Lifestyle
Donlyn Lyndon, Last Surviving Creator of the Sea Ranch, Dies at 90
Donlyn Lyndon was a year or two out of architecture school when he and a few of his Princeton classmates set up what they called a “weekend practice” in Berkeley, Calif. They all had day jobs; Mr. Lyndon’s was teaching architecture.
It was the early 1960s, and the members of the group were, as the critic Robert Campbell put it, dropouts from Modernism, the orthodoxy of the moment. They shared a belief in a more humane and flexible architecture, one that allowed for the sensibilities of the people who would inhabit their buildings and that acknowledged the particular landscapes those buildings would inhabit.
They had been in business for only about an hour, Mr. Lyndon later joked, when they were invited to collaborate on an unusual project.
An architect turned developer named Al Boeke had envisioned a new kind of community on 5,200 acres of a former sheep ranch overlooking the Pacific Ocean, a few hours north of San Francisco — with buildings shaped by, and in deference to, the wild, windswept landscape.
Mr. Boeke hired Lawrence Halprin, the landscape architect who would later be celebrated for his work on Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco and many other urban plazas and parks; Joseph Esherick, an established Bay Area architect; and, at Mr. Halprin’s suggestion, Mr. Lyndon and his “weekend practice” partners, Charles Moore, William Turnbull Jr. and Richard Whitaker, who used their initials to name their new firm, MLTW.
The architects’ job was to design prototypes for buildings that others could follow — but they were suggestions, not prescriptions, Mr. Lyndon often said. The site was breathtaking, a sweep of meadowland that extended to the bluffs along a 10-mile stretch of coastline divided by hedgerows of half-century-old cypress trees.
It was Mr. Halprin’s radical idea to nestle some of the structures against the hedgerows and leave the meadows — in developer’s terms, the prime real estate — untouched. Mr. Esherick’s firm sketched out a clutch of diminutive, low-slung houses clad in redwood shingles with shed roofs tucked into a line of cypress.
MLTW’s assignment was to create something bolder, to show how larger structures could adapt to more exposed land; their site was a promontory with no shelter from the elements.
They designed a condominium building of 10 connected dwellings. Although it was a second-home community, their intention was to craft a kind of village, with common areas like the open meadows and other spaces that encouraged connections among neighbors.
The Sea Ranch, as the larger development would be called, was conceived, Mr. Lyndon wrote, as “a limited partnership — not a marriage — between the buildings and the land.”
He died on April 5 at his home there, his daughter Laura Lyndon said, almost two months after the death of his wife of 63 years, the artist Alice Wingwall. He was 90.
What he and his colleagues created was a stunning departure for its time: a collection of small, loft-like “houses” made from rough-hewn redwood planks, with enormous windows that framed the views, unified by a sloping shed roof to deflect the wind. It paid homage to the barns of the area with its post-and-beam construction and unpainted vertical cladding.
Though it had the unlovely name of Condominium One — they imagined other such structures would follow; they did not — what they built became an “icon of American architecture,” as the critic Paul Goldberger wrote in The New York Times in 1997, when Mr. Turnbull died. (It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2005.)
Condominium One had the effect of raising a finger to the glass-and-steel boxes of the Modernist canon. It became a destination for generations of architectural pilgrims, with its funky, relaxed aesthetic serving as an inspiration for a new California style that would be replicated in ski and beach houses across the country.
Herbert Muschamp, writing in The Times in 1993, when Mr. Moore died, said that the group had elevated “the form of the simple shed to architectural grandeur.”
Mr. Esherick died in 1998; Mr. Halprin, in 2009; Mr. Boeke, in 2011; and Mr. Whitaker, in 2021.
Mr. Lyndon, who became a prominent academic and author, leading the architecture departments at the University of Oregon, M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley, was the last living member of the Sea Ranch gang, a bearded elder and longtime steward of the ethos and ideals they set forth.
“They were more like a band than an office,” Kevin Keim, the director of the Charles Moore Foundation in Austin, said of the members of MLTW in an interview. “They complemented each other in all kinds of ways. They often said their design mode was to sit at a round table with only one pencil between them, and if your idea faltered, you handed it to the next guy.” (The story, he allowed, may have been apocryphal.)
Mary Griffin, an architect who studied with Mr. Lyndon at M.I.T. and went on to marry and work with Mr. Turnbull, said: “Donlyn was the intellectual. He built with words.”
Like many great bands, they soon broke up — in their case, after their initial work at the Sea Ranch was completed, in 1965. Not because of any discord, but because other opportunities beckoned. Mr. Lyndon headed to Oregon, and then Cambridge, Mass., finally returning to Berkeley in 1978.
