The Sea Ranch

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Sonoma Coastal Sketching

One a recent weekend trip with the lads on the Sonoma Coast I added some coastal impressions to my sketchbooks.

I have sketched the coastal locations of Bodega Bay and Sea Ranch many times.

On the drive up I stopped at the Tides Restaurant in Bodega Bay for lunch (made famous in Hitchcock’s The Birds). I had a table with a view of the bay and the Bodega Head across the waters.

After lunch I walked along the wharf where I saw a group of sea lions resting on a dock. They didn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon so I sketched one of them (featured sketch).

The sea lion on the left is begging to be sketched!

After my sketch I drove north on Highway One towards our cabin in the woods just north of the Sonoma/ Mendocino border.

From our base camp in Gualala we headed south back into Sonoma County to visit Sea Ranch.

A Sea Ranch espresso sketch.

While I was at Sea Ranch Lodge, I did a sketch of the lodge buildings. I had stayed here once before.

One of my Sonoma County sketching touchstones is the seaslug-like Sea Ranch Chapel. I have sketched this whimsical building every time I am in the area. Every angle yields a new sketch. This time I sketched the chapel from the side, slightly to the rear. I never seem to tire of sketching this unique structure.

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Seals of Sea Ranch

There are more mammalian residents than the Patagonian clad bipeds, coyotes, or the migrating gray whales of the near shore of Sea Ranch.

These are the harbor seals (Phoca vitulina), that use the coves as a rookery to raise their young as well as using the beaches as haulout sites to rest.

The harbor seal has the widest distribution of any pinniped (eared seals, walruses, and true seals). The harbor seal is a true seal while the California sea lion is an eared seal.

I took advantage of a midafternoon clearing in the rain to do some pinniped sketching. I started at the Shell Beach parking lot at 3:30. The gates closed at sunset, which was at 4:56, so I would have a limited time to sketch before getting back to the car in time. I didn’t want to get locked in!

From the parking lot I made it to the T- junction with the Bluff Trail in 12 minutes. I turned right and headed north in search of resting seals.

I headed out to the point at Shell Beach, the wind threatening to dislodge my hat, and once I made it to the fence, I looked down.

Seals! Harbor seals hauled out on the rocky beach. I was about 30 yards away from the seals and only one looked up and eyed me with large, dark eyes, before returning to rest. These seals were not disturbed by my presence. Which is a testament to the respect that Sea Ranchers have shown to generations of seals over the decades.

I took out my journal, using my clips to keep the pages open in the wind and started to sketch the seals. They were good subjects because they rarely moved.

The challenge was to give the impression of the number of harbor seals without making them look like logs! I hope I succeeded! (Featured sketch).

The only California sea lion I saw was a statue in Gualala Point Regional Park. So I sketched it.

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Recreating at The Sea Ranch

While hiking, fishing, biking, boating, birding, and nature loafing are a popular recreation activities for early Sea Ranchers, they also needed a center to swim and play tennis (and currently, pickle ball).

To this end, three recreation centers were designed and built. The three centers are: Moonraker (1965), the Ohlson (1971), and the Del Mar (1996) Recreation Centers. All the centers where designed in the Sea Ranch style: sloping roofs, barn-sided, and harmonizing with the natural landscape.

There was also function to their forms as the constant prevailing northwestern winds were an environmental impediment to recreating. To this end the architects use of berms and wind-breaks were used to shield the cold winds from the wet, bathing-suited Sea Ranchers.

I wanted to sketch them and I started with the first rec center ever built at Sea Ranch: Moonraker.

It was raining rather vigorously so I sketched the exterior from the shelter of my waterproof sketching blind aka my car (featured sketch).

The Moonraker is an innovative design. The changing rooms are a long, henge-like building which shelters Sea Ranchers from the northwestern winds. The pool and tennis courts are sunk into the landscape, providing an oasis from the prevailing Pacific gales.

The men’s changing rooms at Moonraker. The graphics were designed by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon. The work that she did at Moonraker are considered to be the genesis of the Supergraphics movement.

My next experience with a rec center was more immersive. This was at the second rec center built at Sea Ranch: Ohlson Recreation Center.

With my rental I had access to all three rec centers and I wanted to take a dip at my favorite.

Wow, what a face this presents to the wind. To the right are the tennis courts and as at Moonraker, the structure provides a wind break.

This is the Ohlson Recreation Center. I have always appreciated the design of this center since the first time I saw photographs of it, I’ve loved it. It looks like a futuristic barn that has been on the land for centuries.

I checking in, headed to the door marked “M” and converted into bathing attire. On this cold winter’s day, the heated waters of the wallowing end was perfect.

I thought doing the back waddle in the wallowing side of the pool was a perfect way to enjoy the lines, angles, and surfaces of this iconic Sea Ranch structure. Too bad my sketch book was back in the changing room (and not entirely waterproof!).

