improvements depart only a little from the Pereira Plan, however. Sadly, Pereira has saddled the campus with a framework that isolates its academic units and, thanks to its gargantuan scale, reinforces their isolation. The one part of the campus that offers any real hope of enlivening and unifying the larger setting is the pristine and uncrossable central park. One of Johnson Fain & Pereira's rejected schemes for Main Street saw it cutting straight across the park as a major, walkable urban street that would actually go somewhere and provide life at the heart of the campus. Pereira's Master Plan for U.C. Irvine was utopian, part of his vision of an ideal community. This is the source both of its strength and its downfall, for it lacks the fine-grained, self-organizing patterns of development characteristic of more vital, pedestrianoriented settings. Johnson Fain & Pereira's belated proposal to impose a street grid on the campus reflected the firm's recognition of that failure—and its first, groping efforts to redress it. The planners were right to reassess the campus. In the absence of a new vision for future development, U.C. Irvine runs the risk of becoming an architectural zoo—isolated precincts that never add up to a community. Written for Architecture, January 1990, pp. 66–67.
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