Rancho Santa Fe Poses for Enduring Portrait : Design: Student team is making an architectural and historical record of the exclusive community.

Usually Rancho Santa Fe dwellers shun publicity of any kind about their exclusive estate community. But, this time, pride got in the way.

Ranch residents and the community’s governing board, Rancho Santa Fe Assn. directors, opened their pocketbooks and their community to an architectural team which will document and create a historical and architectural record of one of California’s first planned communities.

The team, consisting of architectural students from colleges around the country plus one architect from Poland, is headed by Texas Tech professor of architecture John White. White has been on 18 other similar summer sojourns and pronounced the Rancho Santa Fe village center “outstanding!”

Students arrived at the Rancho Santa Fe Inn Monday for a get-acquainted session and briefing, then scattered to begin sketching the quaint commercial and residential buildings at the community’s core, which date from the 1920s when San Diego architect Lilian Rice first designed the civic center along Paseo Delicias in a Spanish village style formally called Spanish Colonial Revival.

Rice’s town center contained a school, now replaced by banks and shops, a grocery and soda fountain, a commercial-office block, a garage and filling station, an inn and, of course, a post office. Then she added townhomes and an apartment building.

Some of the old adobe and unreinforced concrete buildings remain as they were when they were designed in 1922, but others, including the schoolhouse, have been replaced. Strict Rancho Santa Fe design codes have made it difficult to tell the difference, but the survey team will stick the the real ones and pass up the later copies.

Lauren Farber, a Philadelphian glad to spend her summer on the California coast and the only non-architect in the group, will add another dimension to the project with her specialty, history.

She hopes to dig into the archives of the Rancho Santa Fe Historical Society and breathe life into the village, past and present, “bring out the uniqueness of this place and of the people.”

Later this summer, a professional photographer, Jack Boucher, will join the survey team to add pictorial documentation to the architectural drawings and the historical text, which will be assembled and stored in the Library of Congress.

The federal program under which the Rancho Santa Fe project is being conducted is the Historic American Buildings Survey. It is only about a decade younger than Rancho Santa Fe itself. It was one of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s work projects to employ the unemployed millions in the nation during the Great Depression.

Paul Dolinsky, chief of HABS and in Rancho Santa Fe to see the local project off to a good start, bragged that his agency was the only WPA program to remain true to its Depression-era beginnings and retain its name.

Out-of-work architects of earlier generations have given way to promising young architectural students seeking summer experience, but the goal of documenting nationally important architectural landmarks goes on.

Warsaw University student Piotr Trebacz still appears to be in shock from the sudden transport from a Communist country into the midst of American capitalism, and all of the survey team seem to have experienced some degree of cultural shock.

“It’s a beautiful place, and I’d love to live here,” White said of the eucalyptus-shaded village.

“But they would have to move a few of those decimal points before I could afford it,” he added after peering in the window of a realty office and noting the multimillion-dollar price tags.

Despite the federal sponsorship of the Rancho Santa Fe survey, no tax money is going into the effort, according to Pat Cologne, president of the local historical society. Half the funds were raised by community donations and matched by the Rancho Santa Fe Assn., she explained.

Dolinsky said the Rancho Santa Fe survey will join about 21,000 other HABS surveys in the Library of Congress. These do not gather dust but become part of the most extensively used collection there, he said.

Researchers, scouts looking for movie locations, architects checking out the competition, historians and a lot of others seek to check out the best of American architecture, he explained.

Most of the surveys were taken on the East and West Coasts, Dolinsky said, although he does not know why Middle America has not joined the movement to honor its past. Locally, the Hotel del Coronado, Villa Montezuma and the Horton Grand Hotel have joined the collection.

Cologne said the current survey has no connection with the Ranch’s designation as a state historical landmark in 1989, nor is it directly connected with the local society’s efforts to become part of the National Register of Historic Places. “But this couldn’t hurt us a bit,” she said.