Fashioned With Flash : Colorful Architecture Fills Golden Triangle

The Golden Triangle is San Diego’s architectural playground.

Sprouting from the mesas is an array of structures in shapes, sizes and shades never before seen in San Diego. There are a money-green reflective glass bank building and a sleek aluminum paneled office building with blue neon accents wrapping around the corners.

There are flash-cube-shaped research and development complexes, and office and manufacturing complexes in pink and peach tones. On the rise are twin elliptical towers with pearl blue granite columns and sapphire blue reflective glass walls.

Between the edifices are waterfalls; reflecting pools; a Japanese garden; a 70-foot-tall, bright red sculpture, and more.

Architects, presented with a blank slate, have let their imaginations run wild. The display is colorful and eye-catching, but San Diego architects caution that the result is not necessarily trend-setting.

“Some of the buildings are interesting,” said Doug Austin, whose firm has been active in the area. “But most of the stuff in the Golden Triangle is not great architecture.”

Robert Mosher, a partner in one of San Diego’s long-established firms, goes further, saying that many designs are merely “fashion.” “In five years, some of the buildings will be so passe they will be an embarrassment to some people,” he said.

Nevertheless, the architecture of the Golden Triangle reflects a change in the architectural climate nationally--a change away from austere, form-follows-function practicality and toward colorful, anything-goes playfulness. In addition, the Golden Triangle is serving as a proving ground for some young architects and developers who are expected to play a significant role in designing the San Diego of the future.

The vitality is the result of a unique set of conditions present in the area. Architects generally identify four key factors:

- The location. The chance to fill a barren chunk of real estate with high-rent buildings has given architects unparalleled freedom. The fact that there was virtually no architectural heritage in the area to respect has been taken as an invitation to try new approaches that might not be appropriate anywhere else in San Diego.

- The developers. A new generation of developers seeking to establish reputations has played a major role in building the area. And one way to make a mark is through innovative design. One developer in particular, Oliver McMillan Inc., is cited for setting the tone with several distinctive projects in the vicinity of University Towne Centre designed by Buss Silvers Hughes & Associates.

- The clients. The high-tech, research and development, and corporate organizations locating in the triangle also have images to project, and they have been demanding higher-quality design. In addition, the competitiveness within the various industries concentrated in the area has made employers more cognizant of the need to create pleasing working environments.

“If they’re going to compete for the best brains, they want to be sure they can keep them when they get them,” Austin said. “So buildings must be more human.”

- The architectural climate. Architects nationally are turning away from the tenets of modern architecture that have shaped design for most of the century. The debate within the profession now centers on “post-modernism,” an ill-defined and amorphous term encompassing a wide range of styles drawing on classical references, forms of ornamentation and unorthodox shapes and colors frowned upon in modern architecture.

Architecture in the Golden Triangle is not on the cutting edge of new design, but it reflects the increased freedom to experiment with form and color that has been spawned by the post-modern debate.

“We need some variety, some fun,” said Paul Buss, president of Buss Silvers Hughes & Associates, a young firm that may have made the strongest mark on the area. “Post-modernism is an over-reaction, but it opens up possibilities for the rest of us.”

Buss’ firm has designed 13 projects in the triangle, and each is different. It has won awards for its La Jolla Bank and Trust, a jagged-edge, money-green reflective glass complex, and for Park Place, a round-cornered, aluminum-paneled office building with neon light accents.

The firm has experimented with granite, marble and other materials, and with designs that juxtapose hard, boxy sides with soft, curvy sides. Its latest project, set to begin construction early next year, is the $95-million Nexus Technology Centre, a complex of eight marble-sided structures around a large reflecting pool featuring an obelisk reminiscent of the Washington Monument at its center.

“We take the liberties opened up by post-modernism and apply them judiciously,” Buss said. “We go to the edge without going over the brink.”

Another young firm that has played an important role in the area is the Austin-Hansen-Fehlman Group. Its influence is seen most in the industrial parks of the region, where it has won awards for making something new of mundane office-manufacturing-warehouse structures.

It’s not afraid to use unexpected colors, pink one time, peach another, and “sight toys,” sculptural accents that provide a focus to a building. Among its often-praised buildings are the Oberlin Tech Plaza and the Elgar building in Sorrento Valley.

“We like to have some fun with buildings,” Austin said, “but we’re not trying to be cute. The designs are legitimate responses to the site and conditions.”

Austin’s firm is also involved in San Diego’s first true post-modern design. It is assisting architect Michael Graves, a leader of the post-modern movement, on plans for a $185-million mixed-use project expected to begin next summer.

“It will be the most significant, and controversial, project in San Diego,” Austin said.

Throughout the Golden Triangle, developers have given San Diego’s young generation of architects a chance to show their stuff, and the results have been new and different and often flashy. But to some San Diego architects, that doesn’t necessarily mean good.

“The developers are hiring young architects who are playing style games because that’s become fashionable,” said Robert Mosher, of Mosher Drew Watson Ferguson Barker, an influential firm in San Diego for nearly 40 years. “It’s more like designing clothes or cars than architecture.”

The work may be a response to the freedom of the changing architectural climate, he said, but “when people get too much freedom, you get some weird things.”

His view is shared by many architects, who complain that too much of the architecture is flash without substance. And a general concern about the Golden Triangle among architects is that it has become a place with too many singular designs on singular pieces of land. As a result, the buildings compete for attention rather than complement each other.

A related problem is that although individual projects have taken care to include public areas, sophisticated landscaping and ancillary facilities such as fitness centers and restaurants, these amenities too are limited to individual plots of land.

“Everybody did a nice solution within their box,” Austin said, “but they didn’t go beyond their box.”

To other architects, however, the variety and vitality of design in the Golden Triangle comprise a long-overdue addition to San Diego’s architectural landscape.

“Variety is great,” Buss said. “As far as seeing buildings that look and act and feel different, I say thank God.”