Alfred Boeke—Vice President of Oceanic Properties—had a San Franciscan architect named Lawrence Halprin design a housing plan at Rancho Del Mar, later named Sea Ranch.

It was a 5,000-acre sheep ranch 120 miles north of San Francisco. From Fort Ross, damp oak palisades and redwood mews fringe a single-lane highway. These, with an Orthodox chapel here and a blini hut there, are relics of the territory staked when the north Pacific coast held the Russian fur trade. The wind is cold and full and strips the sea from sea. The light moves as though under water, and spent grass yields to itself. The clouds’ azure is shot to gold, and sun shot to froth in the wave’s mouth—swollen over water, warm in the clear, an unstill trace in thinning air.

The land now is as open and bare, baring cypresses to buffer the wind. There is always wind. There is foam, forest and pasture everywhere and in one sight. At a glance, the homes are scarcely distinguishable from local barns—boxes spare, grand and wooden, internally divided with unframed lookouts, sloping roofs, appended sheds. They cluster with hedgerows and perch with sea-cliffs. I have seen and been in Chartres and Saint Mark’s, Saint Peter’s and Notre Dame. Not until Sea Ranch did I know architecture to be as much a form of thought as a plan of action. It is a paradise at the world’s end.

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The lure of Sea Ranch is not a matter of the picturesque—a wind-chapped cypress gnarled against azure—but of the rhythmic—from sea-froth the lighter and denser, from hard grass the rising and yielding. The logic of its design is that of the landscape. The process is the product, accident the inevitability. Forms built echo forms accreted and eroded: a sheared edge unbroken in the hedgerows, hewn bedrock on the sea-cliffs. The houses endure a unity not only aesthetic but practical: a single, slant-roof plane deflects wind and leaks little, bay windows block wind and scatter filtered rays where dust motes rise and fall. Forms speak of their place, not time. The relevant trajectory is a geologic one. What holds the land echoes its course.

This core of Halprin’s design—that hands carve by nature’s course—is clear in his earlier study, The Gardens of the High Sierra (1961). In it, accretion and erosion have the inevitability of a cycle and the preciousness of accident. Wind and water hew a mountain lake into “a garden of movement in static form, whose outlines imply the process of change.” There is design—not merely a design—in smooth water over smooth granite, a blotchy rattler under blotchy flowers. Natural form is, in process and material, the reference for built form.

Harsh conditions at Rancho del Mar required ecological design. There, from his window over years, Halprin drew in sheaves a windswept cove. Even these sketches hold what was central for him—the interdependence of built and natural form, cormorants huddled on hewn stone and cedar frames huddled amid cedars. He knew ecology simply as this: the mutual relation of life with its environment.

Halprin’s team made a two-month geographical, hydrological and climatological site analysis before del Mar was bought for $2.7 million in December. The tightness of this schedule prefigured the conflict between Boeke’s desire to build an environmentally-informed project and his desire to recoup his investment in it. Halprin desired only to plan “with nature, rather than ignore her.” He worked three years and documented the work three years later in The RSVP Cycles (1969).

To address natural extremities, Halprin recruited Richard Reynolds. Reynolds was a graduate of UC Berkeley’s geography department who, under Carl Sauer, analyzed extant plants as signs of human land use. He observed, as sheep grazed in the leeward side of hedgerows, a microclimate where hardy plants were colonized by the tender, which in turn drew sheep. Wind was most easily controlled, and most of his Sea Ranch reports are about deflecting it: flow charts, sketches of lank grass reeling, physiological notes—windward, piqued by a steady breeze; leeward, eased by a curling eddy. No part of the landscape is static. Branches arcing in a gale move even hedgerows leeward over time. He writes that nature’s spatiotemporal patterns can serve as models for human use of the land.

For lot layouts, Reynolds used a bioclimatic analysis outlined by the architect Victor Olgyay in Design with Climate (1963). It is as clear as it is ignored that an environment cannot provide physical balance unless this balance is physically felt. A stressful climate requires the body to expend energy to maintain its temperature. Olgyay wrote of human dwellings as balanced as the human body. Good design did not begin with form, but with formation over time. Perfect design was physiological homeostasis.

To correlate human experience with measured fact—air temperature and flow, metabolism, relative humidity and radiant energy—Olgyay drew nomographs. Somewhere between the limits of life, sunstroke and frostbite, was a calibrated lapse which Olgyay called “the perfect spot to sit in a lawn chair with legs crossed, smoking a pipe and reading the newspaper.” Divergence from this comfort required environmental manipulation.

