces built there.

© SFMOMA

The exhibition focuses on the first few years of the Sea Ranch, when its idealism was the primary motivating factor in design decisions. For the exhibit, Becker and co-curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher wanted to find a way for museum visitors to experience the feeling of the Sea Ranch. This is why they decided to include the full-scale construction of a unit in Condominium 1. The unit, owned by Charles Moore, has been recreated with careful attention to detail. There’s even an Iwan Baan photograph of the Sea Ranch coastline and the Pacific Ocean.

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Esherick House
Esherick House - “There is a level of immersion that we are bringing people into,” says co-curator Joseph Becker. “And an experience of the materiality of the site in as much as we can do within the museum.” Becker and Fletcher worked with the Penn Archive, which hosts the archive of landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, and the Berkeley College of Environmental Design archive, which has Joseph Esherick and MLTW’s archived works. Drawings by Esherick document his initial analysis of the site. “Not just in terms of flora and fauna, but kind of a historical perspective on what is the human impact on a site,” explains Becker. “That helps root us in kind of a sensitivity toward the environment that the human scale is so small compared to the geological scale, which created this incredible landscape.” © SFMOMA