News

Diversity Recruitment and General Open House

Saturday October 14, 2006; 8:30am to 1:30pm

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by Peter Bosselmann, Jennifer Brooke, Louise Mozingo, Deni Ruggeri, and Michael Southworth.

The February 2005 reopening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art was marked by an exhibition, “Groundswells,” that also represented a new beginning for the field of landscape studies. The show, on the sixth floor of the reconfigured MoMA tower, sought to inform visitors of the potential for art, culture, and active new uses on urban land that has been abused, wasted, or simply passed over.

A few weeks later, a mid-March conference with a similar theme took place at the University of California at Berkeley. Organized by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, its purpose was to collect interdisciplinary perspectives on “The Future Metropolitan Landscape” and to help formulate the mission for a new metropolitan study center. Such a center would be part of a new program initiated by the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and integrated with work by research groups in Social Sciences, Natural Resources, Engineering, and Geography.

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LAEP Colloquium Fall 2005:

Diversity Recruitment Day

Saturday November 5, 2005
8:30am to 3:30pm
College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley
112 Wurster Hall, Bancroft & College

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Francis Violich 1911 – 2005

Professor Emeritus of City Planning and Landscape Architecture, dies

By Mary Anne Clark, Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

Francis (Fran) Violich, Professor Emeritus in two departments, City and Regional Planning, and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, passed away on Sunday, August 21, 2005 in his home on Tamalpais Road at the age of 94. He was comfortable during his last hours and his room was filled with the afternoon light of a beautiful August day in Berkeley.   His family of five children, Antonio, Carmen, Francesca, Frano and Mario, their spouses and his grandchildren surrounded him.  Fran’s wife, Mariantonia S. Violich, preceded him in death in 1989.   His son Antonio reported that, at the time of Fran's passing, the Campanile was tolling 9:00PM.   The College of Environmental Design has lost one of its wonderful founding visionaries.

Born to Croatian parents in San Francisco on March 16, 1911, Violich was raised in a home “but a few hundred feet on the south side of Golden Gate Park”.   He acquired his interest in landscape architecture through his mother’s passion for gardening and her “innate affinity for the environment”.   After graduating from Lowell High School in the City, he took his undergraduate work at UC Berkeley where he learned how to understand the environment as a whole, the natural environment, and the man-made environment. In 1934, he graduated from the Department of Landscape Architecture with a Bachelor of Science degree.

In 1936, Violich was awarded a fellowship for graduate studies in city planning at Harvard and M.I.T. where he acquired a greater understanding of the social component in design and how to develop urban places to resolve the problems of social inequity.   His study tours of Europe and Yugoslavia in 1937 and in Latin America in 1941-42 established a multi-cultural approach to his California-based professional practice, teaching, research and community activities.   In 1941, he returned to UC Berkeley where he was offered a joint appointment in Landscape Architecture and City Planning.   As a faculty member, he specialized in comprehensive approaches to land use planning and urban design at the local level with special reference to the relationships between social and cultural concerns.   He was chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning from 1962-1964.

Through the late 1940’s and 1950’s, Violich led in the formation of Telesis, an interdisciplinary environmental group with social concerns in the San Francisco Bay Area, gained from collective professional experience in the Roosevelt Era.   The public oriented initiatives of the group introduced a progressive status to city planning in San Francisco.   This visionary group of Bay Area city planners, architects, and landscape architects included Vernon DeMars, Corwin Mocine, Geraldine Knight Scott, Jack Kent and Garrett Eckbo.   The Telesis group advocated rational interdisciplinary planning of the environment at all scales from region to dwelling.   This was the groundwork for establishment of the Department of City and Regional Studies at UC Berkeley in 1948 and, ten years later, helped to pave the way to the formation of a new college, the College of Environmental Design (containing the Departments of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Visual Studies, and City and Regional Planning).   This new interdisciplinary philosophy toward planning was ahead of its time.   In 2001, the American Planning Association gave national historical landmark status to the Telesis group designating it as “The first volunteer-based group to bring multiple fields together successfully in a comprehensive approach to environmental development in a regional context”.

In June 1976, Violich retired after 27 years service to the University.   At his retirement, Donald L. Foley, Chairman of the Dept. of City and Regional Planning, stated, “We would particularly stress his broader contribution to the College of Environmental Design and to the campus in his persistent advocacy of a comprehensive approach to environmental design…   In his teaching and administrative service… and in his own professional practice and research work, he actively personified the interdisciplinary approach that also served as a model for the college.

