Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
War II. Exposure to German at an early age gave Jon a facility with spoken
languages that proved useful later in his life.With written language, he had
more difficulties. He has dyslexia, a neurological condition that interferes
with interpretation of letters and numbers. Although the condition has
been linked to creativity, it was not well understood at the time. During his
school years in California, Jon was shuttled between mainstream classes and
those for slow learners.
His oldest brother taught him to make landscape models and inspired
him to read both
Scientific American
and science fiction. Jon's curiosity about
the natural world also led him to spend hours looking at photographs
in
National Geographic
while lying on the cool floor of the local library
where he sought refuge on hot summer days. Two boyhood camping
experiences left indelible impressions. On a Boy Scout trip in the desert,
he spent hours alone tracking a bobcat. His first camping trip to Yosemite
made so strong an impression that the images still come back to him,
often resurfacing in doodles and sketches that he calls “landscapes of the
mind.”
In 1961, while attending a community college, Coe wrote a paper on
naturalism in landscape design, advocating the use of native California
plants and landscapes, a practice that did not become popular until several
decades later. Pursuing this interest, he entered a program in landscape
architecture at the University of California at Berkeley. In 1963, he
explored the idea of a biopark in a plan for San Francisco Bay's Angel
Island. Coe won several awards at Berkeley and in 1964 received a bache-
lor's degree with honors in landscape architecture. It was at Berkeley, too,
that he met Susan Webster, a landscape architect in the class of 1965; they
married in 1966.
Coe continued his training at Harvard University's Graduate School of
Design. From the start, he disagreed with the prevailing philosophy of the
School of Design, which in the 1960s extolled Modernism, the stark Inter-
national Style of Le Corbusier and others:
In my opinion, it was international elitism. It was the concept that a few elite indi-
viduals know what's best for people around the world and that the International
Style, Modernism, works equally anywhere in the world. ...I see myself as a pop-
ulist, a regionalist. I feel that the architecture and the landscape of each different part
of the world should be unique to itself, and each group of people, each culture, has
their own expression.This variety should be celebrated!
