UCSD Seeking to Open School of Architecture : Move Aims to Upgrade Reputation of Region

In a major move to boost San Diego’s reputation for design and environmental planning, UC San Diego officials are proposing a graduate school of architecture for the La Jolla campus.

San Diego has no buildings on the city skyline serving as a “signature” for the region. And as the county grows apace both with commercial and residential development--now the nation’s 19th largest metropolitan area--perceived lack of quality design by urban observers has become more noticeable.

Now, UCSD hopes to set up the new school to address ongoing issues of design, architect training, and environmental constraints in the region. As the third professional school at UCSD, it would enroll its first students in the fall of 1990 or 1991.

The ambitious goals set out by UCSD planners include: improving the quality of professional architectural practice in Southern California; setting intellectual guide paths for the way growth occurs in the region; and fostering research to strengthen the discipline’s links to the fields of engineering, computer design and materials development.

Approved Unanimously

A detailed proposal has been approved unanimously by the UCSD Academic Senate and will be sent to the office of UC system President David Gardner. If the several required reviews at the state level proceed without major hitches, final approval from the Board of Regents could come as early as next spring. A two-to-three-year process to select a dean, core faculty, and a curriculum would follow.

“We see a genuine need in San Diego for a first-rate school of architecture,” said Richard Attiyeh, dean of the UCSD Office of Graduate Studies and Research. Attiyeh chaired the committee that drew up the concept for the new school. “And we’ve found strong support among local architects for the increased quality a school would bring to the community.”

“I think it would really be significant,” Frank Hope, a longtime San Diego architect and a member of the Board of Regents, said. “We are a little isolated here culturally from the (architectural) profession . . . there is nothing quite like having a fountainhead or source of theory and inspiration on design, planning, and critique, right in your own community that the university could provide.”

The UC system currently has graduate architecture schools only at UC Berkeley and at UCLA, both of which are oversubscribed each year and turn away four out of every five applicants.

Convergence of Thoughts

The move by UCSD for the architecture school results from the convergence of two separate strands of thought on campus, Attiyeh said in an interview.

For the past several years, the university has wanted to develop its professional school base, he said. “We’ve done an excellent job of building up our undergraduate and academically oriented graduate programs to where they are among the best nationally,” Attiyeh said. “But of the major research universities around the country, all have a number of quality professional schools, that contribute both to the greater intellectual diversity and breadth of campuses and connect the university with the general public in the surrounding community.”

UCSD currently has only a School of Medicine and a new Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies that opens next month.

“We feel that now, both to be a well-rounded university and to serve this region, we should do more to develop UCSD’s professional side,” Attiyeh said.

The selection of architecture as the next field for a professional school stems from ideas extending back more than a decade on campus, according to Attiyeh.

“There has been thought about a school of environmental design for many years,” Attiyeh said. That thought crystallized two years ago when a UCSD faculty committee on professional education suggested that architecture have a high priority in campus expansion.

“So a longstanding faculty interest surfaced in context with our desire for expanding our professional school relationships,” he said.

Attiyeh’s planning committee interviewed numerous architects both locally and from around the country, visited other schools of architecture and considered the cultural climate of San Diego in drawing up the recommendation for a school at UCSD.

Coming to Grips

“San Diego has grown rapidly and will continue to grow remarkably, yet it is just now coming to grips with the architecture and design problems that are to be faced in the future,” Attiyeh said. “And given San Diego’s population, and the fact that all other (metropolitan) areas our size have a school, it’s a crime not to locate one here.

“A school here could contribute something important by bringing together a conglomeration of talent among the best in the world, by furthering research, and by providing a central forum for the community to discuss major issues, receive continuing education and exchange information.”

Attiyeh cited figures developed by the committee that show only about 10% of the some 300 architects in San Diego hold master’s degrees in architecture, contrasted with almost 50% in San Francisco and 30% in Los Angeles who have graduate professional training.