A little presoak sketch of the fabulous recreational barn that is the Ohlson Recreation Center, completed in 1971.
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Sea Ranch and Lawrence Halprin

One of the leading lights of the development of The Sea Ranch on the northern Sonoma County Coast was Lawrence Halrprin (1916-2009).

A ten mile stretch of coast (formally a sheep ranch) was purchased with the intention of building a community that did not fight against its location but became part of it. The placement of houses and the design of the architecture was intended to mimic the shape of the hills, meadows, and tree lines of the location.

Halprin was hired on to develop the master plan for The Sea Ranch. This was a tall task to develop a new cultural utopia, even a blueprint for all future development. This was a chance to create a new architectural language that could be translated to other locations.

I connect with the works of Halprin in many ways.

I love the way the land becomes the centerpiece of The Sea Ranch. I can’t wait to sketch it, again!

I also love to look at the sketches of Halprin. He thought in sketches of pencil, ink, and watercolor. Halprin captured the landscape in his sketches. He spent a lot of time at Sea Ranch and he had a house here.

Halprin’s words live on in the Sea Ranch Lodge.

The Sea Ranch is a touchstone that I return to for inspiration, quiet, and sustenance. I love being here and sketching here.

When my father died I retreated to the Sea Ranch Lodge to have some quiet time and write my comments for his celebration of life ceremony.

For the feature sketch I attempted a mild, if not failed, caricature of Halprin donning a barn-sided suit. In the background is his studio at The Sea Ranch where he worked while he was on his land at The Sea Ranch.

The above sketch of the house next to my Sea Ranch rental demonstrates some of the Sea Ranch principles in design. The sloped roof, facing into the wind provides a wind-break on the lee-side of the structure (to the right). The house is also sided in natural vertical wood, reflecting the barn influences of some of the first structures on the land. There is also the influence of nearby Fort Ross and it’s chapel.

What is not reflected in the Utopian plans of Sea Ranch was the view from my front room. The original design called for open views across a common meadow to the ocean. From my wall of windows I could see a golf links, a road, a line of house and finally, just beyond the houses, the Pacific Ocean.

Like the name implies, Utopias don’t always live up to their founder’s vision.

And there are always more people with more money than sense to come along and screw it up!

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Condominium One

Condominium One is one of the seminal buildings in California architecture of the 1960s.

The building looks out at Bihler Point and the Pacific Ocean at The Sea Ranch on the Sonoma County Coast. It was among the first buildings (built by Oceanic) to be constructed at Sea Ranch and it provided the model for most of the structures that were designed and built later.

Sea Ranch provided an opportunity to develop a whole community that tried to work with the land as founding architect Donlyn Lyndon noted:

We wanted each building  to engage the land, to become part  of the way in which people could accommodate to this extraordinary and often chilled and windy terrain. We wanted the relationship between buildings and land to be complementary, to use the buildings to make the land more habitable, without destroying the very qualities that attracted people to this segment of the coast.

This is the mission statement, the creed, that underscores all the early structures that were erected at Sea Ranch.

This was clearly a building I needed to understand and look at. This called for a sketch. As soon as I checked into my room, I headed east from Sea Ranch Lodge and followed the trail out to Bihler Point. I found a spot directly in front of Condominium One, which was to the east and across a sea thrashed cove, and set up my stool, opened my journal, and began to sketch.

The ten unit Condominium One was completed in 1965. And it didn’t look like anything that was built before. The rooflines all slope down toward the ocean, seemingly echoing the sloping hill surrounding it. In the sketch I left the roof unpainted to emphasize the unity of the pitch lines of the roof. The structure is anchored by two towers that rise from the units.

Sea Ranch Barn

The building’s design was influenced by the land but the historic existing structures of the Sonoma coast also had an influence on the building. You can see the influence of the wooden barns that dot the landscape of the coast as well as the barn that directly northwest of the condominium’s location. This barn I sketched and it is part of the “DNA” of the current structures of Sea Ranch.

Donlyn Lyndon also notes that one of the structures that they drove by on their way up to the building site, influenced Condominium One and that was the chapel at Fort Ross.

Fort Ross Chapel

The Fort Ross Chapel was built at this Russian settlement in the mid 1820s and is the first Russian Orthodox structure in North America built outside of Alaska.

Lyndon notes the importance of Fort Ross in its influence on Condominium One:

Even more insistently present in our minds, since it then straddled the highway, was the great wooden stockade of Fort Ross. The restored nineteenth-century chapel, which occupies one corner, was especially moving.

And Lyndon brings up the point that the way a building is designed and constructed, can be moving in a way that can surprise the viewer. When you walk into York Minister or Stanford Memorial Church or the Sea Ranch chapel and you look up, the experience really can be moving. Great architecture can convey  that feeling.

Too bad I couldn’t retrace my steps, turn off to the south (ignoring the private property signs), and knock on one the condo’s doors. The bewildered owner would open the door (in my world anyway) and I would ask, “Can I step into your living room? I want to be moved.”