Huxley’s Legacy Is Spot on Map for S.D.

Ten years ago, California architects felt that they were getting short shrift from national design publications, primarily those based on the East Coast. So a group of them, including San Diegan Ed Huxley, organized the first West Coast conference to focus strictly on design.

The annual gatherings in Monterey, under the aegis of the California Council of the American Institute of Architects, have become an institution, the place to go every April to find out what’s new in California design. Huxley, primarily because of his efforts in chairing the first conferences, was made an AIA fellow in April, the only San Diego architect to receive the high professional honor this year and the first San Diegan since 1987. Only 44 architects throughout the nation were made fellows in 1989.

Sadly, the honor was made posthumously; Huxley died in a plane crash on the way from Washington state to the induction ceremony in Cleveland.

Those in the business of design still remember how the first Monterey conferences elevated California architecture to a new status.

The first Monterey conference was held in 1979, organized by Huxley and architect and writer Richard Saul Wurman, then dean of architecture at Cal Poly Pomona.

Wurman dreamed up the theme “California 101,” naming the initial gathering after the Pacific Coast Highway, which winds along the picturesque Monterey coastline. Organizers invited 101 architects to present their work.

“I thought an interesting model for the conference was to have everybody tell everybody else what they were up to,” Wurman said. “Everyone had the Andy Warhol few minutes of fame. It got everyone knowing each other much better.”

Something must have clicked, because about 400 architects showed up.

“I was there for the second one, and Ed was the reason I got involved,” said San Diego architect Doug Austin, a partner in Austin Hansen Fehlman Group. Austin, who went on to chair the conference twice, said the event was a turning point in his career.

“Ed called and said, ‘We’d like to have you; we want young architects; we think you’re doing interesting stuff.’

“We were just barely beginning, and we got a project on the cover of Architecture California (the AIA’s statewide journal). Contacts we made brought us some work in Los Angeles and some joint ventures.”

Austin and his partners met architects from the San Francisco firm Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz at Monterey. Together, the companies designed the new Price Center on the UC San Diego campus.

Early conferences established some members of the San Diego contingent as being a little far out. The second year, Tom Grondona wore a full-length mink much of the time. That same year, he and Rob Quigley gave a multimedia presentation titled “Two Lonely Boys,” a record of their tour of Europe. The offbeat “performance” lured architects from less creative presentations being given by some of the hottest young Los Angeles architects.

“We ended up with a full theater,” Quigley recalled. “It was fun for the San Diego boys to upstage the L.A. hotshots.

“Interestingly enough, it went this way: The consumer magazines like Sunset and the European journals of architecture were publishing us first. Then, through Monterey and other things, the national journals became interested. They considered the new work in California to be highly suspect until (Los Angeles architect Frank) Gehry was knighted by the East Coast establishment four or five years ago.”

Conference organizers notified the East Coast design press about the first conference.

“We had good results,” said Paul Neel, an architect and professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo who served on the AIA jury that made Huxley a fellow this year. Neel was vice president of the AIA’s California Council in 1979 and worked with Huxley on the first conferences.

“Rosalyn Schmertz, the editor of Architectural Record, was invited, along with 56 other media people,” he said. “And we received some notoriety. The next year, it was just called the Monterey Design Conference, then it expanded to being one of the premiere conferences in the country.”

Eventually, the event moved, in alternating years, to the rustic conference center at Asilomar, with its rugged wood-beamed main hall designed by Julia Morgan.

Even now, the design press remains largely East Coast-based, but, thanks to Monterey, it is no longer ignorant of what’s going on in California, especially in San Diego.

“The good thing about Monterey is, as an editor, in one fell swoop I can see a cross-section of what’s going on in California,” said Paul Sachner, executive editor of Architectural Record. “It was a West Coast conference a few years ago, but now it’s all California, which is fine as far as I’m concerned. California is the most important state for architecture in the nation.”

Sachner recalls a number of San Diego architects he “discovered” at Monterey and published in Architectural Record.

“I initially saw PAPA’s (Pacific Associates Planners Architects) work at Monterey, their ‘Pig With an Eye Patch’ house. That didn’t appear in the magazine, but I recently wrote about their Escondido City Hall.” PAPA first unveiled the city hall design at the conference in 1984.

“Ted Smith appeared in our annual house issue for his homes on Upas Street in San Diego. I initially saw pictures in Monterey. Rob Quigley’s work became familiar to me from Monterey, and we’ve since done several buildings by him in the magazine. I first saw Tom Grondona’s cinnamon bun shop in Horton Plaza at Monterey. We didn’t publish that, although we did publish Horton Plaza after seeing Jon Jerde’s work at Monterey.

“The conference really put San Diego on the map as far as Architectural Record is concerned. Before that, San Diego was south of Southern California. I’ve always called Monterey the most important regional design conference in the country.”

And so San Diego’s Huxley--a graduate of Oklahoma State University, an artist, illustrator, maker of prints and murals, designer of buildings, including several Nurserylands, the Cooks Corner stores and hotels and casinos in Las Vegas--is best known as an organizer of the event that brought California and San Diego architecture out of the shadows.

DESIGN NOTES: At the June American Institute of Architects awards program, Austin Hansen Fehlman Group received an award for the new Price Center at UC San Diego, but no mention was made of Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz, primarily responsible for the building’s exterior. PAPA won an award for the Escondido City Hall, but no credit was given to Chuck Slert, a former PAPA partner who played a significant role in the project’s design. . . .

Thursday night, Rob Quigley presents design ideas for a new Sherman Heights Community Center at 24th Street and Island Avenue to the community. Ideas include closing a section of Island for parking, reconfiguring an adjacent park so it works with the new center and using landscape design to relate the new center to the school across the street. . . .

Mike Stepner can now devote full time to his job as city architect. To replace him as assistant planning director, the city of San Diego lured George Arines from Austin, Tex.