Biography | Raymond Watson — The Ark on Hearst Avenue Where He Learned to Plan Cities

People treat Raymond Watson as a Disney chairman who arrived already running a ranch company.

He trained as an architect first, in a brown-shingled courtyard building on the north edge of the Berkeley campus.

North Gate Hall, nicknamed the Ark, housed California's first school of architecture from 1906.

John Galen Howard designed it. Walter Steilberg later added the library wing.

Watson was born in Seattle on 4 October 1926, the son of Olive Lorentzon, a Norwegian schoolteacher, and Leslie Watson, a Scots-Irish carpenter.

After his mother died, the family moved to Oakland in 1934. He was raised by his grandmother and spent summers at state parks where his father worked.

Near the end of the Second World War he entered the Army Air Corps cadet program and took prerequisite courses at the University of Montana.

Then he enrolled at Berkeley.

He took a B.A. in architecture in 1951 and a master's in 1953, both from the school that still sat in the Ark.

William Wurster had been dean since 1950 and was already pushing the curriculum off Beaux-Arts drawing and toward modern planning.

The College of Environmental Design would be founded in 1959. Its concrete home, Wurster Hall, would not open until 1964, more than a decade after Watson left.

The courtyard he worked in is still there. The building is now the Graduate School of Journalism and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

His first job after the master's was planning a civic center for Stockton, in the Donald Haines office. He also worked in the firm's San Francisco rooms.

In 1960 he left Northern California for the Irvine Company's 93,000-acre ranch in Orange County.

The blank page he had trained for in this hall was about to become a city.

Photo: Sanfranman59, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons