Library Plan Has Potential : Design: Mayor O’Connor’s waterfront proposal offers San Diego a chance to shine.

In her State of the City address last year, San Diego Mayor Maureen O’Connor unveiled her dream for a new central library on Lane Field, a highly visible waterfront site at the foot of Broadway downtown. It is one of her best ideas as mayor, far more meaningful than a Soviet Arts Festival featuring Faberge eggs.

In a downtown dominated by huge commercial projects, where the seat of city government is a pathetic nub of a tower on C Street, a well-designed waterfront cultural complex could serve as a sorely needed source of civic pride.

But great ideas are a dime a dozen. The proof will be in the execution, and many obstacles stand in the way of the project.

To gain approval from the State Lands Commission, which oversees public tidelands such as Lane Field, the city must show that the property will be used for “the promotion of commerce, navigation, fisheries and recreation.” As a result, the mayor’s bibliophilic fantasy has evolved into a proposed San Diego Center for Culture, Commerce and Technology that would also include a museum, conference center, restaurant, amphitheater, offices for the San Diego Convention & Visitors Bureau and the Economic Development Corp., as well as a fisheries and navigation center, all next to a 3-acre public park.

Assuming the city can secure the use of Lane Field from the San Diego Unified Port District--over the objections of several interest groups--and come up with $90 million in creative financing--dangerous assumptions at this point--the mayor’s latest golden egg could still be dropped and splattered.

Obviously, a good design should be a high priority, but San Diego has a spotty history on public architecture. Speculation about the project’s design, however, can come only after other potential glitches are considered. A downtown center for culture, commerce and technology on Lane Field is at least two years of heavy politicking away from a groundbreaking ceremony.

* One faction of the opponents, led by retired businessman Robert Magness, believes a new main library belongs in a more central location and favors Mission Valley. But this auto-clogged, tourist-oriented maze of 1970s and ‘80s planning-and-design snafus is not the right place for what could be the city’s most important cultural edifice.

* Another faction favors placing the library next to San Diego City College, at 12th Avenue and C Street downtown, where it would form a symbiotic relationship with the campus and help revitalize a struggling neighborhood.

San Diegans Inc., the downtown business group, prefers the college site and imagines Lane Field occupied by buildings to serve the cruise ship industry. This is a bleak, commercial vision for Lane Field that offers economic potential but no aesthetic or cultural benefit to the public.

* Others believe the city could expand its existing circa-1954 central library at 9th Avenue and E Street, which was designed by a team that includes the late, well-known San Diego architect William Templeton Johnson. The city might acquire the rest of the block, add a tower and remodel the original building.

* Groups including Citizens Coordinate for Century III and the local American Institute of Architects chapter oppose the Lane Field site. C-III is concerned that the building could mar the precious waterfront. The AIA believes libraries have an internal focus that doesn’t require such a prime waterfront site.

And the AIA also argued, in a December letter to the Port District, that a waterfront library is a departure from the city’s newest downtown master plan, which specifies a civic center-library complex next to City College.

But these Lane Field opponents lose sight of the tremendous opportunity the mayor’s proposal offers, in terms of giving San Diego a more sophisticated identity. Among hotels, office buildings and tourist traps, a waterfront center for culture, commerce and technology could stand as a highly visible symbol of loftier aspirations. Imagine a picture postcard of downtown seen from the bay, where the most prominent feature is a library and cultural center.

As for the AIA’s suggestion that a great library doesn’t require a great waterfront view, just the opposite is true. A waterfront library could offer every San Diegan the all-too-rare and transcendent experience of gazing out on the bay from a high-rise perch during pauses between paragraphs of a favorite book.

But accommodating the broader scope of the project has already reduced the size of the proposed library from the 400,000 square feet requested by City Librarian Bill Sannwald to 221,000 square feet. A main library of 400,000 to 500,000 square feet is standard for a city the size of San Diego. San Francisco’s new library, due to open in 1995, will be 400,000 square feet. The expansion of the central library in downtown Los Angeles, due for completion in October, 1993, will bring the library to 530,000 square feet.

One other logistic obstacle faced by a Lane Field library is the matter of access and parking. Lane Field is several blocks from Interstate 5, across an increasingly congested downtown where parking is in short supply. Extensive underground parking would be essential, as well as efficient bus and trolley service.

Which leads, at last, to the question of design. The city’s recent track record for the design of major public buildings has been dismal. Witness the downtown police headquarters that opened in 1986 on Broadway. It is a boxy, prison-like edifice wrapped in gaudy aqua-colored bands.

The center for culture, commerce and technology--at 440,000 square feet, as large as some downtown high-rises--should be designed in such a way that it would become a delicate waterfront asset, deferring to the bayfront and in harmony with several new developments expected nearby in the decade ahead.

From a purely architectural point of view, an open competition that seeks creative designs first--from architectural firms both young and old, small and large and including locals--and then moves to a construction plan would give the city a much better shot at achieving a waterfront masterpiece.

An imaginative leap is needed: A narrow, carefully proportioned waterfront library tower at the edge of a broad public plaza, instead of a lower, wider box covering the entire Lane Field site, makes sense.

A 15- or 20-story waterfront library tower would have sounded like a travesty five years ago. But among the new generation of waterfront high-rises, a well-proportioned, modest library spire would merge into the urban forest.

If, if, if . . . there are enough ifs to truly test a mayor’s fortitude, but these barriers are worth breaking through.

If O’Connor and her supporters can cut the bureaucratic red tape and move the San Diego Center for Culture, Commerce and Technology ahead, she will end her term as mayor this year on the most positive of notes.

And, if such a center, including a library of sufficient size, is realized through a first-class open architectural competition, with top local architects getting a fair shot, then the city could gain its finest and most significant public building since the County Administration Center opened in 1936.