“We would also stress his distinctive contribution in promoting interest in Latin American planning and in exerting a pervasive influence on the character of urban planning and environmental design in Latin America.   Single-handedly, he proved remarkably effective in attracting and advising Latin American students; one out of every twelve graduate majors in City and Regional Planning during the past twenty-five years has been from Latin America, along with additional Latin American students in Landscape Architecture.   These students, in turn, provided over the years a surprisingly influential leadership corps and brought into being a lively network in which Professor Violich has retained an esteemed place as adviser and friend.   He has served as planning consultant to Sao Paulo and Caracas, and as adviser to educational programs in Venezuela and Chile, to the Peace Corps, the Pan American Union, the Ford Foundation and other organizations concerned with urban planning in Latin America.

“Throughout all of this, Francis Violich has brought an intense commitment: a persistent belief that we can improve the environment around us and that we can improve the environmental design processes by which we intervene.   This commitment brings enthusiasm and conviction to his teaching and to his daily activities in the College.   An intensely human and warm individual, he continues to befriend countless students, colleagues, co-professionals and visitors who chance into his orbit.”

Violich's first book, Cities of Latin America: Planning and Housing in the South was published in 1944. His second book, Urban Planning for Latin America: the challenge for Metropolitan Growth was published in 1987. This drew on his forty years of professional and educational work relating US methods to Latin America needs as their cities evolved at an unprecedented rate into vast metropolitan areas.

Fran Violich was the recipient of many outstanding awards.   In 1992, the American Institute of Planners designated him a National Planning Pioneer.   In 1997, he was recognized as co-founder of the Department of City and Regional Planning.   In 1999, the College and its alumni honored him with a Distinguished Alumnus Award in recognition of outstanding accomplishment.

His book, The Bridge to Dalmatia: a Search for the Meaning of Place released from Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998, relates this theme to post-war reconstruction and planning of urban places in Croatia, and particularly on its Dalmatian coast.   In an interview with Vladimir P. Goss, Violich recalls, “ It occurred to me that my father and my grandparents had built a cultural bridge from Dalmatia to California. There came post-cards and letters, then I myself went "across the bridge." The concept of the bridge, in my mind, applies to the foreign people who come to the U.S. and bring us their cultural concepts and in that way both enrich and take away from the Anglo-Saxon culture which is more materialistic and individualist, breaking up families and shifting the economic gain into the hands of the few.”

The book is a culmination of his research during trips to Dalmatia that began as early as 1937 and continued between 1968 and 1990, including a Fulbright Fellowship in 1979 at the University of Zagreb. The Bridge to Dalmatia “ is both an environmental eco-history and an attempt to understand the urban anthropology of Dalmatia, a region inheriting and living multicultural experience over at least two thousand years. It is both a scholarly and literary interpretation of Dalmatian environmental cultural identity in the Croatian millennial community.

This work has led to establishing in 1996 an active exchange program between the urban planning departments of UC Berkeley and the University of Zagreb.   Fran said at the time, “I have established a fund called the "Dalmatian Fellowship Fund" making a small deposit at the University and I have decided to leave a certain amount from my estate, which is not all that great, that would go to that fund, as well as the royalties from the book. We made a formal announcement about that fund through the University and we are welcoming contributions from other people. My Dalmatian research collection will be left to the University and anybody coming from Croatia would be able to use that unique material”.

In recent years, Violich has played an active role in participatory planning in the City of Berkeley, focusing on its General Plan, on Downtown, the Waterfront and the restoration of Parks to their ecological origins through volunteer action.   He has also been involved as an activist in landscape and planning issues on the Berkeley campus and on San Francisco’s Embarcadero Freeway replacement and redesign of the Ferry Building Plaza.

Soon the College of Environmental Design will be preparing a more detailed tribute to Fran and his contributions to the College, the campus, and the larger community.   In remembering Fran Violich, Dean Harrison Fraker said, “Fran's life is a reminder that we stand on the shoulders of very special human beings”.

In remembrance, donations can be made to the Francis Violich Dalmatian Fellowship Fund c/o the Department of City and Regional Planning, 228 Wurster Hall, Berkeley, CA   94720-1850, Attention: Malla Hadley, Management Services Officer.