In Memoriam: Sarah Jane Lind (1923-2021)
UCLA and cityLAB lost a good friend on December 11, 2021, when Sarah Jane Lind passed away at the age of 98. Lind was a housing trailblazer in Los Angeles, where she lived for most of her adult life. The night school class she took at UCLA, “Planning the Small Home,” started her on a career that went far beyond homemaking. A 1964 article in the LA Times describes her as a “subdivider” collaborating with the architect and her soon-to-be husband, Kenneth Lind. Indeed, the two became development partners whose most significant project, The Penthouse (now called 101 Ocean Avenue), is a modern housing tower that still dominates the bluffs above Pacific Coast Highway in Santa Monica. Few women could claim a similar place in LA’s development history.
101 Ocean Ave. Image courtesy Zillow.
Lind was born and raised in Chicago. She attended the University of Chicago's grade school, high school and university, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree. Lind’s intelligence catalyzed around her modernist aesthetics and incisive sense of economy. She was never happier than when she was sketching residential floor plans that eliminated waste in order to offer something generous like a double-height entry or an extra-wide opening to the outdoors. Lind’s principles only grew clearer as she aged: when she moved to Santa Barbara, she bought a modest house designed by the pioneering woman architect Lutah Maria Riggs that opened on to the spectacular chaparral hillsides beyond.
Lind and I met at a feminist think tank that Betty Friedan organized in the late 1980s at the University of Southern California. Friedan fortuitously saw our mutual interests in architecture and asked us to propose a feminist city. A deep friendship grew, and years later when that early experiment in urban design grew into the idea for a design research center at UCLA, Lind offered funds so I could hire a half-time project director, thus launching cityLAB. She critiqued our progress, always pushing for transformative innovation that could be shared with the public. As cityLAB demonstrated its increased influence and creative capacity, Lind continued to provide resources dedicated to specific goals. Her advice on many initiatives guaranteed that academic jargon was eliminated, clarity of purpose was foregrounded, and design experimentation was advanced.
Lind’s last building project was an accessory dwelling unit built for a daughter at her Santa Barbara home. cityLAB had co-authored the legislation to make that possible, which was one gift we could return to her.
By Dana Cuff
Professor, Architecture and Urban Design
Dana Cuff is UCLA professor of architecture and urban design and director of the award-winning design research center cityLAB, housed within the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. She wrote this remembrance about Sarah Jane Lind.
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