Noted Architect Designs San Diego Complex to Blend With Area’s Climate and Life Style

Michael Graves Monday described his design for a sprawling 12-acre, office-hotel-restaurant complex-- on La Jolla Village Drive just east of Interstate 5 in University City-- as incorporating the neoclassicism of ancient Rome, relating directly to San Diego’s moderate climate and standing in stark contrast to the dehumanizing elements in much modern architecture.

Graves, an eminent American architect, who was in town Monday for a Shinto ground blessing of the site of the $150-million complex, known as the Aventine, said his design was in part a reaction to the steel and reflecting glass buildings that dot the Southern California landscape.

The Shinto ceremony is traditional for new buildings in Japan, and three of the partners in the venture are Japanese--Shimizu Corp., TSA International and Nissho Iwai Corp.

During an interview Monday, Graves suggested that the modernist work of Irving Gill, a turn-of-the-century Southern California architect, is more appropriate to the region than much of today’s architecture

“We are building all over this place--a lot in California and a lot in Southern California--in a way that I think is antithetical to those concerns that I would have and that people like Irving Gill would have had,” Graves said.

“We’re building towers and slabs and abstract buildings--abstract in the sense that they are steel and glass and have very little to do with the potential of this place. They are really a metaphor of the machine rather than . . . a metaphor of man and landscape. I wanted very much to try to make a place . . . that had legible elements that we could know and understand when we approach the building, when we inhabit the building, when we’re a part of its space--that a more abstracted language can’t give us.”

The Aventine, a project of the Naiman Co. in the Golden Triangle, will feature traditional building and landscaping elements such as pergolas, formal gardens, a lake and fountains that will be part of the complex. Named after one of the seven hills of Rome, the Aventine will consist of a Regency Hyatt Hotel, a three-part office complex, a health club and three restaurants.

“All of those things are scaled to our own human dimensions rather than making ceiling to floor, wall-to-wall glass which is an abstracted idea in architecture” Graves said. “These are (window) openings that strike us at our waist, or places where we can put our hands on the sill, can open the windows and do what we have traditionally done with a domestic architecture in this country and have long since forgotten in commercial and office kinds of architecture.”

Graves has a reputation for creating daring designs that frequently blend time-honored architectural elements into a modern style. Among his better known buildings are the Portland Building, a city hall annex in Portland, Ore., the Humana building in Louisville, Ky., Napa Valley’s Clos Pegase Winery and the San Juan Capistrano Library.

“I’m from Princeton, N.J.,” Graves said. “We have three good months of the year. Classical ideas of light, landscape and building rooms and the effect on one another are possible here that simply aren’t possible in many other places in this country.

“And you have something here that is very precious. So, for an architect not to honor that in building here--and setting a building here apart from what might happen in Northern California or in any colder climate--is not to be clear about where you are.”

Although most of the Aventine’s design has been completed, Graves has not yet finished the work on the three restaurants. He has sketched only “suggestions” of what the restaurants will be and said that, in order to keep the designs compatible to use, he will wait until restaurant tenants are named before he completes those designs.

On display Monday were examples of the wooden furniture that Graves has designed for the hotel.

“We haven’t picked things off the rack,” he said. “It is, I think, a kind of breakthrough in hotel furniture. The room itself is colored by us and fabrics are chosen by us (with) a different kind of window arrangement on the wall. It is not cold, is not alienating. It is tactile.

“There are subtle erosions of language and society and culture that take place in modern architecture or some versions of technologically based modern architecture that I think are pretty risky. And, ultimately, I suppose, and the most damning, is that many of our buildings are just alienating to the human psyche.”