The world is a better place, thanks to the work of the late landscape architecture professor Charlie Aguar, whose efforts to preserve Sapelo Island and create the North Oconee River Greenway will be chronicled in a new book by his wife and long-time collaborator Berdeana

B Y - M A R Y - J E S S I C A - H A M M E S - (A B J '9 9)

ecause of Charlie Aguar, Sapelo Island was preserved under the Georgia Heritage Trust. So were Wormsloe Plantation and Pigeon Mountain and Ossabaw Island. Thanks to Charlie, Sandy Creek Nature Center exists and there are trees in downtown Athens. The long-awaited North Oconee River Greenway and Heritage Trail is a reality. And a decade's worth of research on architect Frank Lloyd Wright has resulted in a critically acclaimed book.

"He was a first-generation American," says Berdeana Aguar of her late husband, who died in February 2000. "His mother only had an eighth-grade education. He never thought he had a chance in the world of an education."

The Aguars' exhaustively researched book on architect Frank Lloyd Wright has drawn praise from critics. (top of page) Chronicling her husband's work will be easier for Berdeana because of the wealth of photographs and writings he left behind.

As it turned out, Charlie Aguar not only got an education, he did something with it. Each of his accomplishments could've served as an average person's career highlight, including the 22 years that he taught landscape architecture at UGA, spending a good portion of that time in community outreach programs through the Institute of Community and Area Development.

Woven through everything Charlie did was a love story with Berdeana that spanned more than 50 years, beginning when they were teenage sweethearts and lasting through their collaboration on a definitive examination of Frank Lloyd Wright's work. By fall, Wrightscapes (McGraw-Hill, 2002) was in its second printing, and soon after became one of four books that McGraw-Hill nominated for the prestigious Association of American Publisher's 28th Annual Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division Awards Program.

"This lucid, solidly researched analysis will open new avenues of appreciation and inquiry for Wright fans and scholars," reads the Library Journal in one review. The Aguars "are the first to approach Wright's entire career from the disciplined perspective of landscape architecture and environmental design," notes a Chicago Tribune review. "The Aguars provide consistently sensitive analysis, skillfully applied and rendered in relatively jargon-free prose."

Growing up in the 1930s and '40s in Illinois, the Aguars both visited Wright's Susan L. Dana residence in Springfield. And Charlie Aguar's academic background would mirror Wright's untutored apprenticeships. While a college student, he visited Wright's Taliesin fellowship (an apprentice program Wright established) and home in Wisconsin.

In 1948, "he took me there on our first wedding anniversary," Berdeana recalls.

When the Aguars began writing together, they didn't just write their own separate passages and edit them together. He would write a piece and then she would read it, edit, and add more. She'd pass it back to him, and he'd do the same.

"We had always written together," she says. "I can't describe it. We had our first date in 1943 and wrote letters every day when he was in the service . . . we thought alike. He would start a sentence and I'd end it."

Though Charlie Aguar knew Wrightscapes would be published, he died unexpectedly before it was completed. Recovering from both his death and her recent open-heart surgery, Berdeana did what she had always done: collaborate with her husband. It was her monumental task to edit the two volumes of text they had created together into one volume, sifting through writing, photographs, and sketches culled from traveling to more than 157 sites in 22 states.

Some of their finds of lesser-known facts include that Wright designed the first carport, was fascinated with community planning, and surrounded himself with landscape architects. He also gave much of his work over to apprentices in the last 30 years of his career—he was active until his death at 91 in 1959—due to countless hours of drafting for each project.

Wright also, at times, gave the illusion of following his design principles when in fact he was breaking his own rules. "A lot of the stuff he said was 'Do as I say, not as I do,'" says Berdeana.

For instance, Wright's concept of a Solar Hemicycle—implementing curving design to land sites that were meant to take advantage of sun and weather—was correctly applied only a few times. And the 1946 Lowell Walton "Cedar Rock" house in Iowa violated several of Wright's tenets, including using native materials at hand and designing to reflect the natural setting.

When the Aguars interviewed some of Wright's apprentices in the late 1980s and early '90s, it was clear there was some gap between their practice and Wright's mentoring. The apprentices talked only of the cosmetic aspects of landscaping, "Which is the way Wright [thought] before the St. Louis Exposition of 1904," says Berdeana. After that influence, especially of Japanese design, "there is an immediate change in the way he designed the houses in relationship to the land."

