New Age by Design

Bureaucratic Utopias and the Planning of UC Irvine, 1947-1965
1. Auflage 2026
ISBN: 978-3-0356-3140-1
Verlag: De Gruyter

Buch, Englisch, 208 Seiten, Format (B × H): 170 mm x 240 mm

reveals the twenty-year masterplanning history of the University of California at Irvine, built on a Southern Californian ranch in the early 1960s. Dreamed of as an educational experiment by bureaucrats and designed by the modernist architect William Pereira, this carefully orchestrated vision blends the aspirations of cybernetic science, political ambition, and the promise of an ever-new frontier to conquer. At the dawn of the turbulent cultural era later dubbed the “Age of Aquarius,” the campus was set to revolutionize the way students would live and learn. Conceived from the ground up, the planned landscape of the “University City” encapsulated a technocratic alternative to California’s growing countercultural spirit.

• Insight into the turbulent founding phase of UC Irvine
• Archival material from the dawn of counterculture and computer age
• Exploration of the colonial history and land politics

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Geschichte der Architektur, Baugeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Gebäudetypen Öffentliche Gebäude, Gewerbliche Bauten
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Städtebau, Stadtplanung (Architektur)
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Kunsttheorie, Kunstphilosophie
• Geisteswissenschaften Architektur Architekturtheorie

Über Autor(innen)

Sina Brückner-Amin is Deputy Head of Archive at Deutsches Museum, Munich. Her research focuses on the history of knowledge systems and their architectures, bureaucracy and its media, as well as global colonial history. She works across various media as an author, curator, and science communicator.