CityScape: Annual Architecture Awards Highlight the Ingenuity of San Diego’s Designers

If there is a regional style recognizable in San Diego architecture, you won’t find it in materials. Concrete, steel, stucco, stone, wood and glass are standard from California to New York, Paris to Tokyo.

Instead, what stands out is the ingenuity that goes into designs: forms that come together in artful ways, buildings that suit their sites and neighborhoods, are user-friendly, energy efficient and provide natural air and light to interiors.

Projects with many such qualities were honored Thursday night at this year’s American Institute of Architects San Diego’s annual design awards, at Park & Market arts building downtown.

New York architect Billie Tsien — chair of this year’s awards jury–is especially fond of architect Matthew Segal’s Goldfinch residence, winner of a top-level Honor award. Hugging a canyon rim in Mission Hills, this cast-in-place concrete home is “very settled on its site, very calm, not an intrusion,” Tsien said by phone from New York.

She also praised Studio E Architects’ Honor award-winning expansion of Mandeville Art Gallery at the University of California, San Diego.

“It’s very simple, like a video screen, a very simple idea done in a quite thoughtful way, and it felt in scale with the existing gallery, not a big add-on.”

The three-sided “media-mesh” screen serves as a marquee and as a canvas for video artists. Its rectangular form is supported by slim steel columns that define an “outdoor lobby” leading to the sleekly renovated galleries.

Other Honor award winners:

• Miller Hull’s Student Success District at the University of Arizona, which brings together existing libraries and a historic gymnasium with a spiffy new student center.

• Miller Hull’s Children’s Park, an addition to the Martin Luther King Promenade along Harbor Drive downtown, designed in the nineties by Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz. The new park provides swings, slides, climbing structures and all sorts of other amusements for kids, plus plenty of places to sit. The awards jury said it “breathes new life into the promenade.” San Diego’s Schmidt Design Group and Spurlock Landscape Architects contributed to the planning and design.

• Perkins and Will’s APEX, with its distinctive finned exterior. It’s a striking renovation of a biomed research center at the edge of a canyon near University Towne Center, bringing views and natural light inside, adding canyon-view terraces.

• RNT Architects’ Quad project at San Diego City College: the five-story Arts and Humanities building and the three-story Business Technology building. With its varied, well-proportioned forms in brick (echoing earlier campus buildings), poured-in-place and precast concrete, and glass, plus outdoor spaces ranging from cozy to the expansive central quad, it’s an inviting new campus hub and fitting addition to its Centre City East neighborhood.

• Two unbuilt designs: SmithGroup’s Allensworth Passage, an agricultural center with housing for farm students in central California, inspired by the town’s history as the “first in California to be founded, financed and governed by African-Americans.” And, Luce et studio’s Nature Collective, a visitors center at the edge of a North County lagoon, partly recessed into its site, with rooftop gardens merging it with the landscape.

Merit award winners were two projects in Tijuana by T38 Studio with Walden Desarrollos; Jim Brown/Public Architecture’s Bread & Salt arts building in Barrio Logan; A Squared Studio’s Sonoma Residence; Safdie Rabines Architects’ Omaha Pedestrian Bridge; and Gensler’s Parkside North Residence Hall at California State University, Long Beach.

Citations went to Jim Brown/Public Architecture’s 14-unit Orchid infill affordable housing; and, for design detail, to HGW Architecture’s elegant bentwood ceiling screens at UCSD’s Café Ventanas.

Patron of the Year is San Diego Unified School District, for numerous well-designed schools. Student design awards went to Ben Sperry (Cal Poly Pomona), and Emi Nevara and Uros Milikic (both from San Diego’s NewSchool of Architecture & Design).

It makes perfect sense that Tsien and Williams received a Legacy Award for the former Neurosciences Institute (1995) in La Jolla (now Scripps Research’s Skaggs Graduate School) near UCSD. Tsien said it was a vital project in the early years of the company founded by she and her husband/partner Tod Williams.

They have gone on to design dozens of distinctive buildings, ranging from the Obama Presidential Center (completion 2026) in Chicago and the renovation of David Geffen Hall in New York, to numerous university buildings across the country and projects in Mexico City, Mumbai and Hong Kong.

Tucked into its gently sloped site, the Neurosciences complex is barely visible from the street, but at its heart, dynamic angular forms frame a spare courtyard ringed by private nooks for study and contemplation, and a first-class concert hall (sadly, used mostly for lectures these days). It’s the opposite of boxy modernism.

Tsien said she is still pleased with its design. She wouldn’t change a thing.

“In a way, I think it has stood the test of time, it doesn’t feel dated or old. It has a level of abstraction that is sort of outside of time.”

A second Legacy Award went to Architects Mosher & Drew’s sixties-era west wing of the San Diego Museum of Art in Balboa Park, with its fluted columns and outdoor Panama 66 café at the edge of the sculpture garden. The building will most likely be demolished if a new museum wing by Foster + Partners is constructed (it’s in design right now)

Along with Tsien, this year’s jury included Brendan Connolly of Mithun (Los Angeles-San Francisco-Seattle), Craig Steely of Craig Steely Architecture (San Francisco), Louis Kaufman of De Reus Architects (Idaho-Hawaii-Maui) and Chandra Robinson of Lever Architecture (Portland-Los Angeles).

Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego.

CityScape is supported by the San Diego Architectural Foundation, promoting outstanding architecture, landscape, interior and urban design to improve the quality of life for all San Diegans.