Del Mar Center Is Elegant--but Flawed

Architect Robert Stern’s conceptual design for a new Del Mar Community Center is complete, and it is exactly what city officials hoped for: a scheme that draws on local forms and materials to achieve an effect that is, at once, familiar and fresh.

Stern relied on simple, romantic forms (arches, columns, a pergola) and solid, traditional materials (brick, plaster, cast stone, wood windows, cedar shingles) to achieve a well-composed whole. The community center will include a separate library, City Hall and meeting hall structures arranged around an inviting central plaza.

But, lurking beneath the surface of Stern’s neat design are some significant flaws.

For one thing, the project doesn’t propose much in the way of energy-conserving measures, inexcusable in this era of diminishing resources.

For another, the design doesn’t entirely resolve the urban design issues posed by the gently sloping, 1.6-acre site in the heart of the village of Del Mar.

Stern, who is based in New York and teaches architecture at Columbia University, presented his final design to the city on June 27, and the Del Mar City Council voted unanimous approval. Now they must find a way of paying for the $5.2-million project. The complex issue of financing has pushed a public vote on both the design and financing package back from November until next spring.

In the meantime, a few Del Mar residents are belatedly taking issue with the $790,000 fee the city agreed early this year to pay Stern and the rest of the design team, of which $126,000 has already been paid.

Amid questions of financing and fees, Del Mar developer and designer Herb Turner is lobbying city officials to take a new look at his alternative community center design, which he originally proposed in 1985.

Although Turner’s proposal doesn’t appear to have a chance of making the ballot--city officials are thrilled with Stern’s design--Turner could teach Stern a thing or two about ecologically sound design.

Stern is known as one of the postmodern movement’s founding fathers. During the 1970s, he was among a group of architects--including Robert Venturi and Michael Graves--who rejected the austere approach of hard-core modernism in favor of warmth, decoration and historical references. Critics praised Stern’s earliest expressions of this credo--a series of East Coast houses that smoothly blend indigenous forms.

His Del Mar Community Center, too, is a very tasteful piece of work.

“What I tried to do was make a building that holds together quite a few strands of Southern California architecture,” Stern said. “One point of reference would be (Bernard) Maybeck’s work, in the north and south.” (Berkeley-based Maybeck, who died in 1957, designed only a few Southern California buildings and is best known as a founding father of the rustic Bay Area Tradition).

“Another is Arts and Crafts houses, the low cottages you find from Pasadena south, low-slung and well-scaled to the landscape that grows up around them. We tried to make a new synthesis out of familiar elements.”

Del Mar is now dominated by retail and commercial buildings--the old City Hall and library (on the site of the proposed new center) are nondescript and don’t put government on an equal symbolic footing with commerce.

Stern’s complex would be an inviting governmental edifice, both because of the site and the warm, traditional architecture. By not aligning the walls of the buildings with the grid pattern established by surrounding streets, Stern has created dynamic spaces between the buildings. He has also given each building a distinguished image of its own.

“Each building has an identifying feature which will have prominence from the street,” Stern said. “The city hall has a well-defined entrance (featuring a broad, inviting arch) in the middle of the block. The library has the mass of the children’s room. The meeting room is lower because of the slope (of the site), but it has an important set of doors to the plaza, and it forms the third element in the composition.”

By not aligning his buildings with city streets, Stern generated some odd, problematic spaces. Most apparent is a plaza at the corner of 11th and Camino Del Mar, where the two wings of the City Hall come together. This highly visible public space was requested early in the process by community members, but still has not been adequately refined.

It could have been linked, through a corner entry, to some interior function of the City Hall. Instead, the plaza is joined to the building only by a small entrance to private administrative offices.

Even if the plaza does not mark a public entry, it should be designed as a comfortable, inviting public space that welcomes pedestrians to the community center and channels them along the front of the City H a ll to its mid-block main entry.

During public design workshops, residents criticized one of the center’s most prominent features: a low tower over the City Hall. They questioned both its height and its lack of significant purpose. Stern lowered the tower, but it still doesn’t serve a function worthy of its visibility--it could, for example, have been utilized as a lookout for users of the building. Instead, it will house cooling equipment.

Finally, there is the energy issue. Stern’s building will be equipped with air conditioning to serve the library and either of the other two buildings, depending on which is in heavier use. Climate control is necessary in a library for the sake of the books. But, through proper shading, insulation and utilization of natural breezes, the center would almost certainly remain comfortable year-round without air conditioning. City officials should eliminate the unnecessary air conditioning equipment and insist on natural cooling that would set an example for development in Del Mar.

Turner’s building, which would cost about the same as Stern’s, capitalizes on energy efficiency.

He calls his offbeat but appealing scheme--with the building partly underground--a “non-building.” Turner’s park-like building would send a message of environmental consciousness, quite a contrast to Stern’s romantic civic architecture.

Turner believes the city should reduce its space requirements and lease the extra space to subsidize the debt it will assume to build the center (city officials say they will need all of the space they have asked for).

A variety of simple but ingenuous devices would cool Turner’s building without the air conditioning Stern’s would require on hot days. These including placing a part of the complex underground and landscaping part of the roof. Both Stern and Turner’s proposals would use operable windows to take advantage of ocean breezes.

Turner even proposed an underground water cistern that would store rain runoff from a nearby hillside--runoff that would otherwise flow into the ocean. This “gray water” could be used for irrigating the landscape and could circulate through building walls to help cool the interiors.

Some Del Mar residents also have questioned Stern’s $790,000 fee.

The fee will cover both the services of Stern’s New York office (Stern bills his own time at $250 an hour), and those of associated architects Bokal Kelley-Markham of Del Mar, Los Angeles landscape architect Emmet Wemple and additional engineering and design consultants.

On this estimated $5.2-million project (not including design services), the design fee amounts to 15.3%--a figure that is on the high side but certainly not out of line for an architect of Stern’s international stature.

With the complex political, contextual and urban design issues this project faced, the city had to rely on an old axiom: You get what you pay for. Although Stern’s design has its shortcomings, overall he has created a solid piece of architecture. If built, it would make a beautiful and complementary addition to the village of Del Mar.