In Memorium, Donlyn Lyndon, 1936-2026
Updated: October 12, 2026
This weekend I made a quick trip to Berkeley to participate in the celebration of life for Donlyn Lyndon. Widely known as part of the team that created the breakthrough architecture for The Sea Ranch, in Sonoma County, California, he was also a widely respected teacher and philosopher of places. I had the privilege to work side-by-side with him for fifteen years, editing the journal Places, before I launched my current consulting career.
Returning to Berkeley was a homecoming of sorts to a spirit that has never left me, to the embrace of classmates, colleagues and even several of the faculty I studied with. We not only reminisced about our days in Berkeley, but also considered the serendipitous blessings of the people we connect with who help us situate our world view and propel our careers and our passions.
In that respect, Donlyn looms large in my life. In my remarks, I paid homage to one of Donlyn’s most singular talents, his gift for writing. Those of you who have had a chance to work on writing projects with me, will understand everything now.
It is very comforting to be among you all, and it is a very profound honor to have an opportunity to say a few words about that person who, along with all of his other accomplishments, more than anyone else, gave me the opportunity to grow into the creative, civic and professional life that I have now.
In the early 1980s, fresh out of undergraduate school at Columbia University and working as a newspaper reporter in central Pennsylvania, I returned to New York frequently to visit friends. One of my regular stops was the Urban Center in the Villard Houses on Madison Avenue, and its legendary bookstore of architecture, art, city planning and design. I returned frequently to explore what became my passion – writing and the design of cities. I saved whatever money I could to stock up on books there.
On one visit, I picked up a copy of a brand-new journal called Places. Erudite yet soft-spoken, the journal opened up imaginative new frames of reference for how I thought about cities, how I wrote about them, how I experienced them. Each issue was a new conversation, wide-ranging yet grounded in the central idea that design matters most when places matter to all of us, and design succeeded most it combined rigorous thought with craft and imagination rooted in awareness of human presence, or as Donlyn often called it, “attentive imagination.” Places beckoned to this small-town journalist, helping me see the many ways that places imprint themselves on our psyches, our communities, our culture.
Donlyn stepped into Places after its co-founder, Donald Appleyard, died tragically as the journal was being launched, and for all of its 25 years as a printed publication, was co-editor and ultimately editor. When it came time for me to apply to graduate school for city planning, Berkeley was hands down my first choice. Any school that could publish a journal like that, I reasoned, is the school I wanted to go to.
Not long after I arrived, Donlyn hired me as a research assistant to work on the journal. Little did I know that I would continue collaborating with him for almost 15 years, ultimately as executive editor, in charge of running the day-to-day operations of the journal and pulling each issue together. Ultimately, he gave me great leeway with the journal, space to explore, mature and grow.
In the very first issue that I worked on, Places published “Western Civic Art, Works in Progress,” by Bill Morrish, Catherine Brown, and Grover Mouton. This article chronicled the founding of Phoenix’s public art program, and among the questions the authors asked was, “What Would a City Be Like if an Artist Designed It?” That article got my attention, and through Donlyn, I was able to meet those people. Now, almost forty years later, I am still chasing that vision, as a planner who works entirely in the realm of public art.
--
I’ll admit that for me, Donlyn was an intimidating figure. He could be exacting. I knew then and know now I could never match the profoundness of his thinking, the artistry of his writing. Yet what I remember most is the generosity of his spirit, the twinkle in his eye, his jocularity, his enthusiasms, the way that he used his gifts to gather people and expand their prospects, not to stand apart from or above them. “Gathering” was a central instinct for Donlyn, in both his ideas of architectural space and in all aspects of his life.
This dual spirit infused the way Donlyn led the journal. There would be no doubt about the intellectual prospect that Donlyn occupied and would undergird Places. But neither was this a vanity project. The earliest seeds of the Places can be found in dialogue, began decades before the journal’s founding, with J.B. Jackson, the iconic cultural geographer, and his journal Landscape. Donlyn used the platform of Places to widen the circles of conversation, to interact with the many currents of thoughts in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design at the time, to elevate other voices. He wrote:
“To engage the many dimensions of places, we believe that many voices must be heard. … And we seek contrary and divergent views, so that many issues will be brought to light and so that the plural nature of place will be revealed.”
