A Brief History of Irvine, CA

Irvine is an incorporated city in Orange County, California, United States. It is a planned city, mainly developed by the Irvine Company since the 1960s. Formally incorporated in 1971, the layout of Irvine was designed by Los Angeles architect William Pereira and Irvine Company employee Raymond Watson, and is nominally divided into townships called villages. The townships are separated by six-lane streets.

Pereira originally envisioned an Atlantis-like circular plan with numerous man-made lakes and the university in the center. When the Irvine Company refused to relinquish valuable farmland in the flat central region of the ranch for this plan, the University site was moved to the base of the southern coastal hills. The design that ended up being used was based on the shape of a necklace, with the villages strung along two parallel main streets, which terminate at UCI, the "pendant". Traces of the original circular design are visible in the layout of the UCI campus and the two man-made lakes at the center of Woodbridge, one of the central villages.