The Grassroots Origins of the DCRP

In the spring of 1 929 when I first entered this Old Ark - the original architecture building - never could I have imagined receiving such a tribute on this September day of 1997 for my role in launching the DCRP. I was then a young man of eighteen fresh from Lowell High School in crowded San Francisco. This inviting shingled building, designed by Bernard Maybeck only a few years before, stood as a product of the Arts and Crafts movement. Breaking with the rigid confines of the Parisian Beaux Arts doctrine, it became for me a pivotal point for understanding the campus as a whole and thus shaping my identity as a person. In developing my own thinking about local environmental planning, I learned how relating the built environment to its own unique native landscape served as an invaluable context for nurturing creativity in the minds of young people. The social and physical environment of the Bay Area at the time provided an invaluable context for those of us building the DCRP in those early years.