CityScape: Annual AIA awards honor the best of San Diego architecture

Covering more than a century of buildings, winners of the San Diego 2025 Design Awards by the American Institute of Architects run from Baroque to mid-century modern, sixties weird, and fresh contemporary.

Twenty-one champions were selected by a jury of five out-of-town architects and three locals, and the awards were presented Friday night at the waterfront Eve venue downtown.

Among seven winners of Honor Awards, the highest recognition, one project that is particularly spirited is Torrey Heights, a ten-acre research campus along El Camino Real, east of I-5, in Del Mar. Designed by Flad Architects, it brings much-needed sophistication to a dull stretch of office, medical, and research buildings.

Torrey Heights has three structures up to five stories tall, plus a shorter curved “amenities” building with a café and gathering spaces. Buildings are arrayed around a landscaped plaza. Flad describes exterior forms as “coffered” and “tessellated,” and you can see how they echo the unpredictable lines of nearby coastal bluffs. Expanses of glass and wide glass doors connect indoor and outdoor spaces. The plaza, by Bionic Landscape, has footpaths that angle through beds of succulents, grasses, and flowering natives, and there is a puffy chrome sculpture by British artist Richard Hudson.

“Two of the Honor Award winners that stood out to me were renovations of existing buildings,” said juror Karen Lu, design director and associate principal at Snow Kreilich Architects in Minneapolis.

One of them is Nancy Ridge, a drastic transformation of a dead manufacturing facility on Sorrento Mesa into a life sciences and lab center. The makeover was designed by EYRC of Los Angeles. It has an earth-toned façade of smooth stucco, accented by steel beams and perforated steel stair railings. The landscape by Spurlock includes a “parklette” along the sidewalk: an intimate public space amid lonesome tilt-up territory.

Lu’s other favorite Honor Award winner is the $125 million restoration of Jacobs Music Center, the San Diego Symphony’s ninety-six-year-old concert hall, which began life in 1929 as a Fox movie palace that was swallowed in 1989 beneath two high-rises. HGA architecture oversaw restoration of Baroque detailing, reconfiguration of seating and support spaces, and, with acoustician Paul Scarbrough, a significant upgrade of the hall’s acoustic properties, with adjustable louvers, curtains, and an orchestra surround that sculpt the sound.

“I really loved the historical works, and not from a purist preservation perspective,” said awards juror David Dowell, partner at Eldorado Architects of Kansas City, MI, and Portland, OR.  “That three of the top awards were given in this genre speaks volumes. The layering of time, navigation of changing situations, and respect for the past while celebrating the future all play roles in this kind of work. When preservation is done well, the feeling is one of lightness and seamless travel across time.”

Along with the historical concert hall, Dowell was impressed with the winner of an Honor Award for Preservation: the Botanical Building in Balboa Park. This extensive rehab was a complicated team effort by Platt/Whitelaw Architects, preservation architect Milford Wayne Donaldson, Heritage Architecture, Estrada Land Planning, and Waterwise Gardener (aka Nan Sterman of KPBS fame), along with numerous other specialists.

The Botanical Building is one of the largest wood lath structures in the world. Back in 1915, it was designed for the Panama-California Exposition by Bertram Goodhue and Carleton M. Winslow Sr., but after more than a hundred years was practically on life support. Weathered, termite-eaten redwood lath was revived, along with the copper steeple and domed cupola. Arched steel trusses were repaired, and a precious century-old Moreton Bay Fig was kept healthy through the lengthy reconstruction process.

Another Honor Award went to PATH Villas El Cerrito, by LPA Design Studios, a mixed-use building with vibrant yellow fins that stand out along a faded strip of El Cajon Boulevard. Housing the formerly unhoused, providing medical and mental health services, the complex has several floors of residential units that consist of re-purposed shipping containers.

Pricier housing can be found at Civita, a new mixed-use community on two hundred thirty acres in Mission Valley, which won an Honor Award for its master plan by Carrier Johnson + Culture. The plan creates a genuine sense of community. On the site of a former sand and gravel quarry, this well-organized walkable neighborhood sits near a San Diego Trolley station and includes 4,800 much-needed residential units in several buildings, around a fourteen-acre park.

York Hall, originally designed by Neptune and Thomas and one of the most distinctive Mid-Century Modern buildings at the University of California, San Diego, won an Honor Award for a seismic upgrade by LPA Design Studios with Orion Structural Engineering. The upgrade preserves the striking colonnade of thirty-five fluted cast-in-place concrete columns, reminiscent of the columns at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax headquarters (1939) in Racine, WI.

Paradise Point Resort (formerly Vacation Village) on Mission Bay, renovated in 2018, earned a Legacy Award. Built in 1962 with weirdo takes on Polynesian architecture that were popular at the time, this tourist attraction has swoopy wood roofs supported by telephone poles, adobe brick bungalows with slatted overhangs inspired by the Big Dipper roller coaster in Belmont Park, and an odd lookout tower crowned with a rebar sculpture by artist Val Agnoli.

Mira Costa College in Oceanside won a Patron Award as a “committed and visionary client dedicated to advancing design excellence.” Several buildings give the campus a new heart. These include a Health and Wellness Hub by HMC Architects, where athletes train and compete, and future RNs are educated. There are also a new Chemistry and Biotechnology building by HED architecture, with a snappy orange front façade; a renovated library by Architects Mosher Drew that houses arrays of computers and 30,000 books and with cute designer study pods by Agati; and a Learning Commons, also by Mosher Drew, distinguished by orange “solar and shading” fins.

Also in the realm of education is the University of California, San Diego’s 8980 Building on Villa La Jolla Drive, designed by Gensler, across from the edge of campus. It’s a new headquarters for the Division of Extended Studies, and a research hub for Health Sciences. Here is a simple, well-proportioned modern building that serves as a new UCSD landmark along this busy street.

Other award winners include the RIC office building in Tijuana by Saen Studio; George Walker Smith Education Campus, by RNT Architects; a house by Eric Johnson; a three-unit residential building by Jeff Svitak; the conceptual design by RNT of a new Ocean Beach Pier; and Rio de Oportunidades, Miller Hull’s fantastic vision for a binational project bridging San Diego and Tijuana. A student award to Tyler West for sustainable design and diversity scholarships to Austin Wiggins and Manuel Arellano were also presented.

Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California and is the author of architectural guidebooks to San Diego and UC San Diego. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego, and he also writes about houses for San Diego Magazine.