The Land: The Man with The Plan

The black and grey Bentley snaked south out of Los Angeles along the Santa Ana Freeway, shook free of the traffic, and began to climb fast on a mountain road through the open country. At the wheel was a shapely brunette beauty—secretary, assistant and part-time chauffeur to the man in the back seat listening to Mantovani on a built-in stereophonic tape recorder. The car stopped on the mountaintop, where a friend was waiting; the man got out, a trim 6 feet with heavy-lidded blue eyes and an actor's dash. The wind riffled his wavy, iron-grey hair as he gazed out over Irvine Ranch, the miles and miles of grazing land and citrus groves rolling down to the Pacific.

"Right about there we're going to put a city of 100,000 people," he said, pointing. "At the heart of it will be a thousand-acre campus for a university with 27,500 students. There'll be a university town with a mile or so of hotels, shops, restaurants and theaters. We'll have different kinds of housing—all income levels—churches, a couple of golf courses. Surrounding the university town will be many other communities, here, there and along the coast. And over there will be jobs—places for men to work. We expect to have about 300,000 people living and working here by 1980. There'll be plenty of room for them; this place is six times the size of Manhattan."

The Monuments. The handsome man who can play such a godlike game is neither conqueror nor commissar, but one of a new breed of artisans arising in the world: the regional planner. The regional planner orchestrates vast areas of wilderness with cities, villages, farms and forests to serve the needs of men.

As the planet teems with more and more humanity, his work, with its multiple disciplines—including history, sociology, engineering, botany, geology, hydrography and, above all, architecture—is becoming more and more a pressing necessity.