About

The Project

This project was funded by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) Access to Historical Records: Archival Projects grant program.

The Environmental Design Archives (EDA) at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB)  collaborated with The Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania School of Design (PennDesign) to digitize images from collections that highlight the development of The Sea Ranch, a breakthrough example of environmentally sensitive design that continues to grow in influence and relevance to architects and the public at large.

The 12-month project, Journey to the Sea Ranch (commencing September 1, 2017), has resulted in this interactive virtual collection documenting the unique and prescient design and development of The Sea Ranch, through the inclusion of digitized primary sources including: drawings, photographs, essential documents, and ephemera, from the holdings of the EDA collections of William Turnbull, Jr./MLTW, Joseph Esherick (EHDD), Marquis & Stoller, Dmitri Vedensky, and Barbara Stauffacher Solomon; and drawings, notebooks, moving images, photographs, and project files from the Lawrence Halprin Collection at PennDesign. The EDA and Architectural Archives are incredibly grateful to the donors who have made these collections possible. Using Omeka as a platform, this virtual collection portal encourages users to interact with the development of The Sea Ranch through the rich and diverse holdings of the EDA and UPenn creating a robust research experience.

Please use this site as an educational resource. The EDA and UPenn created this site to help make archival materials that are separated geographically more accessible to researchers. Images that appear on this site cannot be reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder. For questions, including those regarding image permissions, please contact the following:

Environmental Design Archives, University of California, Berkeley - designarchives@berkeley.edu

Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania - allirose@design.upenn.edu

Project Team

Emily Vigor, Digital and Collections Archivist, Environmental Design Archives, University of California Berkely

William Whitaker, Curator, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

Heather Isbell Schumacher, Archivist, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

Allison Olsen, Digital Archivist, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania

Developers

Agile Humanities worked with the EDA and UPenn to create the design of this site. Agile Humanities specializes in open-source development, design themes and platforms, model and migration of data, creates custom apps, modules, tools, extensions, and plugins, and recirculates code through their public GitHub repository. For this project, they modified two open-source tools to use on the Omeka S platform: StorymapJS and TimelineJS. These plugins are available to download at their GitHub site. For more information about their work, visit http://agilehumanities.ca/

Related News

Landscape Architecture Magazine

SF MoMA , Architecture, Environment, and Idealism (on display December 22, 2018- April 28, 2019)

Oral Histories of Sea Ranch, Curbed