Shaking Foundations of Design : Building: A symposium on pushing the limits of architecture didn’t result in any manifestos, but its ‘creative abrasion’ may well have sparked some fresh ideas.

“Converging Lines: Architecture Beyond Boundaries,” last weekend’s symposium at UC San Diego, jolted conventional modes of thinking about architecture.

About 200 people attended each day of the two-day, on-campus symposium presented by the the University’s new School of Architecture, which begins classes next fall.

Kudos go to UCSD for assembling such an impressive group, ranging from Disney theme-park designer Chris Carradine to Nissan Design International Chief Designer Jerry Hirshberg, landscape artist Martha Schwartz to graphic designer April Greiman, architect Michael Rotondi to environmental sculptor George Trakas.

Few of the guests came prepared to discuss the day’s topic, the ways in which the boundaries of architecture might be stretched through interactions with peripheral disciplines such as film, graphic design, environmental art and product design. Instead, many panelists used most of their time to showcase their work, leaving little time for the kinds of spontaneous debates that can transform such weekends into galvanizing experiences.

Still, there were pleasant surprises. The most intriguing design work, shown in slide presentations, came not from architects, but from other types of designers and artists: Disney’s wildly imaginative Pleasure Island entertainment park in Florida; Trakas’ quirky, carefully crafted public spaces; Schwartz’s colorful, artistic landscapes and environmental artist Mary Miss’ large, meticulously detailed outdoor installations.

Discussions were moderated by two members of the architecture school’s newly appointed founding faculty: architectural historian and critic William Curtis (Saturday) and architectural social theorist Dana Cuff (Sunday).

Some of the sessions were energizing, others soporific and/or too dense with jargon. But the common thread that emerged is that architects want to stretch the boundaries of their profession. They just can’t get a handle on how to do it.

Architects want more and more control over all elements of a project, from furniture and lighting to the design of the actual building. But they also want to collaborate with other designers and artists, which means giving up some of this control, or at least sharing it.

Hirshberg coined the weekend’s buzzwords, “creative abrasion,” to describe the sometimes productive emotional friction that occurs when architects, designers, artists and other professionals from disparate disciplines attempt to work together. There may be tension, but another byproduct can be creativity.

Saturday and Sunday were consumed by panel discussions addressing topics at the fringes of architecture.

Carradine and Los Angeles urban designer John Kaliski (an architect for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency) opened Saturday’s session with a discussion titled “Creating Imaginary Worlds.” Carradine presented Disney’s Pleasure Island night-time fantasy land for adults in Florida. Kaliski discussed efforts at revitalizing Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles.

In Florida, Disney transformed a collection of abandoned warehouses into imaginative adult entertainments: a Comedy Warehouse, a “video cave” night club equipped with 300 video monitors and another club combining roller skating and dancing that has since become a surfing-theme night club.

Many architects view their craft as a serious, academic endeavor. For some, fun might not be an operational word. Yet it was surprising how similar Disney’s design issues were to those addressed in reviving Hollywood Boulevard. Both projects attempt to create magnetic public spaces that will attract and energize their users. And both Disney and Los Angeles relied more on fictitious narratives to create their public places than on historical fact.

As Kaliski put it, “I thought I was building a city by revealing its myth, but our own myth (about what an urban environment should be) was just as much invention as Disney’s.”

Next up, Hirshberg spoke about the creative process at Nissan. A session pairing him with architect Craig Hodgetts, another of the architecture school’s founding faculty members, was titled “Automobiles to Architecture.”

When Hirshberg was recruited to head Nissan Design in 1979, he insisted that his new division create more than just cars. Hence, Nissan Design has designed not only the Nissan Hard Body mini pickup and Pathfinder truck, but a vacuum cleaner for Toshiba and a streamlined monster of a powerboat with which a Turkish client hopes to cross the Atlantic in record time. Hirshberg believes this diversity of projects keeps designers on their creative toes.

Hodgetts acknowledged jealousy after Hirshberg showed slides of the “Gobi,” a whimsical prototype mini-pickup with a body that resembles a helicopter body.

“Why can you sell something that we can’t sell?” Hodgetts asked, noting how safe most architects play it to satisfy clients (the Gobi isn’t on the market; Nissan official are still debating whether or not to mass produce it).

Hirshberg noted that designing products is different from designing buildings.

