An Onion to People’s Choice Program : Awards: Predictable kudos and barbs are doled out at the annual event.

Something was missing at this year’s Orchids & Onions program, the People’s Choice awards of local design.

Maybe it was people. Fewer than 800 seats in the 3,000-seat Civic Theatre were occupied last Thursday night, and the cavernous space seemed empty. In past years, 1,200 have attended.

Or maybe it was just the salty spray that the event, now 16 years old, has thrown off in past years. This year, that bite was watered down when the program’s organizers prevented the jury from awarding a couple of well-deserved Onions.

And instead of the refreshing directions the program might have taken if the lay public had been given a significant role, the process has remained too much under the thumb of the design and planning professionals who run it.

Without the reek of the discarded Onions, jurors were left with several solid--but fairly predictable--winners.

Among the Orchids were the Oceanside Civic Center (designed by architect Charles Moore with Urban Innovations Group), the San Diego Convention Center (designed by architect Arthur Erickson with local help from Deems Lewis), Uptown District in Hillcrest (designed by SGPA Architecture & Planning with Lorimer Case Architects) and the 103-unit Columbia Place condominiums downtown (Lorimer Case again).

Onions were given in two areas that had deserved them for years but never before received them.

Carmel Mountain Ranch, the 3,200-home master-planned community along Interstate 15, with its “endless rows of ticky-tacky boxes” resting atop recklessly graded landforms, according to the jury, served as a scapegoat for many badly designed tracts throughout San Diego County.

Coronado was finally chastised for years of negligent planning that led to high-rises on the beach and the “scraping of charming, older homes to make way for oversize, under-designed shoeboxes.”

But the best of the best and the worst of the worst weren’t very daring, and that’s why the show was a bore.

The outlawed Onions would have helped.

One would have gone to an industrial glass box in Carlsbad, as a symbol of dozens of lousy glass boxes that litter the county; the other to a towering house in Ocean Beach that looks more like a commercial office building place in the midst of a residential neighborhood. When jurors drove by, a little girl was bouncing a ball off its looming back wall--probably the only redeeming value of it.

According to awards Chairman Larry Pappas, the glass box award was overruled by the program’s 29-member organizing committee because it wanted the jury to focus on choosing individual winners from more than 300 nominations, instead of using one project as a symbol of a larger trend.

The O.B. house represented a more serious derailing of the program’s ambition to serve as a barometer of public taste. The house received 12 Onion nominations, making it one of the most popular.

“When the program was established, certain by-laws were written that prevent us from going after one man’s castle,” said awards chairman Larry Pappas. “I can appreciate that, but . . . .”

Pappas said the board of directors of the local American Institute of Architects, which oversees the program, ultimately squelched the O.B. Onion, adhering to the established policy of not honoring individual homes.

Otherwise, the awards were interesting and well-deserved, if not controversial.

Moore’s Oceanside Civic Center was praised for respecting nearby buildings designed by Irving Gill, for creating a source of civic pride and for “magnificent fountains (that) provide a refreshing retreat and also help remove hot air from City Hall.” (The fountains serve as part of the projects’ cooling system.)

Since opening last year, the San Diego Convention Center has sparked polar remarks. Many people love the building itself, but hate the way the massive structure blocks the waterfront from public views and access.

The O & O jury recognized this by giving the project both an Orchid and an Onion, honoring its bold architecture and recognizing the unfortunate siting.

Uptown District, the mixed-use project along University Avenue, deserved its Orchid for respecting the scale and character of the surrounding neighborhood, but it lacks public art and high-quality storefront designs.

Columbia Place, like other Lorimer Case projects, is a competent but bland piece of architecture. Its Orchid was given for the way the architects accommodated the older buildings on the block.

Postmodern architect Michael Graves’ only San Diego design--the Aventine hotel/office complex in La Jolla--had jurors at each other’s throats. It received more nominations for Orchids--and for Onions--than any other project.

Although not spelled out during the awards ceremony, jurors meant for the award to go only to the Hyatt Hotel portion of the project; they considered the nearby office complex an awkward juxtaposition of forms.

Several jurors lobbied against the Orchid because they didn’t approve of such a large, loud project in a sensitive location, but the Aventine’s excellent detailing and originality carried a majority.

Smaller projects had their place too. Orchids went to the year-old Church of the Nativity in Fairbanks Ranch, designed by architect Charles Moore with the firm of Moore Ruble Yudell, to a gem of an underground parking garage at Scripps Memorial Hospital in La Jolla, and to the Bookstar bookstore in Point Loma, a renovation of the art deco Loma Theatre.

Other Orchids went to murals in Chicano Park south of downtown, and the mural by artist James Jackson in the lobby of the Symphony Towers high-rise on B Street downtown; a park-like desiltation pond in Carlsbad; the Anza Borrego Visitors Center, designed by San Diego architect Robert Ferris and completed in 1978, which blends smoothy with surrounding desert landforms; architect Jonathan Segal’s tiny 7 on Kettner condominium project, a well-designed in-fill project downtown, and the County Administration Center’s dramatic new lighting.

Additional Onions went to a gaudy plastic surgeon’s office, the U-Store storage complex next to Interstate 8 in Alpine, and an awful adobe-electronic community monument in San Marcos.

“They need to do something different with the program,” confessed one juror after all was said and done. (The jury included six design and planning professionals and three members from other professions.) “Based on the turnout, I’d say people are burned out. They should let the jury do more creative kinds of awarding, and find a way to get the public more involved in the jurying process.”