INTRODUCTION

Hideo Sasaki was born in 1919 and raised on a farm in the Central Valley of California to a large Japanese-American family. In his early years he worked the family’s farm harvesting crops. The first member of his family to leave the farm and seek higher education, he began his early higher education atReedley Junior College where he majored in general education. He moved on to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he became interested in design and planning. Since UCLA did not have planning and design programs, he transferred to the University of California, Berkeley.

Hideo’s college career at Berkeley came to an abrupt halt at the start of World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. As a Japanese American he and his family were incarcerated inCamp Poston, Arizona in 1942.

At the war’s end Hideo relocated to Chicago, Illinois. He completed his education at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, earning an undergraduate degree in landscape architecture. Following his graduation from Illinois, the Harvard Graduate School of Design awarded him a scholarship where he earned a master’s degree in landscape architecture. Upon graduation he returned to the University of Illinois and taught for two years.

While teaching at Illinois, he worked at the architectural firm ofSkidmore, Owings& Merrill (SOM) in Chicago where he became acquainted withReginald Isaacs. Shortly thereafter, Reginald Isaacs, then recently appointed as Chair of the Planning Department at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, invited Hideo back to Harvard to teach with a joint appointment to the Departments of Urban Planning and Design and Landscape Architecture. When the school’s legal counsel determined that the terms of the grants by which the landscape architecture and planning departments were set up did not allow joint appointments, he joined the landscape architecture department. Later he assumed the role of chair of the department and remained at Harvard for seventeen years.

As Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture, Hideo brought an expansive vision to the idea of collaborative design.

I always felt that the social, environmental, and physical problems were so complex that it involved more than one discipline. I was not at any time or in any way jealous in the sense that I was personally possessive. I wanted to bring the best and it did not matter where the best came from or what profession. I think that spirit has prevailed. We do not say “well you are an architect, or you are an engineer.” That is the philosophical basis of my practice.1

In 1997 Professor Charles Harris wrote of Hideo’s impact at the Department of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design:“Under the leadership of Hideo Sasaki the decade of evolutionary change (1958 to 1968) had an almost revolutionary impact upon the nation’s major educational programs and professional offices.”2

The practice of collaborative design in 20th-century America was informed by several notable precedents of design collaboration in t