The Aguars had the opportunity to meet Wright; Charlie Aguar would visit him several times.

"He was a flamboyant man," Berdeana recalls of Wright. ". . . He had an aura. He was a good talker, but he didn't always practice what he preached."

She is now starting work on a new book, alone, tentatively called Charles E. Aguar, Unsung Champion of Environmental Design.

After Charlie returned from World War II, he got a degree in city planning. He joined UGA's landscape architecture school in 1970.

MAKING OF AN ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNER
Born to Portuguese immigrants in 1926, Charlie Aguar began developing his work ethic when he was 10 years old and became the "man of the house" after his father died.

By the time he was a teenager, he had already been bicycling two newspaper routes a day. In high school, he worked multiple jobs at once—at Walgreen's and Sears and Roebuck, while also raising rabbits for a nearby restaurant. The president of his school's aeronautics club, he wasted no time at 17 enlisting in the Civil Air Patrol Cadet Program. Ten days after his high school graduation, he reported to duty, and was soon stationed in Guam, Tinian, and Iwo Jima.

Boosting what would become a lifelong interest, he borrowed a Brownie camera and took photos of himself and friends goofing off on base, surreptitiously developing them in a bathroom at night. And while he flew as a member of a B-29 photo-reconnaissance crew, he began noticing the landforms beneath him.

"We ran into some pretty rough clouds coming and going," he wrote to Berdeana in September 1945, "but it was swell and clear over Japan. We really saw things! . . . The coastlines were very rugged, with really beautiful coral formations, and every bit of land is cultivated—not in squares like in the U.S., but in irregular, curving patterns all over. . . "

Charlie began taking correspondence courses in engineering, and his letters soon bore painstakingly rendered lettering among his cartoons of life overseas. After he came home and the Aguars married, he attended the University of Illinois, graduating with the first class to receive a formal degree in city planning. After planning projects in Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois, and Minnesota, he came to UGA in 1970 to teach in what was then the School of Environmental Design.

MAJOR IMPACT ON ATHENS
"When we came down here, one of the first things Charlie did was join the Georgia Conservancy," says Berdeana.

Al Ike, who taught alongside him at UGA and retired a few years ago as associate vice president of public service and outreach, was also a member of the conservancy. He witnessed Charlie's appointment to conduct extensive research and help determine sites for nomination for then-Governor Jimmy Carter's Georgia Heritage Trust Program, a project similar to one Charlie had undertaken in Minnesota.

"He brought those ideas with him," says Ike. "That's where he made the greatest impact on the state of Georgia."

While working with ICAD at UGA, Aguar developed plans for Jekyll Island State Park and developed model city and county zoning ordinances that were adopted by dozens of Georgia cities and counties.

In 1973, he became a member of the organizing group that would design the Sandy Creek Nature Center. Walt Cook, for whom Cook's Trail is named, recalls other locations considered for the center, including Five Points, Oglethorpe Elementary school, and Memorial Park. By selecting the site on Highway 441, wetlands that the U.S. Soil Conservation Service planned to dredge were saved. In 1974, the Georgia Heritage Trust helped provide funds to create the center.

The original plan for the center also called for more buildings overlooking the pond, but "Charlie was probably instrumental in scotching that" due to logistics, says Cook. All the while, Aguar was nurturing a dream that began soon after he moved to Athens, and found completion after his death.

"It's common knowledge that Charlie Aguar is the father of our Greenway system in Athens-Clarke County," says Dick Field, chair of the Greenway Commission and senior public service associate at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. "What we have now is his vision."

Berdeana says he began proposals for what would become the greenway and heritage trail in 1973. "He started talking to all the garden clubs in the area and started pushing it," she says. "He was so patient with the Greenway plan," says Cook. "He didn't give up on it and it finally happened."

In 1991, the greenway commission formed, but first-phase groundbreaking didn't begin until November 1999—almost 30 years after Aguar first envisioned the project, and only a few months before he died.