With his former colleague Mr. Moore and another co-author, Gerald Allen, he wrote “The Place of Houses” (1974), a gentle anti-manifesto that did not prescribe one style over another. It was a plain-spoken, poetic guide to how to think about making a home — the order of rooms, the placement of windows — using examples from a Japanese teahouse, Palladian villas and, yes, the Sea Ranch, places that were touchstones for the authors and examples of shapes and spaces that made people feel good. (Mr. Lyndon loved a bay window, and nooks to curl up in.)
Some critics saw the book as a paean to nostalgia, but others praised its humanism and lack of pretense. Jane Holtz Kay of The Nation called it “a consciousness raiser for houses.” Mr. Campbell of The Boston Globe described it as “a cleareyed blast at conventional wisdom of every sort on the subject of houses.”
As Mr. Lyndon and his co-authors wrote: “Anyone who cares enough can create a house of great worth — no anointment is required. If you care enough you just do it. You bind the goods and trappings of your life together with your dreams to make a place that is uniquely your own. In doing so, you build a semblance of the world you know, adding it to the community that surrounds you.”
Donlyn Lyndon was born on Jan. 7, 1936, in Detroit. His mother, Dorothea (Zentgrebe) Lyndon, was an educator. His father, Maynard Lyndon, was an architect who chose his eldest son’s first name for its euphony with their surname, creating what Donlyn — who never answered to Don — approvingly called “a syllabic palindrome.”
Donlyn won a scholarship to Princeton, where he studied architecture, earning his bachelor’s degree in 1957 and his master’s in 1959. He met Alice Atkinson, an artist, at Berkeley; they married in 1963.
When she began to go blind in her 30s because of a condition called retinitis pigmentosa, she turned from sculpture to photography. In 1980, she changed her surname to Wingwall, inspired by the broken wing of a stone angel on a building in Rome. “I have a broken wing, too,” she said. (Mr. Lyndon embraced it: “What does Wingwall think?” was a common refrain in their household.)
The house Mr. Lyndon built for them at the Sea Ranch was decorated in her favorite colors: orange, yellow and red, the last color she was able to see.
In addition to their daughter Laura, Mr. Lyndon is survived by another daughter, Audrey Lyndon; a son, Andrew; five grandchildren; a brother, Maynard; and a sister, Jo Lyndon.
Mr. Lyndon was the author, with Mr. Moore, of “Chambers for a Memory Palace” (1994), an architectural world tour and epistolary dialogue between two lions of architecture about the design of places they loved. Mr. Lyndon’s history of the place he loved most, “The Sea Ranch: Fifty Years of Architecture, Landscape, Place and Community on the Northern California Coast,” with photos by Jim Alinder, was published in 2004 and revised in 2013.
There are now more than 1,800 houses at the Sea Ranch, at least 10 of which Mr. Lyndon had a hand in designing, though it did not exactly evolve into the environmental utopia its creators envisioned.
A design committee still reviews all new construction and landscaping, but as development has intensified, the houses have grown larger. Climate change has brought additional challenges: finding building materials that are fire-safe, and firescaping the land, particularly the hedgerows, which are dying off.
“Place, and its nurture,” Mr. Lyndon and Mr. Allen wrote in the revised edition of “The Place of Houses,” published in 2000, “remains an essential breeding ground for civic virtue. The sustenance of our democratic republic, we believe, demands it.”
Goth Shakira wears a Blumarine jacket, vintage Jean Paul Gaultier top from Wild West Social House, Jane Wade bra and Ariel Taub earrings.
My ex-boyfriend, whom I just got out of a relationship with, had a pure heart and was a loyal lover. However, he lacked ambition and his family didn’t have the best values. I don’t see myself raising children with him because I don’t want my kids to be surrounded by his family. (I broke up with him on the night of his birthday because his sister got violent with me.) We dated for over a year and I’d always be the one to take care of the check when we’d go out on dates. He had no network, so we would always hang out with my friends and colleagues. Am I wrong for leaving him? Is his loyalty worth going through all that?
Girl. (“Girl” is a gender-neutral term of endearment, by the way.) I’m going to need you to take a deep breath, look at your gorgeous self in the mirror and relish in the fact that you have made the right decision.
First, let’s focus on the good. Loyalty and purity of heart are beautiful traits that many, many people on this earth have. When you find someone who does, and then combine that with your attraction and attachment to this person (along with the reality that many, many people also lack these traits), it makes sense that you’d be feeling like your ex is a rare find that you might not encounter again. However, you can care for someone, and also acknowledge the truth that the life they are setting themself up for is not the life you envision living — or, crucially, the life that you envision your children living. A long-term partnership is so much more than love. It requires a shared vision for fulfillment and happiness, based on compatible values. It necessitates a wholeness from both parties, wherein two individuals take ownership and accountability over their own success and well-being. It is loving to let someone go so they can live their life in peace and free of judgment, and even find someone else whose version of an ideal life more closely matches theirs. Most importantly, letting someone go who you know is not aligned with the life you want to live is a deeply self-loving act.
