Design for Fame : New Dean at UCSD Building Reputation on Private Practice

When she moved to San Diego from Philadelphia in 1990 to become founding dean of the new Architecture School at UC San Diego, Adele Naude Santos vowed to maintain her career as a practicing architect.

True to her word, Santos’ practice is thriving, with offices in Philadelphia and San Diego and significant projects in the United States, Guam and Japan.

Last week, she spoke about her design career at her expansive, wood-shingled home in Bankers Hill, where she works in a two-story guest house that has been converted to architectural offices.

Santos’ Philadelphia-based office of five people, directed by her partner, Alan Levy, concentrates primarily on buildings for the University of Pennsylvania, where she chaired the Department of Architecture from 1981 to 1987. The latest is the Institute of Contemporary Art, completed last year.

The San Diego office is her loose design think-tank, the place where some of her most creative ideas are born. Three large projects are currently on the boards: a residential community for 10,000 on a man-made island in Japan, an interactive children’s museum in San Francisco and revisions to her competition-winning design of a low-income housing project in Los Angeles.

Deeply committed to her work, Santos is a no-nonsense sort who has little time for jokes and small talk, yet her best designs contain humor, spirit and plenty of imagination.

She prefers comfortable, loose-fitting clothes, often made from imported fabrics printed with organic designs. She speaks with a hint of South African, where she was born and raised. Her parrot, Kiwi, occasionally alights on her shoulder. Together these elements, along with her slightly reserved personality, lend her a sophisticated, somewhat mysterious cosmopolitan aura.

With her drive and award-winning design skills, Santos can tackle any type of job, from the smallest house to the largest mixed-use projects. But she has been selective in her efforts since re-entering private practice six years ago, after resigning as chairwoman of the Department of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.

“I decided I was going to do architecture because I loved it,” she said. “I’m not going to do bread-and-butter jobs. I have to do something that interests me intellectually. I keep a small team of extremely productive people, and we run a very intense ship. We turned out an astounding amount of work last month.”

The first floor of her offices serves as a gallery of her work, ranging from bold, earlier buildings, including homes she designed in South Africa during the 1970s with her ex-husband and ex-partner, Antonio de Souza Santos, to larger, more recent competition entries. She has a high batting average in competitions, having won five of the past nine she entered.

On the second floor, Santos shares a design studio with two young associates: Bruce Prescott and Ricardo Rabines.

Flying out from San Diego to meet with clients nationwide and abroad, Santos does much of her creative thinking in the air, where she sketches detailed drawings in bound notebooks.

The Japanese developer of the housing project on man-made Rokko Island, off the coast of Kobe, wanted to see her design for a competition early, so she and her enthusiastic associates finished it by working early mornings, late nights and long weekends. She was in Japan for two days last week to present the work, and the winner is to be decided this spring.

Santos’ entry has the hallmarks of her best work. It is inventive and bold, but also ecologically sound and responsive to the intimate needs of the people who will inhabit the spaces.

Dwellings would be in massive seven- to 21-story structures, arranged around generous, landscaped gardens. Buildings and landscaping would be intimately related. Santos envisions buildings set into gently rolling terrain, instead of the flat building pads most developers prefer.

Santos favors complicated sites that other architects might view as headaches.

She is proud of a compact office/gallery building, completed in 1988, that she wedged into a tight site between larger buildings in Tokyo. She used a rooftop skylight and an open interior scheme to bounce natural light down into the gallery.

The complex ways that three-dimensional interior spaces interrelate intrigue her most of all, she said, more than two-dimensional floor plans and the design of the exterior shell.

“I’m obsessed with natural light. I always want to cut and slice to get light in.”

Another challenging site is the roof of the George R. Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, where Santos has been hired to design The Children’s Place, an interactive museum for children.

She is taking maximum advantage of the dense urban setting. She is considering a free-standing “soap bubble” elevator that would move children up and down, giving dramatically changing views of the city’s skyline and bayfront. The project will also include an ice-skating rink, a bowling alley and a retractable, transparent roof to take advantage of good weather.

Santos also designed a new civic center for the small Southern California city of Perris, which won a competition last year. The city is now looking for a way to fund the project.

Bold, elemental forms such as cones and cubes double as public amusements. A gigantic funnel lined with mirrored glass is a “sky catcher” that would scoop in views of clouds and blue sky for visitors in a courtyard below. A sculptural outdoor staircase would serve as a sundial, casting shadow lines to indicate the time of day.

With such ideas, Santos aligns herself with contemporary architects such as Arata Isozaki and Frank Gehry, who want their buildings to be living, breathing interactive spaces, and not just containers.

Although Santos holds master’s degrees in both architecture and city planning from the University of Pennsylvania, where architectural genius Louis Kahn chaired the architecture program during the 1950s and early 1960s, Santos does not consider Kahn an influence.

Instead, her early heroes were such classic Modernists as Alvar Aalto and Le Corbusier, influences of whom are visible in her 1970s South African concrete and concrete-block houses, designed with an economy of form and built from solid, basic materials; those same traits have shown up in many projects since.

Santos’ father is an architect who once told her his profession is “a bad idea for women,” Santos said. Her mother is a poet. She did her undergraduate work in architecture at the world-renowned Architectural Assn. in London, earned a master’s in urban design at Harvard in 1963 and received her pair of master’s degrees from Penn in 1968.

Her earliest designs were small apartment buildings in Cape Town, South Africa, built during the late 1960s. In the next few years, she cemented her reputation as an innovative designer of low-cost housing with projects in South Africa and Chile.

Of her five competition-winning projects, none has been built. Her most significant realized design of late is the Center for the Arts at Albright College in Reading, Pa., a collaboration with artist Mary Miss. Completed in 1990, the building features a circular courtyard covered by a spoked, wheel-like circular trellis that casts rhythmic shadow lines.

Balancing careers as an educator and architect is difficult. Santos is romantically involved, but won’t give details other than to say that her significant other is equally committed to his own life and work. She regularly forgos social events in favor of hard work, and the dedication is paying off.

“It’s tough, I’m working incredibly hard,” she said. “But something must be right. The Perris project is some of the best work I’ve done.”