Sea Ranch, mapped onto a nomograph, exceeds the human comfort zone. Its economic success required an environment friendly to lawn chairs, pipes, and papers without end. Reynolds studied the effect of topography upon the size and shape of eddies. Halprin designed aerodynamic grading plans, exhaustive to the point of analyzing the wind deflection of various fence shapes. Halprin’s analysis of form in terms of its formation informed Reynold’s analysis of form in terms of its function.

Reynolds understood land as his mentor Sauer did: change alone is fundamental to its form. Carl Sauer, The Morphology of Landscape (1925): “The characteristic common to all landscapes is change.” A landscape was its nature—climate, geology, topology—and its culture—population, housing, production. Land had parallel courses of its use across space and time, and all use was cyclical—hotter, colder, sparser, denser. Sauer read Oswald Spengler, who wrote of cultures declining in inevitable stages of youth, stability and waste. And so a recursive view of land: from rise to ruin, natural and cultural changes parallel and inform each other.

Reynolds saw progress as the imposition of new ways of using land, natural and cultural, upon past patterns. Sauer’s method is as evident in Reynolds as his pessimism. Reynolds’ topology, hydrology and soil maps begin with ancient indigenous controlled-burn methods and end with future erosion, deforestation and over-grazing. “You do not necessarily have to conform to the processes at work,” he wrote in 1966, “but at least, if you choose to go against them, you are in a better position to estimate the consequences and costs.” Design was a matter of risk management.

Accordingly, Halprin designed along interdependent trajectories of risk. Although the “where” and “when” of a landscape was a matter of its natural change, its “why,” “what” and “how” was a cultural exchange “predicated toward dynamic equilibrium,” he wrote in The RSVP Cycles. Halprin, as much as his colleagues, built according to natural form. He expanded the parameters of nature, however, to include “people, their actions, and their chance encounters with natural processes.” The designer is conditioned by his object. Design dealt equally with “things and the relationship between things.” Good design did not concern “what exists at any given moment in time” but the course of this existence “in constant motion, constant change.”

Halprin intended to build the structure of change itself. Architecture was only as logical as it was ecological, and only as ecological as it sustained exchange between the alive and unalive. Architecture did not control but regulate this exchange. Architecture was the mitigation of environmental ruin. Because the natural order of things is change, however, it means disorder in time. How was one to build a balance of body, building, and land? How to couple human with natural change short of the ruin implied by this change?

Halprin used a scheme described by the urban architect Christopher Alexander. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form (1964), Alexander wrote of design as a set of nested contexts, and change as a matter of their disturbance. Good design squared a form with its context. Form means the object which the designer changes, and context means the outside forces which change it. The context is that—wind, water, cold—which “puts demand” on form. As an orderly environment is only meaningful when felt as human comfort, change is only meaningful when felt as disturbance. Design begins with the observation of disturbance. It aims to balance form and context, a rose in the steel dust.

In charts he named “ecoscores,” Halprin drew relationships between form and context in terms of disturbance. One ecoscore relates five timelines—“Climate, Vegetation, Animals, Human Culture, and Sea Ranch Culture”—from a geologic past, through the felt present, to a possible future. They form a spiral of temporally distinct, spatially same rhythms. Alone, each timeline has its own rhythm of adjustment to chaos. Together, the chaos waxes and wanes for a few millennia. Halprin’s use of Reynolds’ analysis, Olgyay’s balance, Sauer’s succession and Alexander’s disturbance is a matter of genius. Short-term financial cycles unfold and inflame. Exponential human land use, parabolic animal extinctions. An economic recession—a population boom—and plant patterns tear jagged.

A spiral ecoscore marks the temporal fact of what is and the possible course beyond what is, whether toward harmony or ruin. The path evolves as its parts evolve.

Time is the recursive loop which joins land use to its impact. In the first and last, geologic time is the metric for change. On this scale, no human act mirrors the past. In a flash and ten centuries, the world’s present form is merely what caused it in some earlier time. Human action is where the spiral diverges from its geometric ideal. The land is alive to the extent that this ruin is minimized. The ecoscore represents the course of this ruin, but it’s less controllable as more variables are involved. How to know a life in full, and still know how to change it?

The heart of Halprin’s ecoscore is a tension binding stability and change. It leaves his question of ideal land use unsettled. Its aim, however, is mathematically clear: a harmony of plants, animals and people, all along the same course of change. Self-organization is the metric of natural form. Human need is the metric of built form, but the interdependence of people and their environment is the means and end. At Sea Ranch, as nowhere else, Halprin mirrored given form in built form. There lives here that covenant immanent to life, a yielding order to one’s place and time.

