Inspirational Ray at Design’s Cutting Edge : Education: Multidisciplinary SDSU Professor Eugene Ray impresses upon his students the need for creativity.

One of the most provocative and least visible local architects is Eugene Ray, head of the environmental design program at San Diego State University for 20 years.

Ray, a multidisciplinary thinker in the tradition of Buckminster Fuller, hasn’t found widespread acceptance for his ideas, yet he remains committed to new materials, forms based on nature, a sensitivity to ecology and his strong belief that each project is a chance to invent something new.

He is a veteran advocate for architecture as art, for buildings that serve a higher inspirational purpose besides solving functional problems.

That explains why the graduate and undergraduate programs in environmental design at San Diego State are part of the art department.

“I’ve always felt art departments were the more creative places,” said Ray, who noted with pleasure that Los Angeles architect Frank Gehry turned down a position as dean of the architecture school at USC a few years back when administrators wouldn’t move it to the art department.

Like many of his peers on the unconventional cutting edge, Ray has found much of his praise abroad, in Japanese design journals such as A+U and Domus, and in exhibitions such as the 1985 Paris Biennale, which included his work.

“You’ll find that there is a broader appreciation of design in places like Italy, Japan and France,” explains Ray, a compact, humble man who doesn’t get overtly emotional about the slights he’s felt in his own country. “There isn’t this hesitancy to try something new simply because it’s new.”

Ray’s large classroom and adjacent office are filled to the rafters with drawings, models, books, magazines and other items collected during his career.

Looking at the artifacts, you sense a different aesthetic at work. Ray’s commitment to non-rectilinear forms extends to the way he displays colorful architectural drawings and photographs--on sheets with rounded edges he trims with a coffee can to eliminate square corners.

He believes curves are more soothing than angles, and this carries into his architecture. Cones and spheres make the most pleasing environments for humans, he says, partly because they minimize the impact of electromagnetic radiation.

Even writer Ray Bradbury found Ray’s creativity impressive. In a personal letter to the architect in 1972, he referred to Ray as a fellow “jackdaw.”

“You are a jackdaw, of course, like myself, collecting bright objects, ideas, and tumbling them together in a kaleidoscope to see what prism lights hit the sides of your skull and other peoples’ brainpans. How I wish you were in charge of brightening up most cities . . . like Century City here, or the Universal Studios black-soot building which needs a big symbol of orange on its side to make it look enterable.”

Ray’s lectures ramble freely over many disciplines, from art to architecture to pop culture to the recent Earth Day--he and his students built a dome from recycled carpeting tubes for the on-campus celebration.

“I’m interested in improving realities,” he tells a small group of environmental design students gathered to hear one of his talks. “Movies show a reality above and beyond real life. Our goal is to make real life as exciting as movies.”

The projects he and his young proteges dream up are unlike anything you’ve seen around town: assorted domes, combinations of spheres and cones, houses with walls made of compacted earth, frameworks built from PVC pipe, lightweight environments of thin, taut fabric, prototypes for housing using new materials being pioneered by the Japanese.

Ray’s design philosophies are broader-based than most. He’s been talking about ecology and energy conservation since before the first Earth Day. He sees it as significant in his life that the Whole Earth Catalog--a bible of ‘60s alternative living--won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969, the year he brought his own rarefied thinking to San Diego State.

His conversations are peppered with terms he has invented or picked up from visionaries like Fuller: “radiant architecture” (which takes into account light, color and electromagnetic radiation), “synergetic environments” (which combine elements in such a way that the sum is greater than the parts), “biomorphic” (designs based on nature) and “biotronics” (a happy marriage between biomorphic forms and electromagnetic radiation).

In recent years, he’s been more of an academic than a practicing architect, but he has a lengthy resume of building credits dating back to the houses he designed in New Orleans--his home town--after he earned a master’s in architecture from Tulane University.

“Silver Ship” is what he calls his home on Nautilus Street in La Jolla, which clings to its steep hillside like a space station, or, as Ray would probably prefer it described, a large living organism. Canopies resemble eyelids, curved windows on hinges flap up and down like wings. Using such economical yet catchy materials as corrugated aluminum, Ray built it over several years, with the help of students, at a cost of $40,000.

He still finds time for the occasional design job. Students are collaborating with him on a master plan and building designs for Madre Grande, an alternative community in Dulzura in East County. A Native Indian Cultural Center with a tent-like conical form awaits a San Diego site and funding. And Ray’s lightweight fiberglass covers for an archeological excavation in Presidio Park are also waiting for funding.

Although Ray’s designs often seem futuristic or perhaps timeless, completely outside architecture’s mainstream, he is also committed to architectural history. He’s written letters and reports in favor of saving such local landmarks as architect R.M. Schindler’s El Pueblo Ribera apartments in La Jolla.

Several of Ray’s students have gone on to productive careers in architecture or other design-related fields, even though his lack of emphasis on such practical matters as drafting and management can leave them scrambling for supplemental education once they graduate.

“His classes were eye opening,” said San Diego architect Kotaro Nakamura, who earned a master’s degree under Ray and is now a fellow professor at the university. “I had strict engineering training in Japan. Eugene opened my creative side, and I owe him a lot.”

“The program was so loose that it didn’t constrict me,” said local artist Mario Lara, best known for his temporary architectural installations. “I was encouraged to go in my own direction, as opposed to other programs, where they make you fit a cookie cutter and you get squeezed out the other end.”

With energy conservation, low-cost housing, and environmental concerns all coming belatedly into the limelight, San Diegans, especially architects, could do well to take another look at Ray’s ideas.

His buildings are unconventional and not elegant in traditional ways, but his concern for humanistic values over materialistic ones seems more timely than ever.

DESIGN NOTES: “Unsolicited Patterns for a Reluctant City,” an exhibit by four young San Diego architects proposing that the airport remain at Lindbergh Field, is on display through June 1 in the gallery behind ABC Books, 835 G St., downtown. . . . Portraits by photographer Robert Bretell of architects Ken Kellogg, M. Scott Emsley, James Hubbell, Wallace Cunningham and Ken Ronchetti with their families are on display through May at The Pannikin in Encinitas.