Year Wasn’t Entirely Outstanding, and Parts Were Downright Dubious

SAN DIEGO — And so another year comes to a close. In the world of San Diego architecture, it has been an exciting one, if not entirely pleasing.

What were the outstanding achievements of the year? What were the dubious ones?

Mayor Maureen O’Connor blasted us into 1988 on an optimistic note when she promised us a new city architect. With all the slow-growth confusion, City Hall was too busy to get the new position rolling right away, but, by October, Assistant Planning Director Mike Stepner was appointed to the post.

So far, the idea remains in the category of “Dubious.” No tangible results thus far. Stepner has been noticeably silent, especially on historic preservation. The jackhammer rape of the ornamentation on the historic Egyptian Court Apartments on Park Avenue and efforts to restore an Irving Gill fountain in city-owned Mt. Hope Cemetery both seemed like prime opportunities for the city architect to speak out--even if his office has not yet been fully staffed or empowered.

Then, there’s the whole issue of where a new downtown civic center ought to go and what it ought to look like. Perhaps this was another lost opportunity for the city architect to have a higher profile.

A task force led by architect Paul Buss selected a site at 12th Avenue and Broadway, and the City Council concurred. It’s far from the heart of the new downtown action, which is taking shape several blocks to the west. But it seems the only feasible place to put such a big new facility.

Two “Dubious” pins are in order here:

One goes to ROMA Design Group for trying to talk about the new center’s design before a site and funding are even in place. Let’s let the winner of a first-class competition design the project.

The other goes to Bob Lichter of John Burnham & Co., who is trying to convince the city to stay put, purely on the basis of economics.

Doesn’t he realize that giving San Diego’s city government a first-class home is not merely an issue of dollars and cents? Aretha Franklin put it best when she sang “R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

Meanwhile, certain aspects of city architecture controlled by the city of San Diego ran smoothly.

Architect Rob Quigley’s new Linda Vista Library, which seems to please both the design magazines and the people who use it, was a tour de force example of what bureaucrats can do when they get up some gumption.

City Librarian Bill Sannwald backed this progressive design, when it would have been easier to go for something middle-of-the-road. And City Councilman Ed Struiksma went back to his colleagues to get more money so a courtyard could be completed as designed.

The library is one project that merits “Outstanding” all around.

Back in the realm of the “Dubious,” chalk one up for the San Diego Historical Society, which sold its historic Bankers Hill house designed by Richard Requa and Frank Mead for $665,000 in 1987. Late this year, it was already back on the market--for $1.2 million. Not only did San Diegans lose a chance to have access to a masterpiece, but the society also may have shortchanged its own efforts to bring in money for its new Balboa Park museum.

Great American First Savings also gets a “Dubious” award, and not just for its temperamental downtown high-rise. This one goes to the planned new Great American headquarters on lower Broadway, designed by superstar architect Helmut Jahn. The poor little tower looks, at least in the model stage, like the bastard child of Jahn’s dramatic One Liberty Place in Philadelphia.

“Outstanding” seems like the right reaction to the new convention center downtown. Although in drawings it resembled an abandoned space station, it is taking on impressive geometries as raw concrete buttresses rise along Harbor Drive. Congratulations to the City Council for voting, after heavy lobbying from the American Institute of Architects, to keep the rooftop fabric tents in the budget.

Those paranoid people up in Del Mar Terrace, led by Dick Garlock, seem to be operating under “Dubious” powers of reasoning. Why else would they attack architect Ted Smith for the less-than-perfect landscaping around his Carmel Valley Road “Go Home” buildings?

Or, if it’s Smith’s beach-funk blend of architecture that’s prompted them to ask San Diego City Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer for a special “Go Home Ordinance,” they need only look in their own back yard to see some really funky buildings.

“Dubious,” too, is prominent architect Robert Venturi’s design for a planned new addition to the La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art. Apparently bowing to awesome community pressure, Venturi’s design makes such a literal nod to Irving Gill (arches, reconstructing the Scripps house facade) that little of Venturi’s genius shines through. At least the interior spaces look exciting.

We can really only single out one architect as “Outstanding.” Rob Wellington Quigley’s vision isn’t always perfect. Sometimes his risky designs wind up being a little too weird for many of us. But he’s the only local architect with both the talent and the powers of persuasion to get large projects built in his fresh interpretation of a regional style.

And last but not least, the most “Dubious” award of all goes to San Diego in general. One architect was right on when he noted “the increasingly conservative tendency to condemn anything that may be a little arguable aesthetically.” When Ted Smith and Rob Quigley take excessive heat, and Tom Grondona gets an Onion for his Kensington dental office, and the dullards bad-rap architect Michael Graves’ Aventine project near University Towne Center before it’s even built, it seems San Diego could easily be headed for a future of anonymous glass box high-rises, pseudo Mediterranean strip centers, and out-of-place Cape Cod tracts.

A “Dubious” afterthought goes to the American Institute of Architects for its 1988 design awards program, in which the emphasis took a profound turn toward the conservative. At the awards ceremony, the jurors were barely able to keep their mouths shut. They seemed to have reservations about several of the winners. Someone big and hairy, seeking to placate veteran AIA members who feel their white elephant designs have been unjustly overlooked in past years, must have given the jurors a serious talking-to before the judging began.

DESIGN NOTES: Architects RNP (Ralph Roesling and Kotaro Nakamura) received an honorable mention in a Seattle competition to design multifamily housing. . . . The San Diego Historical Society is gearing up to raise funds for its George Marston house in the new year. It will probably start with a March garden tour outside the Irving Gill-designed mansion . . . The San Diego Museum of Art has a new fountain in its rotunda. It was designed by Robert Thiele, and includes outstanding patterns of Italian-made tiles.