“People are willing to take more chances buying a far-out fountain pen than a far-out home,” he said.

Schwartz, one of the designers of San Diego’s downtown “linear park,” a long narrow, artfully landscaped 1/4-mile strip being developed alongside the trolley tracks on Harbor Drive, shared the dais with San Diego landscape architect Ignacio Bunster-Ossa for a discussion of “Architecture in Landscape.”

Schwartz accused modern architects of ignoring the public spaces around and between their buildings. Her mission, she said, is to do creative things with today’s odd, urban landscapes: highways, streets, rooftops, strip centers, odd parcels of open space. She showed a public courtyard she designed for a shopping center in Atlanta, featuring 350 ornamental frogs, all gazing at a giant, steel-frame ball that appears to be rolling into the plaza.

Speaking about the difficulty of collaborating with architects, Bunster-Ossa noted that “architects are egotistical, wanting to hog the whole thing.” Schwartz said she still has trouble gaining acceptance as an equal among design professionals, especially architects. She thinks they view her as a frustrated architect who simply couldn’t handle the necessary math classes.

One audience member questioned Schwartz’s bold, colorful designs, wondering whether the design of public spaces is an appropriate medium for self expression.

“If not your own expression, whose do you use?” Schwartz asked, as audience members nodded in agreement. “Part of the reason the environment looks so bad is that no one is committed (to an individual vision), no one sticks their neck out.”

Architect Kinya Maruyama and artist George Trakas teamed up to discuss “Architect as Craft or Craft as Architecture?” Maruyama’s Tokyo-based Team Zoo company is a collaboration among architects and designers from other disciplines. Team Zoo designs buildings crafted of natural materials that suit their sites, while often involving local residents in the decoration and detailing.

Architect and author James Sanders was featured on Saturday’s closing panel, titled “Envisioning Places.” Sanders is working on a book that examines Hollywood’s depiction, in movies, of New York City. He showed how two Hollywood classics--”Life With Father” and “The Heiress”--give different takes on the classic New York City row house, the basic living unit around which the city’s grid street pattern was laid out during the early 1800s.

Sunday morning’s audience, many of them worn down from Saturday’s informational onslaught, were clobbered right off the bat with the weekend’s most obscure panel: “Urban Design in the Information Age.”

German urbanist, architect and sometime MIT Professor Peter Droege, psychologist Richard Farson and graphic designer and computer expert Eric Martin dazed listeners with a jargon-laden discussion of new communications technologies. Unfortunately, none was very effective at relating computers and other 2001-type paraphernalia to the realm of design.

Sunday’s highlights followed: three panels on collaborations between architects, artists and designers.

Los Angeles architect Ming Fung explained a project she dreamed up with science fiction writer William Gibson for an exhibit titled “Visionary San Francisco,” presented at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art last year.

Gibson’s vision of a futuristic San Francisco Bay Bridge, taken over by the homeless and transformed into a dark, grungy “Bladerunner” sort of mini-city, spurred both Gibson and Fung to some wildly imaginative design work.

Graphic designer April Greiman, who says she has no idea how computers work, has nonetheless pioneered the use of the Apple Macintosh computer in graphic design. To design a poster, she scanned a Polaroid photo of a hand into her computer and electronically altered it, with interesting results. She also produced an artful promotional spot for the Lifetime cable television channel by using the Mac to manipulate images she collected with an inexpensive 8-millimeter video camera and a 35-millimeter disposable still camera, of a sort available at drug stores.

Michael Rotondi, a rising star among the new breed of young Los Angeles architects, resigned as a partner in the well-known Los Angeles firm Morphosis last summer. Rotondi has formed a new, multi-disciplinary firm with which he hopes to find new, collaborative ways of working with other artists and designers. Rotondi, who said he had turned a mid-life crisis into an occasion for growth, even spoke about love as an essential element of collaboration.

Other speakers Sunday were daylighting expert and UCSD School of Architecture founding faculty member Susan Ubbelohde; Austrian designer-artist Peter Noever; Minneapolis architect Jeffrey Scherer and San Francisco artist Douglas Hollis.

Taken as a whole, the “Converging Lines” symposium didn’t result in any specific manifesto that might lead to concise new modes of practicing architecture. But it did produce plenty of “creative abrasion,” sparks that could shock some architects into fresh ways of approaching what they do.