High-Rise Adds Little to Waterfront : Design: One Harbor Drive’s ‘public’ plazas aren’t nearly as public as they ought to be.

One Harbor Drive, the new luxury high-rise condo project downtown, is an average piece of architecture. How it fits into its key waterfront location, however, will be determined when important public spaces at its base are completed later this year.

Developer Bruce Stark’s $80-million, 41-story interloper is the newest addition to a waterfront that should have been planned and developed to serve all San Diegans but is going to be dominated by expensive hotels, condominiums and a convention center.

At 3rd Avenue and J Street on the edge of Martin Luther King Promenade, a public waterfront park along Harbor Drive being completed as part of the city’s downtown redevelopment plans, One Harbor Drive offers 202 condos priced from $271,000 to $2.6 million.

The idea of waterfront high-rises is debatable. Plans for downtown San Diego drafted during the 1950s and 1960s proposed grouping high-rises close to Interstate 5, with lower buildings near the water. Eventually, though, public officials ceded to development pressures and high-rise proposals flowed freely. Now, downtown San Diego is growing up in marked contrast to such modestly scaled waterfronts as San Francisco’s Marina district.

If there must be high-rises here, they should have inviting bases, oriented to pedestrians, that will help the waterfront come together as a hospitable residential neighborhood. So far, this isn’t happening.

Blockbuster structures including the San Diego Convention Center and adjacent Marriott Hotel towers began to mar the waterfront during the 1980s, and the worst is yet to come.

During this decade, Harbor Drive is scheduled to be developed with several high-rise hotels and residential towers, and Stark’s project sets a disappointing precedent.

Hawaiian architects Boone & Associates, who have designed 15 of Stark’s 17 residential high-rise developments in the United States and abroad, designed One Harbor Drive in association with architects Brian Paul & Associates of San Diego.

Its towers have a cold, sleek appearance similar to other Stark projects. Endless expanses of bronze reflective glass and mud-colored stucco panels cover these pencil-thin stalagmites, which rest atop a clunky, suburban shopping mall of a base.

Stark’s projects usually occupy waterfront locations. He likes to build curvy glass buildings to capture the views. But the only relief to this glass menagerie comes from a series of balcony openings in the bay sides of the towers and some scalloped projections on their tops.

One Harbor Drive’s five-story base, which houses several levels of parking and will also include at least four restaurants, is a misguided attempt at combining classical elements in a vaguely postmodern way. It consists of beige stucco walls punctuated by square cut-outs and raspberry-colored arches, and it incorporates a jumble of columns.

Several points of access allow residents and visitors to enter the base. Automobile driveways loop into the property on J Street and 3rd Avenue, providing access for visitors who leave their cars to valets. Most residents, however, will enter One Harbor Drive’s parking structure from J Street and ride elevators to their homes.

Entries that connect the visitor driveways to the building’s interior are surprisingly undramatic for such an expensive vertical residential tract. Floors and walls in the low-ceilinged lobbies are covered with the perquisite shiny granite, but the material doesn’t warm up these spaces. They seem especially dreary when contrasted with the lobbies at the Meridian, the pioneering luxury high-rise condo project downtown that opened in 1985.

But One Harbor Drive has one essential asset of any good real estate project: location, location, location. The building may be bland in appearance, but it offers forever views.

Even the lower units provide exciting panoramas, looking out over Martin Luther King Promenade, the trolley and convention center to the south, and toward the rapidly maturing Gaslamp Quarter historic district to the north and east.

Beginning on the eighth floor, the backsides of each tower feature curved bay windows that give each unit a sweeping vista.

These towers cut an admirably slim profile, which is good for two reasons: It lightens their impact on the downtown skyline, and, with only three units maximum per floor, each home benefits from plenty of privacy and view-grabbing glass area. By comparison, the Meridian averages eight units per floor.

One Harbor Drive’s towers are connected by a sixth-floor pool deck, nothing too spectacular design-wise.

Stark promises that his project’s base, still being leased, will be packed with good food and entertainment.

Pedestrians strolling down Martin Luther King Promenade from east to west past One Harbor Drive, Stark predicts, will encounter the glass-domed entry to an entertainment/sports bar, a seafood restaurant and a second, domed entry to a steakhouse. A fourth establishment called the America’s Bar will face J Street.

All three restaurants in back will look out on the park, probably through large windows that will open in nice weather, allowing restaurant patrons to view passersby and vice versa.

With its alternating bands of paving materials and long lines of trees and button-like planters, Martin Luther King Promenade is a grandly conceived “linear park” that brings order and beauty to this stretch of Harbor Drive along the trolley tracks.

Stark’s project, although not offering retail or recreation uses that might appeal to a broader demographic base, could still contribute good design to this park’s edge. His buildings meet the park with curvy walls and inviting steps, a marked contrast to the blank walls of many downtown buildings, and restaurant spaces could yet be attractively finished.

Landscape architects from the San Diego-based Austin Hansen Group, which worked with San Francisco landscape architects Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz on the park’s design, helped coordinate the design of the public spaces next to One Harbor Drive.

These consist mainly of two triangular public plazas at the west and east ends of the site. The larger, west plaza is the public centerpiece of One Harbor Drive. When completed, it will make a strong connection between the development, the King promenade and the major trolley station nearby.

Although these plazas are shaping up nicely, key elements have been eliminated.

Artists Andrea Blum and Dennis Adams proposed a series of border-related photo panels in the west plaza, one of which would have depicted a male climbing a fence at the Mexican-American border. These were rejected by redevelopment officials as too controversial, following protests from the Latino community.

Several wrought-iron chairs that would have invited the public to repose in the east plaza were dumped by the developer, undoubtedly afraid of undesirable loiterers.

As a result, these “public” plazas aren’t nearly as public as they ought to be, and Harbor Drive is rapidly developing a split personality.

There’s a chance that, eventually, the King promenade will carry pedestrians and bicyclists on an Oz-like journey through a forest of secured condo and hotel high-rises resting on stark bases surrounded by dead public space. This is hardly the path to a downtown for all San Diegans.

But, even with its flaws, One Harbor Drive is creating a stir. Its sales staff claims that 50 escrows will close from May 5 through 10, with 70 more to follow within a month. And they predict that the remaining 82 units will be sold by year’s end.

That would make the the project an unqualified business success. By contrast, the Meridian, after seven years, still has a few unsold homes. So, although Stark’s project may not be everyone’s cup of tea, it appears to have a following.

One Harbor Drive may provide comfortable homes to those who will start living there in May, but it’s a disappointing work of architecture surrounded by public space that is already falling short of its potential for revitalizing the downtown neighborhood around it.

DESIGN NOTE: Last week’s column on San Diego landscape architects Andrew Spurlock and Martin Poirier should have stated that Orange County landscape architect Tadashi Yamaguchi, their business associate and consulting principal, has been responsible for landing the firm’s Japanese projects, and that he contributes substantially to the design process.