Hideo Sasaki - Biography

Biography

Sasaki Hideo was born in Reedley, California, on 25 November 1919. He grew up working on his family's California truck farm, and harvesting crops on Arizona farms. He began his college studies at the University of California, Berkeley during the time of World War II. Owing to his Japanese descent, he was forced into the Poston internment camp in Arizona. He was able to leave the camp upon volunteering to work as a farm hand in Sterling, Colorado. Soon after the war, he moved to Denver, Colorado where he met his wife, Kisa, a graduate of the University of Colorado. Sasaki then moved to the University of Illinois where he received Bachelor of Fine Arts and Landscape Architecture degrees in 1946. In 1948 he graduated with a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Design School. After graduation he returned to Illinois where he instructed for two years. For the next eighteen years, he became a professor and the chairman of the department of Landscape Architecture of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. In 1953, he founded Sasaki Associates, Incorporated in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, where he was the president and chairman until 1980. He led the company's architects and planners in developing many noted commercial areas and corporate parks.

During his later years he lived with his family (wife and two daughters, Rin and Ann) in Lafayette, California. He died on 30 August 2000 in a hospital in Walnut Creek, California, shortly before his 81st birthday.