Vernon DeMars

Vernon Armond DeMars was an American architect and professor at the UC [Berkeley College of Environmental Design]. He specialized in Modernist housing projects and public housing complexes.

Biography

Vernon Armond DeMars was born on February 26, 1908, in San Francisco.
As one of the principal members of the group Telesis founded in 1939; and he helped develop what Lewis Mumford called, the Second Bay Area Regional Style. He, along with Joseph Esherick, designed Wurster Hall, Sproul Plaza and the Student Center at the University of California, Berkeley. While working as a visiting professor of architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, DeMars was part of a team that designed the 12-story Eastgate Apartments faculty housing project that Architectural Record magazine called one of the 50 most significant buildings in the United States of the past century. He later assisted his former MIT colleague Alvar Aalto in constructing the library at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon.
DeMars, along with his architectural partner, taught at the UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design. The pair was involved with redevelopment work in Marin City, California, that won recognition from Progressive Architecture magazine in 1960.
Image:Eastgate, MIT - IMG 8409.JPG|thumb|Eastgate Apartments, a former residence hall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image:View of open space and recreational area at rear of Building No. 39. Note boulders as landscape design element. Buildings No. 23, 25, 25, 27, and 39 from left to right. Looking west - HABS CA-2783-50.tif|thumb|Former List of public housing developments in [the United States#California|Easter Hill Village], Richmond, California