“We have little representation of those who will become future leaders in the profession and will affect the public perception of design,” he said. And because of San Diego’s lack of a graduate school with an always-bubbling caldron of ideas, local firms find it difficult to attract top graduates from other schools.

To Serve Region

“The tendency nationally is for architecture schools to serve their local region so we would fit into that pattern,” Attiyeh said. “A school here would attract first-rate students, many of whom would stay and produce in the region after graduation.”

Attiyeh said that Southern California’s other fast-growing counties, especially Orange and Riverside, would also benefit from the school.

Joseph Martinez, a local architect who also teaches urban studies at UCSD, said that architecture is no longer a largely technical service for doing working drawings.

“You have to be a good designer, you have to be financed, you have to know economics, and you have to have rapport with your clients,” said Martinez. “You just can’t come in with a (bachelor’s degree) anymore.”

Hope said that today he increasingly hires new architects who have advanced professional degrees.

“If we are looking for someone to knock out working drawings, we don’t really care (about a master’s degree) but if we are looking for someone who may become a partner or leader in the firm and the profession, it is different now . . . a master’s is becoming more interesting and appropriate for architects.

“We have enough architects, but what we need to do is improve the quality of architects. That is where the school, over a number of years, would bring a quantum jump in the quality of architecture being practiced in San Diego.”

UCSD officials want the school to have a strong research component, something that most architecture schools traditionally have not specialized in.

Users of Research

“They’ve tended to be users of research, rather than creators of it,” Attiyeh said. He said that UCSD, with an already powerful base of engineering and other architecture-related studies, can easily forge a stronger link between architecture and other disciplines by offering collaborative opportunities, particularly for problems associated with the Pacific coast.

Attiyeh cited the UCSD structural laboratory, the only one of its kind in the United States, where full-scale buildings and bridges can be tested for resistance to earthquake and other forces. The engineering division also has an advanced materials lab where new materials are tested. The cognitive learning institute can contribute in the field of computer-aided design, helping to cut down the amount of time needed to create a new structure, he said.

In addition, relationships between design and the region’s unique coastal environment can be understood through work ongoing at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

“A lot of research issues will combine architecture with the region,” Attiyeh said, noting the importance of earthquakes and coastal processes to San Diego. “There’s been discussion in the past about an airport offshore and Scripps, with its knowledge about ocean engineering, could greatly contribute to the school of architecture in such areas.”

Equal Benefits

For architects like Hope and Martinez, a school will spin off equal benefits both to their profession and to the general public.

“San Diego is uniquely different from Los Angeles or San Francisco and it needs input on planning and values and cultural goals that don’t really come out of the profession itself,” Hope said. “We (architects) are working like hell to make a living and we need some people who have the time to sit around and think about what is good for us and the community, and we would get that with a school of architecture.

“From the professional standpoint, we would have a new source of inspiration and access to the latest thinking in the design world and the art world, not only in technical areas but in aesthetics as well.”

Added Hope: “The community would benefit because you would have the university focused on community problems and growth, which is all to the good, since UCSD is an important part of the community.”

Role of Critic

Both Martinez and Hope emphasized the role of critic that a university school could play.

“We have too much developer schlock garbage going up, filling our landscape with cheap buildings that are not making a positive contribution to our environment or the cityscape,” Hope said. “A first-class institution like UCSD would be of the highest quality and when they would say something, the community would listen and an architect would feel badly about not doing the best.”

Martinez cited continued criticism of San Diego architecture by outside observers who say that San Diego design lacks rigor.

A university school would be able to focus sustained attention on design as it relates to San Diego’s physical and environmental characteristics, such as its canyons, beaches and the international border, Martinez said. A cadre of students and professors would be examining the city on a constant basis as part of the school, resulting in an exponential increase in the quality of ideas available to the community, he said.

“We could develop a specificity for San Diego and the Pacific Rim, and in (our own way) come to rival Boston or San Francisco as a region in terms of sophistication.”