The meaning I glean from your words is this: It’s not so much that you yearn for him romantically and fear you made a mistake simply because your life is empty without him. (In fact, it sounds like you were the one adding a lot of value to his otherwise limited existence through your resources.) It seems that you feel guilty for leaving him behind as you went on to pursue a better life for yourself. That kind of feeling is more caretaking, and dare I say maternal, than loving (at least the kind associated with romantic partnership). He’s your ex, not your son. Unconditional love is only healthy and appropriate in the context of a parent-child relationship, and that’s not the situation here. People who engage in romantic relationships with men — women, femmes, gay men, etc. — are socialized to be ever-forgiving, to have infinite patience and compassion. The lines get blurred when you do feel kindness and genuine compassion for someone you care about. It can be difficult to discern when you’re being too harsh, and when you’re just setting a healthy boundary. Society makes it difficult for us in that way. But we don’t have to succumb to that pressure.
You can’t fall in love with someone’s potential. If a person, especially a man, shows up to a relationship as someone you can’t envision spending an extended period of time with, then that’s not your person. Not only is it impossible to truly “fix” or “change” anyone, it’s simply not an efficient or productive use of your precious energetic and material resources. Of course, we all change over time, and hopefully in positive ways. But that change needs to be self-directed, coming from within each individual. “Change” exerted on another through force robs the receiving party of the dignity of authoring their own life path. Even the verbiage of your question indicates that you’ve already extended a lot of generosity and patience toward someone who didn’t feel like working toward social and financial independence, and setting boundaries with their family should have been a top priority. I can sense your exhaustion underneath the guilt. That’s the root of the matter. And what matters is you.
I can sense your exhaustion underneath the guilt.
Loss is just space. It can hurt and feel empty at first. But it also allows you the room you need to expand your world with abundance, not shrink it and drain it into scarcity. Affirm in your heart and in your mind that love itself is an infinite resource. If you channel the patience and generosity that you once put into your ex into a life where you are fulfilled to the utmost, the right person (or people) will find you.
And, girl. Some time from now, when you are loved by a man who takes his own dignity seriously, and supports you in the feminine energy of rest and calm that you deserve to experience and embody, you will be so grateful to this current version of you that had the courage to let go. I’m proud of you.
Photography Eugene Kim
Styling Britton Litow
Hair and Makeup Jaime Diaz
Visual Direction Jess Aquino de Jesus
Production Cecilia Alvarez Blackwell
Photo Assistant Joe Elgar
Styling Assistant Wendy Gonzalez Vivaño
The kiss finally happened at a Halloween party Chatterjee hosted at her apartment, while the two were watching “American Psycho” on the couch at 3 a.m., when everyone else had gone out for food. “We’re sitting so close our legs are touching and I’m freaking out,” Braggins said.
“I looked at Abby, and I was like, ‘I’d rather kiss you than watch this,’” Chatterjee said. So they did. About a month later, they were official.
On April 10, Braggins suggested they take a trip to Home Goods in Brooklyn. When they ended up at Coney Island Beach instead, Chatterjee was none the wiser. It was an early morning, so the two, along with the dog they adopted together, Willow, enjoyed having the beach to themselves.
Braggins ran ahead with Willow and crouched behind some rocks. When Chatterjee got a glimpse of Willow, there was a bandanna tied around her neck. It said, “Will you marry me?” Braggins pulled out a shell with a ring in it. The answer was yes.
A few days before, Chatterjee had proposed to Braggins amid a gloomy, cloudy sky on top of the Empire State Building.
The two were married on April 21 at the New York City Marriage Bureau, in front of three guests, by Guohuan Zhang, a city clerk. Afterward, they celebrated at Bungalow, an Indian restaurant in the East Village, with a few more friends.
Though Chatterjee’s parents were not present at the wedding, one of the couple’s most meaningful moments came in 2023, when Braggins traveled to India to meet Chatterjee’s family for the first time. Chatterjee had never brought a partner home before, and she had warned Braggins that same-sex relationships were still not widely accepted there. But by the end of the trip, Chatterjee’s mother had embraced Braggins as family, telling her, “I have two daughters now.”
