Model parking lots
Instead of commercial strips, the community offers a number of local shopping areas and three distinctive regional malls. An open-air mall, Fashion Island, in Newport Center, opened in 1967. In a 1980s redevelopment, its original Pereira design took on a more pedestrian-oriented, Mediterranean theme. The new design was by the popular shopping center architect Jon Jerde, with landscape architecture by SWA.
The all-important parking has been handled sensitively, with an exceptionally high level of design. The Fashion Island parking lots, an important part of the view from the surrounding high density, mixed-use areas, were extensively relandscaped with palm trees and new pedestrian promenades.
Market Place, a big box center designed by Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, straddles the border between Irvine and neighboring Tustin. Its parking lot is oasis-like in its planting, punctuated by white columns, pink triangular walls, and berms covered with coarse gravel. The landscape design was by POD and Kirby & Company.
The newest development, the entertainment-oriented Irvine Spectrum Center, is located at the intersection of the 5 and 405 freeways. It is designed around a looped pedestrian pathway that passes through spaces inspired by Moorish architecture.
Viewed from above, the mall's parking lot, which was planned in several phases, looks like an orchard. Its designers included landscape architects Burton Associates and architects RTKL.
As Irvine's highly successful business parks have been redeveloped and expanded, the earlier landscape dominated by one-story tilt-up concrete buildings has also been gradually replaced with more varied, campus-style office buildings and lush modern landscapes.
Open space
The building designs on the Irvine Ranch have often been at odds with current elite architectural norms, but the overall design has had popular appeal, in part because of the development's generous open space. "I like the newness," said one resident in an interview. "I like the fact that it's middle-class and clean and convenient and you can park your car."
The initial Irvine Company plans envisaged that the coastal areas would be developed mostly at very low densities, although with a string of higher density centers. Those plans changed with the 1972 ballot initiative that created the California Coastal Commission, which led the company to reduce its planned density.
In 1988, in response to another vote, city officials and the Irvine Company signed a memorandum of understanding that would lead to the transfer of development rights away from certain open space areas to areas considered ripe for higher density development.
Today, according to the company, some 44,000 acres of the ranch are protected as wildlife habitat, with 6,000 more in parks and open space. Company owner Bren has created a $30 million endowment for planning and management expenses to supplement public funds. This is an undoubted success story, although critics still complain that the company has not done enough in wetlands protection.
What density could do
Irvine was initially designed to be "the place where urban sprawl ends," an early approach to what we could now call smart growth. Woodbridge
Photo by Ann Forsyth
Although a car-centered town, Irvine seeks to accommodate pedestrians and cyclists, shown here at an intersection in the village of Westpark. Irvine's pedestrian paths are linked to the open space network (bottom).
(pop. 26,000), the signature company village of the 1970s, has a gross population density of 14.6 persons per acre — comparable on a larger scale to the village-level density in the new urbanist Kentlands in Maryland. More recent villages typically achieve higher density levels.
That density makes transit a real possibility. As far back as 1974, the city of Irvine general plan proposed reserving 80- to 150-foot rights-of-way on arterials for some sort of transit, possibly a monorail.
In the 1990s, the Orange County Transportation Authority put forth a plan for the Centerline light rail line, which would run into Irvine from the northern part of the county. Opposition from Irvine residents along the line has put the project on hold for now. At the moment, expanding the existing bus system is the best hope for adding transit between Irvine's intensely developed employment and commercial areas.
But even now, something of the futuristic vision of early plans remains. Commuters leaving (or catching) the San Diego-Los Angeles Amtrak train at the Irvine Transportation Center (in the Irvine Spectrum) can "share" an electric or hybrid car. Zev.Net (Zero Emission Vehicle Network Enabled Transport) is managed by U.C. Irvine's National Fuel Cell Research Center and the Institute of Transportation Studies in cooperation with several employers, the city of Irvine, and the Orange County Transportation Authority.
After four decades of intensive development, the Irvine Ranch today demonstrates how complex and difficult it is to provide a comprehensive alternative to sprawl, even with supportive developers and substantial design expertise. Still, its modernist, manicured planting, and its contrasting habitat areas and emerging mixed-use areas are the visual backbone of an important experiment in suburban design.
Ann Forsyth is the Dayton Hudson chair of urban design and the director of the Metropolitan Design Center at the University of Minnesota. Her book, Reforming Suburbia: The Planned Communities of Irvine, Columbia, and The Woodlands, will be published this year by the University of California Press.