During the years I worked on Places, the journal expanded its reach, establishing productive partnerships with all manner of organizations, such as the AIA and ASLA; the National Endowment for the Arts, the Environmental Design Research Association; the Mayors Institute for City Design, the Congress for the New Urbanism; the Charles Moore Foundation, even Project for Public Spaces. It grew its academic partnerships, living for many years at Pratt Institute and ultimately building up an international roster. “Places,” landscape architect Randolph Hester said, “has made us into a community.”
--
Donlyn was Places, and Places was placemaking, before anyone ever bothered to coin that term. Every issue began with Donlyn’s editorial, “Caring about Places,” and as we put together each issue, I eagerly awaited the arrival of his next essay, which in those days usually arrived by fax. Even now, I return to them often, especially the essay in the first issue, which affirmed Places philosophy and ethic as something of a lodestar for my own:
“Places will focus on the shifting lines between public and private domains, with particular attention to public space in the service of shared and egalitarian ideals of society.” The editorial also warned of the danger of when “initiatives for shaping public environments are concentrated in the hands of a very few,” presaging later editorials wary of dogma past and present, and accumulations of power he saw on the horizon.
In the forty years since the journal was launched, the notion of placemaking has expanded throughout the environmental design professions to embrace goals like cultural resiliency, economic vibrancy, environmental sustainability, participatory action, and tactical interventions. The seeds of and debates about all of these ideas can be found in the pages of Places, which has enabled me to follow the evolution of my field with both a critical perspective and a critical embrace.
---
By all accounts, Donlyn was an extraordinary architect and teacher. For me, his superpower was his mastery of writing. As William Turnbull once said of MLTW, “Donlyn was the intellectual. He built with words.”
That Donlyn did. His prose could be poetic, with sentence construction that begins modestly,
rhythms itself forward, then cresedendoes into ideas that are bigger than you could have imagined.
“Places that harbor no secrets whisper that none are allowed.”
“To see in one place how another might be is perhaps the designer’s greatest gift.”
His writing was characterized by wordplay, perhaps inspired by his own name, which he called
“a syllabic palindrome.” Donlyn loved juxtaposition, contrast, collisions that resolve.
Places become distinct when they become familiar ... we know where they are because we’ve been there before.
Holding steady does not mean standing still, it means charting a course with resolution and consistency.
His writing is meant to read aloud. However, it resists, the grammarian in me ultimately concluded,
conventional sentence diagramming. I am still trying to emulate it. I urge you all to read it.
---
I once had the opportunity to meet the artist Hank Willis Thomas, when he stopped by the office of Mural Arts Philadelphia, where I began working as a consultant not long after I left Places to launch my professional practice. Our founding director, Jane Golden, waved me into her office, and the three of us chatted for an hour. About 40 minutes in, Hank said to us, “You know Jane, you helped me get my start.” And she said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “One day you were out painting a mural on the street where I lived with my auntie. I came out and was watching, and you handed me a brush, and invited me to join in. That helped me realize that I could be an artist too.”
I would say the same of Donlyn. With warmth and generosity, with great good spirit, he handed me a brush. He helped me find my path, helped me find my voice. And he helped me find value and joy in both. There is not a day that goes by that I am not reminded of that.
So, as in the days when I was editing Places, I offer Donlyn the final word, with my deepest gratitude:
“Our task is to make places and buildings that nurture and enrich … bringing imaginative, critical, responsible thought to the making of things – so that they will stand, stir, accommodate, intrigue, sustain attention, and take a rightful place in people's lives.
Places, he wrote, “would promote lively discussion of how valued places come into being, how they are designed, how they matter, and what we all may do to make places that nurture lives and enrich the public realm”
Places is about caring about places.
Thank you, and thank you Donlyn.