Torrey Pines High Excels : Buildings: Despite some glaring design flaws, the school stands out as a good piece of architecture in North City West.

If you have to spend your days pondering differential equations or the Gettysburg Address, Torrey Pines High School is a fine place to do it.

Sitting in North City West--the master-planned community of cookie-cutter tract housing and bland suburban office complexes east of Del Mar--Torrey Pines High stands out as a distinguished work of architecture.

Built of laminated wood beams and concrete blocks with rough-hewn vertical ridges, the buildings have a monumental sense of permanence that suits their important purpose and sandstone-bluff setting. Landscaped interior courtyards and rooftop clerestory windows flood the classrooms and corridors with pleasing amounts of natural light.

The heart of the campus, which serves 1,860 students, is a central complex of classrooms and offices. The new building was grafted to an older one, and the seam is barely noticeable.

Outdoor spaces are as important as the buildings themselves; the campus’ layout takes full advantage of temperate weather. Buildings surround a large quad that serves as the social heart of campus. At lunch time, it teems with students.

Torrey Pines High School won a merit award from the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects last year and has been recognized with awards from American School and University magazine and the Concrete Masonry Assn. of California and Nevada.

San Diego architects Deems Lewis McKinley designed both the first-phase buildings, completed in 1974, and the more dramatic, $9-million 1988 addition that includes 23 classrooms, a library and a football stadium.

But, although the graceful architecture symbolically elevates education to its proper place in the community, some minor lapses in design detailing have left some faculty and school staffers grumbling. Several said the architects asked for their input during the design process, then ignored many suggestions.

The most obvious design flaw is the way the first-floor library, a place where students need privacy and quiet, is open to a second-level mezzanine surrounding it. For a few minutes a day--during breaks and at lunch time--hundreds of students roam the mezzanine, disrupting the studious atmosphere below.

Architect John McKinley, a partner at Deems Lewis McKinley, defends the design. It was an attempt to make the library, the ultimate symbol of higher learning, the focus of the campus.

“We wanted it open to invite students in. We wanted a supermarket atmosphere where they could go in and ‘shop,’ a place easily accessible by faculty and students alike.” The library can be glassed in later, if the noise and distractions prove too great, McKinley said.

But the glass would only be a second-rate Band-Aid for this breach in design logic.

The angular roofs also cause concern. Pointed roof peaks run the length of the buildings and are capped at the ends by large, triangular panes of glass that can’t be easily covered with conventional drapes or blinds. As a result, the end classrooms can’t be totally darkened for educational films and slides.

Elevated concrete planter boxes around the library’s circulation desk represent yet another mistake. The large planters are barren. Apparently, there isn’t enough natural light to grow plants. The planters waste valuable space that could have been used for storage, shelving or display cases.

Storage space is also a problem elsewhere on campus. Several faculty members have complained that their classrooms lack adequate storage and bookshelves.

Between the first phase and the second, which doubled the school’s capacity from 1,200 to 2,400, educational philosophies changed drastically, and this is reflected in the school’s new addition.

“In the early ‘70s, there was a lot of concern about team teaching, and they wanted flexible spaces,” McKinley explained. As a result, Phase I’s classrooms have partitions that can be moved to create a variety of room shapes and sizes.

School adminstrators were ultra-concerned about security in the first phase because of bomb threats and other forms of violence on high school campuses during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Windowless classrooms deter vandalism and theft, but are prisons to students. Outdoor lockers, which capitalize on temperate weather, were actually placed outside because of bomb fears.

Phase II classrooms--as an acknowledgment to the fading popularity of team teaching and a return to a more traditional approach to education--have solid walls. But they benefit from more relaxed attitudes toward security: View windows and large clerestory windows on the backs of the roof peaks bring in wonderful quantities of natural light.

Two landscaped courtyards in the recent addition add to the feeling of light and openness within the buildings, bringing natural light to corridors and classrooms.

The use of natural light also saves energy, McKinley said. Instead of air conditioning, the newer addition has operable windows and rooftop clerestories that help cool classrooms. But, on especially hot days, the rooms get too hot, teachers say. Occasional discomfort is a trade-off for energy conservation, McKinley countered.

But again, despite the school’s many small design flaws--inexcusable from architects who specialize in school designs--Torrey Pines is a significant work of architecture.

It points the way toward new and exciting school architecture and away from the boxy, often mundane, stucco school buildings that became the standard in the postwar years.

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Architect Nan Robertson won a competition to design a cultural information kiosk to go outside Carlsbad’s main library. Her competitors were Tom Grondona, Joe Nicholson and John Brennon. The steel-and-wood structure she designed resembles a communications satellite, with a spinning “wind catcher” on top whose square leaves are meant to make you think of turning book pages. The project should be finished by Christmas.