Transforming The Irvine Ranch

From citrus trees to spring breakers, Transforming the Irvine Ranch tells the story of Orange County’s metamorphosis from 93,000 acres of farmland into an iconic Southern California landscape of beaches and modernist architecture. Drawing on decades of archival research and their own years at the famed Irvine Company, the authors bring a collection of colorful characters responsible for the transformation to life, including: Ray Watson, whose nearly century-long life took him from an Oakland boarding house to the Irvine and Walt Disney Company boardrooms Joan Irvine Smith, a much-married heiress who waged war against the US government and the Irvine Foundation's reactionary board and won William Pereira, the visionary architect whose work became synonymous with the LA cityscape. Spanning the history of modern California from its Gold Rush past to the late 1970s, Transforming the Irvine Ranch chronicles a storied family’s largely successful attempts to remake the vast Irvine Ranch in its own image.

The Irvine Ranch: A Time for People describes the excitement, the accomplishments and the conflicts during the first 50 years of development of the 90,000-acre Irvine Ranch in Orange County, California, into the largest master-planned new community in the United States. The book highlights The Irvine Company, the privately held corporation which developed the Ranch under three ownerships during the post World War II years, focusing on the firms seven presidents and current chairman. Here is the dramatic transformation of an agricultural dynasty into an urban empire told in eight engrossing chapters wrapped around the actions and personalities of Myford Irvine, Arthur McFadden, Charles Thomas, William Mason, Raymond Watson, Peter Kremer, Thomas Nielsen and Donald Bren. The book provides the reader with an intimate perspective of the workings of the sometimes mysterious and frequently misunderstood Irvine Company.

The story of Irvine goes back more than 200 years, to a time when it was a vast, sprawling ranch extending from the brush-covered foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains to the dramatic bluffs of the Pacific coast. Since that time, the Irvine Ranch has experienced a revolutionary change from pastoral wide-open spaces to one of the most successful planned communities in the nation. All along the way, there were people whose vision shaped the transformation of Irvine. Among them were the members of the Irvine family, who for nearly a century were stewards of a ranch that amounted to more than one-fifth of modern-day Orange County. The Irvine of today owes its success to the ideals from its past: the determination to develop the immense potential of the land while still preserving its natural beauty.