Fire Stations Are a Far Cry From the Bunkhouses of Old

To children, firefighters are heroes. To adults, they are security. And the fire stations themselves represent reassuring symbols of safety and power, especially in smaller communities that don’t have other significant public buildings.

San Diego County has a long history of well-designed fire stations, some of them among the most progressive of local public buildings and generally more inventive than the average library or police station.

Today’s firefighters seem uniformly thankful for modern stations, which mark a significant departure from the old bunkhouse-type stations of the 1940s and ‘50s.

Firefighters now have their own rooms, instead of bunking in crowded mini-dorms. Many stations are as comfortable as Club Med, with exercise rooms, carpeted and stylish living rooms with stereos and TVs, expansive kitchens with broad, stainless-steel counters and separate bathrooms for men and women.

Perhaps one reason fire station commissions often result in interesting designs has to do with the odd combination of functions they must serve. Essentially, they consist of small apartment complexes grafted onto bulky garages known as apparatus rooms, which house trucks and equipment.

San Diego architect James Robbins has become something of an authority on fire stations since 1986, when he was commissioned to design his first one. He now has three on the boards. Robbins sees station designs moving away from cutting-edge styles that made them community landmarks during the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.

“I think there was a time when cities were more urban, populations were more concentrated and fire stations tended to be larger and more obviously public buildings,” Robbins said. “Now that populations are more suburban, fire stations are more distributed through the community and the architectural contexts are different, often residential.

“I think many of the best fire stations are less visible as public monuments and more supportive of residential neighborhoods around them.”

Case in point is Robbins’ design of the Lakeside Fire Protection District’s Station No. 26 on Oak Creek Road off Highway 8 Business.

The building is large, but Robbins has given it a hospitable, residential appearance through his subtle handling of forms and materials.

Sitting in a rugged, open area expected to develop as a residential neighborhood, Robbins’ building is tethered to earth by a base of pale brown concrete block. A copper-coated roof takes on forms typical of residential designs. By carefully grouping small, residential-scale windows together and by incorporating exterior details that cast subtle shadow lines across the building, Robbins has made a massive structure seem intimate.

Like a well-designed house, the building invites you inside. The tall, bulky apparatus room on one side and the residential wing on the other are united by a trellis-shaded entry forecourt. Above the entry is a tower with the station’s number painted on it, a vestige of the hose-drying towers at old firehouses.

Inside, the new Lakeside station, completed last year, is expansive and well-lighted. Robbins provided clerestory windows that spill natural light inside.

Lakeside Deputy Chief Richard Upah has been a firefighter for 18 years, all of them in Lakeside, and he thinks the new station is the greatest.

“Everyone wants to work there now,” he said. “It’s much roomier and designed for more privacy, the emotional privacy people need.”

(And that privacy is critical when you consider that most shifts are 24 hours long.)

While Robbins’ low-key contextual approach may be the coming trend, other stations around the county have taken aggressive, even experimental, design directions.

One such anomaly is the San Diego Fire Department’s Station No. 34 on Cowles Mountain Road near Navajo Road in San Carlos.

Designed by La Jolla architect Robert Jones and completed in 1963, the station features a glass-covered, steel-post-and-beam apparatus room that looks like something seminal modern architect Mies van der Rohe might have dreamed up had he been commissioned to design a fire station.

For security reasons, making the firetrucks visible from the street (and thereby letting thieves know when the station was empty) would not be acceptable today, but this dramatic glass pavilion plays up to the child in all of us, showing off the shiny, red machinery.

A more recent take on station design is architect Dick Friedson’s San Diego Station No. 41 at Carroll Canyon and Scranton roads in Sorrento Valley.

Given the industrial-commercial setting, Friedson used a hard-edge design that would not suit a residential neighborhood.

Instead of breaking the building’s mass into residential proportions, as Robbins did in Lakeside, Friedson used three clearly defined building volumes to house and express the station’s three primary uses: sleeping quarters, kitchen-living room-baths and the apparatus room. He used vertical strips of glass block and thick window eyebrows that look like little diving boards to give the building’s otherwise sleek exterior a degree of intrigue.

Contemporary buildings don’t always meet with universal approval, but firefighters seem to enjoy living and working at the new stations.

“I’ve worked in all 42 stations in the city of San Diego, and this is probably the nicest we have,” said Capt. Robert Stehlik, a firefighting veteran of 23 years now based at Station 41.

Stehlik said he hears nothing but superlatives from both firefighters and the public about the building’s well-lit interiors and clean-lined exterior.

“That’s the big comment we have, that it’s such a nice station,” he said.

His only complaint is that it could use more storage space, specifically a concealed area where tools and big, greasy drums containing oil and solvents that are used to maintain the trucks could be stashed out of sight.

Nor is Station 34 in San Carlos an unqualified success. For one thing, storage space is lacking because cabinets can’t be hung on its glass walls. Also, firefighters tire of the unending task of cleaning the giant window walls.

Despite all the progress, the evolution of the fire station hasn’t been without disappointments. As development spread to the suburbs and fire stations were built on larger lots, they became horizontal instead of vertical.

And the fire poles became extinct.

DESIGN NOTES: UC San Diego isn’t talking yet, but reliable sources say San Diego architect Rob Quigley and San Diego landscape architect Ignacio Bunster-Ossa are about to be appointed to part-time faculty positions at the university’s new architecture school, the first faculty appointments made under founding Dean Adele Santos. Several full-time faculty positions will be filled later this year. . . .

The annual design symposium at UCSD on May 12 and 13, under the direction of Santos, will import architects from around the world to discuss affordable housing. Indian architect Balkrishna Doshi has signed on as keynote speaker. . . .

New York artist Allan Wexler’s room-size installation pieces have an architectural bent. A show of his work opened at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art in La Jolla last Sunday and will run through June 2.