A Winner Despite a Few Flaws

With its bold geometries and dramatic spaces, the Lemon Grove Senior Center captivated four out-of-town architects who visited San Diego last month to choose the best of local architecture.

These architects served as jurors for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects. They liked the project enough to give it a prestigious Award of Merit; only four projects received that distinction.

Designed by San Diego architect Dick Friedson, the project is a graceful composition of three economical but dramatic stucco buildings, sitting on a generous site next to Lemon Grove Park on Washington Street. In the Mexican tradition, a smooth stucco wall provides a striking and mysterious facade to the street,

Inside lies an administration building with large, wood-frame windows that overlook a lush, raised flower garden just behind the wall; a multi-use auditorium with a catering kitchen behind it, a large concrete courtyard, and, flanking the auditorium, a cylindrical recreation building with a dramatic beveled top and square, round and triangular skylights.

Inside the buildings, natural light is abundant through many tall windows and several clerestories. Even the innermost spaces get some of this light.

A long outdoor corridor with richly tiled benches shaded by a simple wooden trellis serves as the main pedestrian route.

Except for unsightly rooftop hardware, poorly concealed behind a metal screen added after construction, the project appears well designed, an asset to a community with few good contemporary buildings.

Yet for all of its pluses, the building has its shortcomings, some attributable to the architect, some to bad planning.

Had the jurors toured the facility during business hours--when they visited, it was closed for the day--and interviewed its users, jurors might have formed a different impression.

Those who work inside the building every day say it has significant functional shortcomings.

For example, a room intended for physical therapy is too small for the necessary equipment, so, in an awkward solution, therapists and their patients now share a single space with office workers.

The large concrete patio in the middle of the three-building complex is essentially unusable during the hot summer months--it has no shading devices.

A concrete floor in a large multi-use room is dangerously slippery. No seniors have fallen yet, but an employee recently did; she wasn’t hurt.

A circular game room echoes, making it difficult for hard-of-hearing old folks to converse.

And storage space for both equipment and office supplies is woefully inadequate, so rooms and countertops are always cluttered.

This all adds up to a building whose insides don’t live up to its camera-pleasing outsides.

“It’s pretty, but it’s not real functional,” said Lourdes Contreras, director of the Lemon Grove/Spring Valley Nutrition Board, which uses the center under an agreement with its owner, the city of Lemon Grove. The board’s programs provide activities and noon meals to 95 seniors each day and day care to 32 seniors with physical or mental impairments.

In addition, the city offers recreation and education programs for area seniors.

Contreras and Irene Rogers, a recreation specialist for Lemon Grove, run the center.

Architect Friedson offered some legitimate excuses for some of the complaints. For example, the director who helped him shape his design left before the building was completed. He also said the board’s programs expanded and changed between the time the project was designed and when it was completed and first occupied last fall.

Lemon Grove City Manager Jack Shelver admitted the city knew the project was too small before it was built.

“We started out wanting 9,000 square feet, but soon realized we needed 13,000,” he said. “We pared it back to 11,000 to stay within the budget.

“As is usually the case, it was a compromise between what we wanted and the money that was available.”

According to Friedson, the game room was originally intended to be a quiet library and reading space, hence no need for great conversational acoustics. But someone decided it was the right place for a pool table and card tables.

Friedson defended the concrete floor as a logical choice, siting low cost and minimal maintenance. However, he claimed that the floor was incorrectly poured and improperly waxed, with dangerous results. He said the problem has been remedied by removing the wax with an acid wash and finishing the floor with a non-slippery coating.

Just this week, though, it still seemed too much like an ice rink to be safe for brittle-boned seniors who frequently take accidental tumbles.

Finally, a planned $17,000 fabric awning that would have shaded the central courtyard was cut for budgetary reasons, Shelver said.

Whether or not you think the project succeeds overall, such problems raise significant questions about design awards programs.

Cynics have long complained that most design awards are given primarily to the most photogenic projects, not necessarily those which are the most functional.

Generally, jurors visit few of the buildings they judge, doing most of their work indoors with slide projectors.

In their defense, they face a nearly impossible task. This year, for example, in just three days the four local AIA awards jurors viewed slides of works by 130 contenders. They selected 16 award winners, only one was higher than the merit award the senior center received.

Still, to give high-level honors to a building which has so many functional problems, regardless of whose fault they are, seems misleading.

AIA Awards Chairman Russ Stout said that the most important function of the program is public education. But when appearances win out over practical concerns, the general public doesn’t really profit.

The AIA makes a major event out of the awards. The media get plenty of press releases and give a a fair amount of coverage. In 1988, the AIA even produced a book commemorating past and present award winners.

Stout readily acknowledged that it was “unfortunate” that jurors didn’t get a thorough tour of the senior center.

“The one way to remedy this is to somehow make sure we can get them in to every project.”

Stout said this year’s jurors were particularly drawn to projects that addressed significant social problems, as this one does. This represents a new trend. Traditionally, such economical, institutional buildings were relegated to the realm of architectural mediocrity. Cities put their design energies into more glamorous big-ticket projects like city halls and convention centers.

But even with their bias favoring social awareness, a tour might have substantially changed this jury’s opinion.

“I’m wondering, would they not have awarded it, or lowered the award?” Stout said.

For the awards to have more legitimate meaning, future programs will need a more meticulous screening process.

DESIGN NOTES: Architect Rob Quigley has landed two plum projects: a six-block, mixed-use development a block from the pier in Oceanside, and a new privately developed transit station/mixed-use project proposed for downtown Solana Beach. . . .

“In the Realm of Ideas,” the Frank Lloyd Wright show, continues at the Museum of Art in Balboa Park. Tonight at 7, architectural historian Kathryn Smith will lecture on how Wright’s work related to modern art in the museum’s Copley Auditorium. This afternoon from 2 to 5, educator Marilyn Kellogg, wife of local architect Ken Kellogg, will lead an informal discussion on various aspects of the exhibition in the museum’s John M. and Sally B. Thornton Rotunda.