In memoriam: Professor Emerita Clare Cooper Marcus, expert in user-centered design and healing landscapes
Clare Cooper Marcus was known for pioneering work translating empirical research on user behavior into practical design recommendations for architects, landscape architects, and city planners.
The College of Environmental Design mourns the death of Professor Emerita of Architecture and Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning Clare Cooper Marcus, who passed away on January 18, 2026, at 91. Internationally recognized for her pioneering research on the psychological and sociological aspects of architecture and landscape design, Marcus was a key figure behind CED’s groundbreaking social factors curriculum of the 1960s and 1970s. After retiring from UC Berkeley, she focused on therapeutic landscapes in healthcare, establishing a consulting practice and co-authoring two discipline-defining books on the topic.
“What Clare accomplished in her teaching and research was transformative across the design fields . . . . and her illuminating talks forever transformed how you perceived — and evaluated — the world around you,” remembers Louise Mozingo, professor of landscape architecture & environmental planning.
Trained as a geographer and deeply influenced by the 1960s human potential movement, Marcus advocated for a user-centered approach to design in her teaching and research. Marcus was particularly interested in exploring the environmental needs of vulnerable populations, including children, low-income families, and the elderly.
“Clare Cooper Marcus was a pioneer in developing the techniques of post-occupancy evaluation, a process now embedded in architectural practice,” says Charles Rice, professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. “Her particular focus on housing always recognized an occupant’s individually expressed needs, expectations, and experiences.”
“Clare’s study of Easter Hill Village was one of the first to find out if and to what extent the architects’ intentions were experienced by residents,” says Professor Emerita Galen Cranz. Marcus paid particular attention to how children experienced living in this Richmond, California, public housing project; she published her findings in Easter Hill Village: Some Social Implications of Design in 1975.
“She also focused on how individuals experienced their own homes,” says Cranz. “That led to unearthing the unconscious influence of early environments on architects’ later work and to her popular book House as Mirror of Self — which got the attention of Oprah Winfrey, hence national attention.”
Marcus authored numerous other impactful books that translated empirical research on user behavior into practical design recommendations, including Housing as if People Mattered: Site Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing (1986), with Wendy Sarkissian, and People Places: Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space (1990), with Carolyn Francis.
Teaching at UC Berkeley: Translating research data to the drawing board
Born in 1934 in London, Marcus earned her bachelor’s degree in historical geography from the University of London in 1955. She first came to the United States on a Fulbright scholarship in 1956 for her master’s degree in urban geography at the University of Nebraska.
—Charles Rice, professor of architecture at the University of Technology Sydney
After returning to the U.K. for several years, Marcus immigrated to the United States and “worked in New York City long enough to afford the Greyhound bus cross-country to Berkeley,” she wrote. She earned her Master of City Planning degree from UC Berkeley in 1965 and subsequently held research positions at the Institute of Urban & Regional Development. Marcus joined the landscape architecture faculty in 1969 and then the architecture faculty in 1971; she taught at CED for 25 years before taking early retirement in 1994.
She was on campus during the tumultuous years of the Berkeley counterculture movement and joined in the student strikes and agitated for free speech. She also embraced other cultural explorations then popular in Northern California, attending seminars in the Carl Jung Institute in San Francisco and the Esalen Institute in Big Sur.
Along with other CED faculty, including architect Rosyln Lindheim and sociologist William “Russ” Ellis, Marcus helped shape a curriculum that responded to the era’s calls for a more humane approach to the environment. Together, they established courses and a PhD research track in architecture focusing on social factors in design.
Architects and social scientists began to team-teach studios to bridge the gap between research and practice. Marcus wrote in her contribution to Design on the Edge, a history of the Department of Architecture, that these studios were intended to “facilitate the direct translation of social science concepts and research data to the drawing board.”
Marcus’s popular CED course, Social and Psychological Factors in Open Space Design, continues to be taught in the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning today. She also taught seminars on social aspects of housing design, environments for the life cycle, and sense of place.
Marcus received numerous awards over the course of her career, including for exemplary design research from the National Endowment for the Arts, a career award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and ASLA and AIA Merit Awards for her publications.
Therapeutic landscapes: Bringing together academic research and a lifelong love of gardening
After retiring from UC Berkeley, Marcus shifted her focus to therapeutic landscapes in healthcare. She published numerous papers in the field, consulted on the creation of gardens in hospitals and senior living centers, and co-authored two definitive books with former students, including Therapeutic Landscapes: An Evidence-Based Approach to Designing Healing Gardens and Restorative Outdoor Spaces (2014) with Naomi Sachs.
“I think I literally jumped for joy when she asked me to co-author Therapeutic Landscapes,” says Sachs. “Clare’s writing was an inspirational combination of intelligence and straightforwardness. She eschewed ‘academese’ in favor of clear, readable, pithy language. Her passion was researching, writing, speaking, and teaching about landscapes that promote health and well-being, in healthcare and beyond.”
Marcus had formed her lifelong love of nature and gardening while living in the English countryside as a child, where she had evacuated with her family during World War II. Over the course of almost 50 years, she transformed the lot of her Elmwood district home in Berkeley from a wilderness into a much-loved oasis of flowers and vegetables, shade garden, fruit trees, bird feeders, compost bins, and a greenhouse.
She became a U.S. citizen in 2008, but she always considered Britain “home.” She returned yearly to walk one of the many long-distance footpaths through scenic landscapes. Shortly after retirement from UC Berkeley, Marcus lived alone on a remote island in the Scottish Hebrides and began writing a memoir, published in 2010 as lona Dreaming.
At the time of her death, Marcus was working on another memoir, aptly titled Groundbreaking: My Unmapped Path as an Academic, Mother, and Gardener, which will be published in May 2026 by New Village Press.
A memorial gathering is being organized by the family; please visit her memorial website for details. In lieu of flowers, please consider a donation to Doctors Without Borders or the International Rescue Committee.