Gift too much for county

Press, 6 April 1989, Page 20

Gift too much for county

From

JOHN N. HUTCHISON

in San Francisco

A WIDOW’S bequest, grown too large since her death to be wisely spent to aid her neighbours, is being put to the broad benefit of mankind.

Mrs Beryl Buck left oil properties worth SUSIO million in 1975. Her will asked that it be used for charitable purposes in Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco. But within a few years the estate ballooned in value. It now exceeds SUS4OO million.

Marin’s citizens are, on average, among the wealthiest in the United States, and, although there are pockets of great need, the trustees of the fund found it impractical to disburse such largesse in an area of less than 300,000 people.

There was a decade of rancorous dispute, but a judge finally decreed that a large portion of the fund should be set aside to serve human needs beyond those of the county, to improve educa-

tion, to address the ills of alcohol and drugs, and to study the problems of aging.

One of the results is a very large geriatric project. It will finance a centre of world importance concerned with the biological and medical aspects of aging. In late March, the trustees announced that a SUS3O million facility will be headed by Dr Edward Schneider, a leading authority in the field. Construction, will begin next year at a site of almost 200 ha in the scenic hills about 50km north of San Francisco, with most of the property left as parkland. In phases over 20 years, the Buck Centre for Research in Aging is expected to develop until it houses and employs a staff of 300.

The choice of the architect for the centre drew more attention in the media than that of Dr Schneider. He is I. M. Pei, sometimes called the world’s

greatest living architect. Born in China, he was educated at Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

His most recent work to attract international attention is the expansion and remodelling of the Louvre museum in Paris, where he created a sensational controversy with a glass pyramid for the entrance over a new underground wing of that venerable institution. Other Pei designs include an addition to the National Gallery in Washington, the new Bank of China tower in Hong Kong and the Fragrant Hill Hotel in Beijing. Pei won the Pritzer Prize, which architects throughout the world equate with the Nobel Prize.

The Buck Fund seems ample for permanent endowment of the institutions it is now organising, as well as projects it may establish in the future. When the court resolved the disputes, the trust was accumulating interest at the rate of SUSB2,OOO every day.