Adding a Little Spirit : Building Aims for New Image With Mural

The challenge: Transform the ugliest building in San Diego into a work of art. The result: A nine-story, three-dimensional mural, complete with swaying palm trees and the Spirit of St. Louis.

The building is the year-old Ramada Hotel on K Street, in downtown San Diego. Designed and built by Concrete Dynamics, the 22-story hotel has been described by an architectural critic as “a building that brutally assaults the street and robs the neighborhood of its scale and humanity.”

After the building garnered an “Onion” at last year’s “Orchids and Onions” architecture awards ceremony, hotel owner Clark Higgins decided the building needed some dressing up. So he put out the call for an artist to design a mural.

Carol Hobson, former director of the county’s Public Arts Advisory Council, organized an international competition, whichattracted more than 40 entries from San Diego, Los Angeles and Mexico. A panel of five artists and consultants selected San Diegan Mario Uribe’s design depicting the legendary “Spirit of St. Louis” flying through a window-like opening in the wall of the building.

“We had some entries that were different, to say the least,” said Dale Vogelaar, the hotel’s director of sales and marketing. “But Mario’s design is really dramatic. When we put the lights on the mural, it really looks like the Spirit of St. Louis is flying through the side of the building.”

The mural is a trompe l’oeil rendering, meaning Uribe used optical illusion techniques to attract the viewer’s eye. His inspiration for the design came from “The Spirit of St. Louis,” a movie starring Jimmy Stewart.

The original Spirit of St. Louis was built in San Diego by Ryan Aeronautical for Charles Lindbergh’s historic 1927 Atlantic crossing.

“I wanted to bring some of the sky back that the building might have taken away,” Uribe said. “This mural opens up a window, in a sense, and improves the architecture of the building at the same time.”

The mural was done by Muralizing, a local company owned by Linda Churchill and her husband, Nicholas Weiss. Suspended from the hotel’s roof, the couple and two assistants took more than 1,000 hours to complete the work, which covers a 210-by-70-foot portion of the hotel’s northern wall.

The project cost Higgins about $40,000, Vogelaar said, including Uribe’s $30,000 prize and Muralizing’s production costs.

The giant mural will be unveiled at 7 p.m. Thursday.