Gaslamp’s Welcome Addition

The East West Design Complex, a compact building in the Gaslamp Quarter downtown, proves that contemporary projects have their place in historic neighborhoods.

Its thin-brick skin and modest scale are in keeping with nearby buildings, and its unpretentious design doesn’t overpower them. But the brick covers a sleek, minimal exterior, and the well-lit interior spaces have an aura that is strictly up to date, including a curved glass-block wall.

The four-story, $1.3-million East West buildin, designed by Roesling Nakamura Architects of San Diego for landscape architects Wimmer Yamada & Associates, who will occupy the first floor next week, includes four levels of offices and a small retail space facing 4th Avenue.

Many of the buildings in the Gaslamp Quarter, which stretches along 4th, 5th and 6th avenues from Broadway to the San Diego Bay, were built in the 1890s and feature ornate ornamentation, bay windows and brick or wood construction.

Some earlier in-fill projects--small new projects built in dense urban areas--in the Gaslamp Quarter tried to clone their 1890s predecessors, usually on shoestring budgets. The results looked like phony, low budget sets from a Hollywood B movie.

A building at the northwest corner of 4th Avenue and G Street is one example. This pastel-hued abomination, completed during the late 1980s, was an attempt to capture the flavor of 100-year-old buildings nearby, but without the craftsmanship or thoughtful detailing.

City planners never intended for new Gaslamp Quarter projects to replicate historic buildings.

“The Gaslamp Quarter is a National Historic District,” acknowledged San Diego City Architect Mike Stepner. “But, under the guidelines for rehabilitation and building, when you’re in-filling or adding on, you don’t do some copy or Disneyland re-creation of a building unless you are actually restoring or rebuilding the original.

“The goal is not to mimic the buildings that are already there, but rather to provide sympathetic in-fill projects that can be contemporary in design if they respect the scale, character and architectural elements of existing buildings.”

The East West Design Complex is the most significant urban project for architects Ralph Roesling, 39, and Kotaro Nakamura, 36, who also designed the International Gallery on G Street downtown, Words & Music Book Gallery in Hillcrest, military, medical and school buildings and several award-winning houses. Staff architect Chikako Terada also contributed to this design.

Roesling and Nakamura have worked in offices in the Gaslamp Quarter since 1982, and Roesling is a member of the Gaslamp Quarter Council, so the architects are well aware of local history.

Sandwiched between a nondescript one-story 1920s building to the north and the historic William Heath Davis house to the south, the East West Design Complex is simple but dynamic.

A broad street-level entry leads to a courtyard landscaped by Wimmer-Yamada, beneath an open-air light well cut into the south side of the building. The bamboo-filled courtyard and a second, small court at the back of the building are the focus for several of the offices, providing natural light and swatches of greenery. The front courtyard also separates offices from the Fourth Avenue retail entry.

Sweeping through the first-floor lobby, a curved glass-block wall is only one example of the admirable degree of honesty inherent in this building’s design and construction. The wall isn’t just a trendy piece of decoration. It gives a conference room privacy while passing natural light through to the lobby.

Instead of trying to make the thin-brick exterior look like heavy, solid brick, the architects left the edges exposed to acknowledge that the material is decorative, not structural, and is there to give a nod to the historic district.

The building’s most visible facades, on the west and south, are asymmetrical compositions made from basic forms--squares, rectangles and the gentle curve of the south wall.

“There is power in geometry,” Roesling said. “Great buildings from history have some kind of rational order, some kind of harmony that’s based in geometry. The trick is to keep something spiritual and alive, some kind of mystery.”

The East West Design Complex succeeds on both functional and aesthetic levels, providing efficient, well-designed spaces for its users and suggests some poetic interpretations. Roesling, for example, compares the building to the bamboo that grows in its courtyard--it is a fresh design contained within a nostalgic brick shell, the way a hardened bamboo sheath contains the new growth within.

The thin-brick front wall, punctuated by nine square windows ordered with the precision of a tick-tack-toe board, almost seems to float free from the building, separated by the narrow strip windows at its edges.

But while the west side of the building, facing Fourth Avenue, makes a crisp, well-proportioned statement, the south elevation, facing Island Avenue, is too busy. While it gracefully balances walls of brick and stucco around the the courtyard and three-story light-well at its center, it is cluttered by awnings and the busy lines of railings on the fourth floor.

Due to city fire safety regulations, the north and east walls of the building could not contain windows. Roesling and Nakamura detailed the pale-gray stucco with a simple grid pattern.

According to Stepner, at least a dozen more 25- to 50-foot-wide Gaslamp Quarter sites similar to this one are ripe for redevelopment. Roesling and Nakamura’s building shows how today’s architects can effectively use contemporary design and materials while respecting the century-old context of this historic district.

DESIGN NOTES: Proof that contemporary architecture isn’t for everyone: A Fairbanks Ranch house designed by San Diego architect Rob Quigley and published in Architectural Digest in 1984, was torn down last year by new owners who decided it didn’t meet their needs. They plan to rebuild from scratch, but for now, the lot is vacant . . . .

San Diego architects Rene Davids and Christine Killory won a Citation in this year’s Progressive Architecture magazine awards program; they are the only local firm to be honored. Their project consists of 13 small apartments for low-income, single mothers and their children, around a central courtyard, to be built in Escondido. Adele Naude Santos, dean of the architecture school at UC San Diego, was a member of the awards jury.