I was comfortable being called “weekend girl” and had even coined the nickname. We met running on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica. Our first date followed: a run through Pacific Palisades. We talked about food. Our second date: dinner. We talked about running. I was coming out of a sticky romantic relationship and into a new job, so a casual fling seemed appropriate. We had endless common interests; making plans was easy. He was the best kisser I’d ever come across, but I still liked my solo weeknights.
It continued that way for a few months. There were sleepless nights of laughter and love-making. I didn’t care where he was on a Wednesday. I had a dumpy, dark one-bedroom further south on the disregarded part of Bundy Drive, and he had a well-appointed and nicely lit two-bedroom, so weekends were at his place or occasionally the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs. Things were light and fluffy until he made a proposal.
“Do you want to be adventure buddies?” he asked while we dined at the hotel bar.
“Well, yes, I like that title. Does that mean I’m not ‘weekend girl’ anymore?”
“Adventure buddies” had a nice ring, but it was vague.
“I was thinking we can clear out a closet at my place, and you could spend more time there.” He faced forward.
We organized the closet the following weekend. I was wearing a T-shirt and just my underwear, while he was wearing his sleeping shorts, no shirt. We agreed it was a fantastic Friday night. I woke up in the morning to a warm California sun and hot coffee, sipped on the balcony. Noticing that the outdoor space got just enough light to wring out some tomatoes, we headed to the nursery to top off our nest.
I had been a serial apartment dweller with limited outdoor space, so I never knew the color of my thumbs. We plucked three healthy tomato plants and three pots. We added plant food and tomato cages to the cart. The staff offered their expertise several times, and I wondered if I was wearing something that screamed “gardening noob.” We declined the help, as it seemed easy enough; put the plants in the dirt and water them.
Two blissful months later, we were getting some tomatoes and lots of loving. We were planning adventures, date nights and what we would cook with our forages from the farmers’ market. It was effortless. We spent most of our time just the two of us, but we were slowly integrating our respective worlds and families. I was the happiest I had ever been, and I felt fortunate. Gratitude is due when your biggest problem is the sad-looking tomato plants on your balcony. Something was wrong.
Back to the garden center we went, bringing a leaf as a specimen. They said we had an unidentified pest and pointed us to the neem oil. We got back to our babies, and as we started to spray, there they were: hornworms. They were bright green with pokey stinger-looking things on their butts, and they were as long as my index finger. There were dozens of them. We loaded them into a giant mason jar, but it was too late. My green dreams were now caterpillar nightmares. Maybe we should have asked more questions in the beginning? How did I not notice this sooner?
“Wanna get froyo?” I was a sucker for mochi and figured that would cheer me up.
“Sure, just gonna take a quick shower.” He set his phone down and hopped in. I went to grab my mascara and saw the white and blue messages light up.
“I wish I were with you tonight, but Em is here.” No name, just a number. I scrolled up — boobs but no face. Who was this girl?
I didn’t move to L.A. to become an actor, but I sure put on a performance that night. I let the phone go black without a word as the shower shut off. We ate the yogurt and called it an early night. I lay mummy-style and wide-eyed next to him through the sleepless night. By daybreak, I had a plan.
I spent the next morning with his iPad reading through text chains. “You’re so gorgeous,” or “I’d love to take you to dinner,” or “I am not with that girl; you are the one for me.” There were nudes and sexts and I love yous. And so, so many people. I gasped and shook while reading the first few lines, but it became more like entertainment as the minutes passed. It was more than two hours of reading material. I was hungry and had planned to get my nails done, so I grabbed the wallet he had left on the table and helped myself to a champagne lunch and a mani-pedi.
I got home before he did and prepped myself for the fireworks. The bubbles and the “five-more-minutes” foot massage helped boost my confidence.
“Babe!” he exclaimed, excited and clueless.
“Babe!” I parroted. “I just finished reading your iPad! What a productive morning!”
I was calm while he paused.
“Oh my god. Get out. I can’t believe you violated my privacy,” he yelled.
I responded without defensiveness. “It’s sad. I thought I loved you. But it turns out you love 13 others — and that ain’t gonna work for me.” With calculated confidence, I directed him to pack my things from the closet. I was eager to get back to my dungeon-like, safe apartment.
“I hope you get help. It seems like you need it.” I really did care for him, and it was hard to drive away.
It was a lot to take in over a short time, but I am grateful for the lessons. For me, integrity is paramount and asking questions up-front is a must. Even when the dating gets tough, I won’t settle for less than the truth. This summer, I will be companion planting basil, dill and marigolds with my tomatoes and an occasional spritz of a natural insecticide.
The author is an entrepreneur and working on a book about overcoming betrayal. She splits her time between L.A. and Michigan. She’s on Instagram: @emilybrynwilliams.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
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