"After Charlie died, the commission decided we wanted to name part of the Greenway after him," says Field. "We identified a little plaza area off of Willow Street, a nice wooded area. We've been regarding it as the Aguar plaza ever since."

To make it official, the Greenway Commission and the College of Environment and Design hosted the Charles Aguar Oconee Memorial Design Competition for the Oconee River overlook site just north of Weaver D's downtown.

To aid his wife in a possible book on his life, Charlie left behind 16 pages of musings on his career that Berdeana just recently found.

INSPIRATION TO STUDENTS
Dale Jaeger's Gainesville-based planning firm is in the midst of a multi-year project on downtown Athens' streetscapes, dotted with the trees that Charles Aguar encouraged years ago. Jaeger took Aguar's class on professional practice in the late 1970s before graduating with a master's degree in landscape architecture in 1982.

"The way he organized (class) was he brought in a lot of practitioners," she remembers. "He brought a real practical side to it, and brought the profession to life."

Charlie also took students with him on ICAD projects; they studied and made proposals for upgrading lands bordering the Oconee River years before the Greenway was a reality.

Aguar also brought a more holistic touch to landscape architecture, she adds. "He exposed to me that you could be a landscape architect and also embrace the planning field."

"I had an impression that landscape architects worked on a smaller scale," says Rex Gonnsen, who received his bachelor's degree in landscape architecture in 1982 and took Aguar's civic planning and regional planning classes. Later, he would work alongside him in the Greenway Commission.

"Charlie taught us it was much bigger than that," says Gonnsen. "We were looking at cities, regions. He understood both the big picture and the little picture."

When Aguar arrived at UGA, there was a movement in which "landscape architecture was transitioning from the traditions of gardens and residential areas to a broader perspective: the city," says Jack Crowley, dean of the College of Environment and Design. "He helped grow that perspective." The growth of that perspective was evident in August 2001, when the school evolved into a more inclusive college. "It's a broadening once again of perspective to include the environment," says Crowley.

Charlie also embraced environmental stewardship. "He was on the leading edge of that movement," says Field.

"I was impressed on how he built his house," which is located near the Oconee River, says Gonnsen. "He took into consideration solar heat, and, of course, he preserved the trees right up to the edge of the house," which is built on piers.

Among the tangible heirlooms Charlie left is a formidable collection of photos and slides, and his transformation of them into posters and collages as gifts to friends. He also left Berdeana several hefty binders filled with career highlights and family memories, all captioned with his distinctive script. "Maps, music, water, airplanes, fantastic scenery!" he wrote next to a photo of his lodgings for one project. "Only thing missing is Berdeana."

When the Greenway Commission won one of the first awards from the River Care 2000 Program, "Charlie was there and took a bunch of pictures and created a collage," says Field. "He had it framed and gave it to me. He did that sort of thing—take pictures, and create something to commemorate the moment."

"Everyone has quirks," says Crow-ley. "Charlie took pictures of everything. There was a joke that if their house caught fire, there'd be an explosion of celluloid. He was a jokester and a punster. It lightened up a lot of things when we were getting budget cuts. The guy had a great outlook."

"He would just see things," says Berdeana. "He was a very charismatic person. He would get really enthusiastic and just inspire people. He saw things differently than other people. He was just a visionary."

Berdeana is still working on her biography of Charlie; she's now up to his tenure as assistant director of the St. Louis City Plan Commission in the 1950s. Recently, she made a marvelous discovery: a nondescript little book that Charlie left behind, filled with 16 pages worth of musings on his life and career decisions, with even a bit of wry commentary hoping his wife would find it and make something of it someday.

"I was looking for books on the history of planning. I wanted to put things more in perspective," says Berdeana, whose search led to Charlie's little book of personal insights, which was hidden away on a top shelf. "Charlie wasn't one to do things methodically. So at 4 a.m. on January 28, 1986, after listening to her read aloud before bed, as was their habit, Charlie found himself unable to sleep—so he pulled out the little book and started writing.

"Knowing the dangers of autobiographical accounts as self-serving attempts to rewrite history," Charlie's writing reads in part, "I nevertheless want to pick my own brain, commit my recollections to paper and ink, and leave it to someone else, hopefully Berdeana . . . to pick up on it, confirm, subtract, interpret, etc. etc." And so she has.

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