The world lost a talented urbanist and visionary thinker, and SPUR a great friend, with the death of Joe Brown on October 31. A SPUR member for over 25 years, Joe was the former CEO of EDAW, which he merged into AECOM and became its Chief Innovation Officer.
In April 1995, Joe penned a guest editorial for the SPUR Newsletter evaluating the current health of San Francisco and offering a prescription for bigger, more integrated design thinking. In observations even more true today than they were 30 years ago he wrote, “Free to migrate, people with options (and capital) will seek out the most involving, substantive places to be part of.” Among his recommendations: city neighborhoods that combine living and working, a new willingness to change and grow, and big plans, “not just on the scale of the city but in sync with a demanding, competitive world. Make big plans now … or be prepared to make little plans for a small future.” In today’s post-COVID world, with the rise of working from home and the demise of single-use downtowns, Joe’s prescription to abandon the old idea of a single-use office district and open our imaginations to a very different neighborhood rings true.
That summer Joe and his EDAW team picked SPUR as their client for their annual summer student program, where they brought 12 bachelors and masters landscape architecture students from around the world to tackle a timely design challenge. At that time, the location had just been selected for the terminus of high-speed rail and a new Transbay Transit Terminal. For three months, the students worked with SPUR board members, staff, and SPUR members in leadership positions in the San Francisco Planning Department, the Redevelopment Agency, transportation planners, lawyers, economists, architects, and developers to imagine a new neighborhood. Today that neighborhood, the East Cut, is nearing completion. And one of the ideas from that Transbay District Neighborhood Vision that made it into steel and concrete 20 years later is the great oculus in the center of the Transbay Transit Terminal, bringing daylight down to the track level and symbolically spreading the energy of the station throughout the neighborhood and city.
A few years later, Joe and EDAW again partnered with SPUR on a vision for what to do with the abandoned industrial district in Dogpatch that is just now coming into fruition as the Power Station neighborhood. This was followed by many other projects where Joe and the EDAW team partnered with SPUR on important design challenges, establishing new directions for mixed use neighborhoods, transit-oriented design, and always, big ideas.
Joe had degrees in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, was a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a Life Trustee of the Urban Land Institute, lectured and taught at universities around the world, received the highest awards from ASLA and ULI, is widely published, and led major design plans including the Monumental Core Plan of Washington, D.C., Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, projects for Disney, and work in China, Australia, London, France, the Middle East, and elsewhere around the globe. His final project was the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, with architect Frank Gehry. But more than all the professional accomplishments and accolades, Joe was incredibly smart and dedicated to making this a better world through thoughtful collaborations, visionary probing, big thinking, and a generous style of leadership. SPUR is honored that he chose to share some of his great talents with us.
Jim Chappell worked at EDAW for 10 years before coming to SPUR as President and Executive Director in 1994.