Biggest Firm Keeps Lowest of Profiles

Even if you are familiar with San Diego architecture, you probably haven’t heard much about the largest local architecture company.

Yet SGPA Architecture & Planning probably effects your daily life more than any other San Diego firm. Specializing in retailing centers, the company has designed more than 400 such projects since opening in 1969, including at least 40 in San Diego. Among these are town centers in Rancho Bernardo, Rancho Penasquitos, Del Mar Highlands, Carmel Mountain Ranch and Rancho San Diego On the strength of its reputation for designing economical, financially successful retailing centers, the company has grown to 135 employees and $10 million in annual revenues, with satellite offices in San Francisco and Irvine.

But SGPA has not received a single design award during the last eight years from the local American Institute of Architects chapter.

This seems to confirm the suspicion one gets, driving around San Diego, that most retail projects are driven by economics, not innovative architecture and planning. What works is replicated over and over again.

Most of SGPA’s newer shopping complexes have elements in common. Budgets dictate affordable stucco walls, often with simple, easy-to-build geometries, usually in a vaguely Mediterranean style. Tile roofs predominate: The accepted method of adding “authentic” regional flavor; even worse, stark industrial-grade metal seems to be the roofing choice for the ‘90s.

At the new town centers, the automobile takes precedence over the pedestrian. The ritual of entering the center, parking the car and finding your store of choice has superseded a walk down Main Street. And the fast food restaurant has replaced city halls and churches as the most prominent community building, with McDonald’s leading the way.

Critics may not always find much cause for optimism at these malls, but Mike LaBarre, one of 11 principals at the SGPA, stands by the company’s designs.

“We’re definitely satisfied with the quality of our work,” he said. “But we would like more recognition from the AIA. Every year we get awards from the retailing industry.

“In my opinion, the AIA awards tend to go to unusual architecture more than mainstream, even if the mainstream project is very well designed, has a positive impact on a community and has met client objectives.”

As for the difficulty of creating dignified town centers with fast food restaurants as their most visible elements, LaBarre hopes this will gradually change.

‘The McDonald’s thing is a function of land development economics. McDonald’s is the tenant willing to pay the highest price for a premier location. Until the shopping center conventions of today change, you’re always going to see that.”

LaBarre and other SGPA architects blame economics for limiting forms and materials, putting a damper on creativity, even though other architects have proven, with projects such as the newest downtown single-room-occupancy hotels, that it is possible to make interesting, functional buildings using low-cost stucco construction.

“Right now, we have a big challenge: how to create a positive aesthetic that projects quality for less dollars,” LaBarre said.

This may be an long battle with few victories. Just compare a ‘70s SGPA project like the wood-shingled Pacific Plaza on Garnet Avenue in Pacific Beach with such ‘80s stucco cousins as The Promenade on Mission Boulevard in Pacific Beach or North County Plaza near Highway 78 in Carlsbad.

Architects at SGPA, seeing the wood shingle style as a bygone sign of the ‘70s, have taken to calling such designs “woodsy goodsy.” But there’s no denying a certain warmth and charm often lacking in the larger all-stucco projects of today.

Besides the shingles, which give scale and detailing to the buildings, Pacific Plaza has unusually inviting landscaping: small, beachy hillocks resembling coastal dunes soften the impact of buildings, concrete and tile. Low wooden benches and tables, shaded by umbrellas and trees, provide plenty of inviting places to take a break.

These days, landscaping seems a lower priority. New retail centers usually have several trees, but few large-scale patches of greenery. Or maybe it only seems that way because a good portion of the budget goes toward breaking up huge parking lots with landscaped islands, instead of greening the insides of the projects, where people spend most of their time. Today’s centers also have benches and outdoor tables, but they generally seem to be fewer and more poorly shaded.

On a hot afternoon recently at the SGPA-designed Costa Verde retailing complex off La Jolla Village Drive in La Jolla, expanses of unshaded tiles underfoot served as unintended passive solar devices, absorbing sunlight and re-emitting the heat, so that the temperature for shoppers was several degrees above the air temperature.

Maybe all of this is unfairly morose, but it is disturbing to see the county gobbled alive by dozens of these new centers. In all fairness to SGPA and other architects, much of the blame for the blandness rests with developers who favor proven formulas and tenant design demands over fresh architecture and planning, and consumers who worship easy auto access and fast food.

Also in fairness to SGPA, the company has designed some excellent retailing centers.

The Mercado in Rancho Bernardo, completed in 1987, replaced an earlier complex which had foundered financially. It’s a fresh interpretation of Mediterranean and Spanish elements, impressive in a community already gorged on stucco and tile roofs. Project designer Jerry Silva is said to be a stickler for detailing, and this is evident in the way the carefully varied facades blend from one to another. Signage has been kept to a minimum, and there is a symbolic domed tower, so that even if commerce is the order of the day, there’s some sense of civic pride.

Uptown District, a new project on University Avenue in Hillcrest, may be SGPA’s most significant breakthrough, with SGPA’s mixed retail-office buildings merging into condominiums designed by Lorimer-Case. Parking is hidden so that human-scaled storefronts, designed to blend with adjacent ‘30s and ‘40s architecture, become the dominant image from the street.

The people from Ralph’s took a risk by situating their supermarket internally, so that the smaller storefronts could be nearest the street. According to LaBarre, the store is a financial winner.

This well-designed mixed-use project, including retailing, residential and office space, could well make SGPA a role model for architects in the ‘90s. Already, this broader approach to retail development has spurred some of SGPA’s best work.