1991 IN REVIEW: SAN DIEGO COUNTY ARCHITECTURE : Collaboration a Key Building Block in Design

As the year winds down, a trend that many believe will drastically alter the role of the architect is on the rise: collaboration on public projects between architects and a host of others ranging from artists to community planning group members. Several such projects locally are just reaching critical mass.

Architect Rob Quigley’s design of a new community center for Sherman Heights, for example, which is scheduled to begin construction next year, was strongly influenced by the ideas of neighborhood residents.

Although technically his work is not really a collaboration, Michigan architect Gunnar Birkerts worked with landscape architects as well as artist Alexis Smith on the new addition to the UC San Diego library, due for completion next spring.

The design of a new recreation center in Rancho Penasquitos, which will start construction early next year, was the result of the late architect Lee Platt’s collaboration with artist Christine Oatman and landscape architects Andrew Spurlock and Leslie Ryan. And a new master plan for the eastern 700 acres of Balboa Park is being produced by a design team that includes both landscape architects and artists as essential players.

Collaborations aim to make buildings better suited to both their neighborhoods and users. They are also making architects rethink their roles.

“My research says, if you’re not a creative socio-political negotiator, then your creative design ideas don’t stand a chance,” said Dana Cuff, a professor at UC San Diego’s new school of architecture of the collaborative process. Cuff’s book, “Architecture: The Theory of Practice,” examines the changing social context for architecture. “I think the older generation of architects is more resistant to this change.”

Quigley added: “It’s a very different way of receiving information. The typical way is, the community group says what it wants, and the architect goes into his ivory tower and, in the Ayn Rand-Frank Lloyd Wright tradition, comes out with a work of genius. And the architect is either a hero for his work of genius, or the user group is disgusted with the lack of attention to their concerns. In this new, pro-active mode of collaboration, the architect does not have an agenda other than to aid the community group.”

There are historical precedents: San Diego’s first community planning groups were organized by the city during the 1960s to gather input during the drafting of the city’s General Plan. The number of these groups mushroomed during the 1970s, and today there are more than 35 in San Diego County. As poorly designed new development spread like a mutant virus during the 1980s, these groups became much more vocal.

Meanwhile, as some public projects began to include money for art in their budgets, planners began to seek ways to involve artists in the early stages of the design process, to integrate the art into the architecture, rather than let it become a decorative afterthought, a free-standing piece bolted to a concrete pad.

In the collaborations supervised by Quigley’s office, community members also have participated in the design process from the start, sketching on huge sheets of butcher paper to help the architect comprehend what they want. In the Sherman Heights community center, Quigley credits the community for several design ideas that had not occurred to him.

The community group suggested moving a public park to a more visible location for reasons of security and as a symbol of community pride. They requested a marriage of Victorian and Mediterranean design elements--an odd combination that prompted one of Quigley’s most refined designs. The exterior is simple, earthy Mediterranean-via-Irving Gill, while the interior includes a meeting hall that captures the spirit, if not the letter, of the Victorian era, with its high-pitched ceiling and filtered natural light.

“Most significantly, they cared more about the gardens than the architecture of the building,” Quigley said. “These are brilliant ideas that I didn’t think of that are at the core of the entire scheme. Collaborations empower the creativity of the architect, they don’t hamper it.”

At 66, Michigan architect Birkerts, who designed the subtle, subterranean addition to the UCSD library, isn’t as convivial toward the collaborative process as some of his younger counterparts. He sees the involvement of artists and landscape architects as important, but with the architect still in control.

Birkerts had finished most of the conceptual design on the library addition when Los Angeles artist Alexis Smith was selected to add to the project by the Stuart Foundation, which commissions public art for UCSD.

Smith’s “Snake Path,” a serpentine, slate-tile walkway, will lead up to the library, and will include a “Garden of Eden” rest area, and a 7-foot-high stone book with an inscribed passage from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” on the cover.

“I think that it is still within the capability and talent of the architect to be working as an artist in the process of his architectural creation,” Birkerts said. “So I don’t see applied art as a way of resolving design issues.”

Smith’s contribution complements, but does not directly play a part in Birkerts’ building design. Artist Christine Oatman, by contrast, prompted drastic changes in Platt’s Canyonside Recreation Building in Rancho Penasquitos after she joined the design team. Together with landscape architect Andrew Spurlock, she suggested that the building should serve as a metaphoric extension of nearby Penasquitos Canyon.

The building will consist of two halves with a “canyon” running through the center. A 40-foot exterior wall crafted of split-face concrete block will mimic the rough texture of the canyon walls.

While Oatman believes the collaboration was productive, she found the process trying.

“It was very difficult for me, because I was very timid and didn’t have architectural background,” she said. “I could barely talk because I felt so intimidated.”

Some architects are uneasy with giving up control of the design process, but Oatman thinks the profession of architecture is ready for a push.

“It seems to me that architecture is a business, it’s just the bottom line,” she said. “Architects are used to meeting the functional needs of the client. A lot of times they don’t have the luxury of having another viewpoint that might be more sensitive to the environment. I have great respect for this very utilitarian kind of expertise they have that I don’t have. I think when they call an artist in, they are looking for a vision that can enhance their design and the ethos they have regarding a project, other than usual formula solutions.”

But collaborations can be fraught with difficulty. Personality conflicts often arise. Oatman and artist Richard Posner, for example, are part of a design team headed by the San Diego architecture company Wallace Roberts & Todd, now developing a master plan for the eastern portion of Balboa Park known as the “East Mesa.”

“I don’t get along with Richard at all,” she said. “We’re supposed to be working together, but it’s not ever going to happen. They’ll just use whatever they want from either of us.”

But Project Director Kathy Garcia of WRT takes this trace of bitterness with a grain of salt, as an inherent part of the collaborative process.

“Christine’s ideas and Richard’s are coming from very different approaches. Richard likes to be very allegorical, he has a wry sense of humor, and he can be taken as flippant but is not necessarily. Christine is extremely sensitive to the historic nature of area and of San Diego. But both are having a substantial influence.”

With the involvement of artists, community group members and other non-architects expected to increase during the 1990s, UCSD’s Cuff hopes these collaborations will result in true creativity and not compromise.

“I think it’s important to distinguish between creative collaborations and compromise, which is what most people think collaboration is,” she said. “Compromise means people state positions and negotiate around them. Collaboration to me means you don’t start with positions, but create a vision as you go.”