There is an order which affirms the thing and an order which yields it to its circumstance. The cypress burls are crystalline; they give—to winds, to mouths, to waters. Money grows and wastes too. Insofar as it’s more valuable than the paper which bears it, it’s not matter. Still, it’s hard to recall that, in money’s case, the sense of inevitable progress is merely a sense. Halprin’s order yielded. Boeke rejected his cluster-housing plans. With the aid of Sonoma County, all sites became single-family lots.

A recession in the early ‘80s stopped a decade of building. While Sea Ranch grew from a sheep ranch to 10 coastal miles of second homes, the California Coastal Commission had formed. It wanted, press releases said, to save the coast for children unborn. Both sides wanted to save money and the land and neither saved either. The Commission sued Sea Ranch for violation of public access and affordable housing regulations. Negotiations stalled until the state legislated a compromise in 1984. To recoup costs, prices were higher and lots were halved.

Halprin called this suburban iteration of Sea Ranch “a place without a heart.” Barbara Stauffacher Solomon, a San Franciscan who painted the publicity graphics for what may have been the first housing development with its own T-shirt, bought a house on Stinson Beach 100 miles south, justifying it to a reporter with only this: “At Stinson people can walk along the beach.” Boeke said of the place “Am I proud? That’s not a word I use much.” 

The marketing brochures had thick-beamed honey cedar and redwood shingles and the sea gleamed through plate-glass windows and the text said it was not for everyone. Still, those who knew the text was not for them spoke of “Sea Ranch time,” when three days there were a week somewhere else. The rhythms of human life were not comfortable but easy, harsh and easy, wind and more wind. Nature meant, for Halprin, the force opposing hands could not control. It was either too broad or too bleak, for Sea Ranch was not exempt. How to meet ruin with poise?

After every visit, before the 120-mile drive home, I drive to the chapel. My first trip to Sea Ranch was a gift. We stayed three days in a cabin on the shore. On the fourth we came here, and each were stunned that the other had nothing to say. We studied each other for an hour; it was a year before we spoke again. He told me he had written a piece since then about a siren charming the wind. I asked him whether sirens did not sing when it was windless. Only to ruin, he said. I have a memory of the beauty of that day which I try each time to recreate, but I can never maintain it apart from this daze. Here the stretch of moving silence: in time, swept sea, streaked earth, scoured stone. Beyond it, do we simply yield?

An artist named James Hubbell wrought the Sea Ranch Chapel in 1985. It is a body out of Ovid, some life between a peacock and a windswept tree. Its foundation is a pile of stones picked from near meadows, hemmed by flowers, blending into wild grass. Its sides are formed of redwood blown and molded as a shell. A cedar roof bears the curve unbroken, green copper winging here, bronze spires cresting there as cooling storm-whipped molten amber. 

The inside ceiling is plastered with white broad petals, half-carved with flowers and half-set with shells. The floor is rough stone, smooth where feet and hands and light have filled. The altar, walls and benches are of redwood that seems still to rise from earth. No part outweighs the other. From a red clay fountain wind melts into silence, silence into running water. There is a green pool on the rock’s face, and a smell of sun above the water’s still, and a sea-mist thinning the pool. The sea crests in the far, half a form out of nothing. Every other moment there’s a clear cut of wind and a beating of leaves in shadow.

Hubbell intended, from roof to base, a wave. It seems an undone spiral. Light is drawn from what is given. Stained-glass windows swath bright from floor to roof. Emerald, plum and gold light washes and dapples the wood, the earth and the ore. There are sloping double-doors of teak and sloping handles of half-worn bronze. There are wrought-iron prayer screens, burnished chandeliers, mosaics jeweled in whorls and eddies. 

There is a sign which states that this nondenominational space is for prayer and meditation, and a sign which asks guests to respect its sanctity according to the guidelines of the not-for-profit Sea Ranch Chapel Foundation. The air is that of chapels; the corner gloom, clear light under molten amber. It differs only in that nothing is denied, no form raised above the rest. Finger-, foot- and face-worn grooves rut the altar’s grain. From dawn to every sunset since its first, the chapel has been open. The still is never rift. If mere form can preserve any thing, it preserves this. If I were the marrying type I should like to be married here, on a windy day.

Good design equally concerns things and their relations. One never fully shakes oneself of the conviction that if only you write the fact or build the fact, it will stand for you in the end. If form is the process of formation, there is nothing in the world so solid as Sea Ranch—some living, all moving—and nothing which sooner melts into wind. Wind is itself the form: in time, swept sea, streaked earth, scoured stone. This, enduring here: no place endures. It is a paradise at the world’s end.