Award Jurors Take Narrow View

What is good architecture, anyway?

According to three out-of-town architects who took a good look at some San Diego designs last week, it involves, more than anything, “investigation”: thoughtful consideration of sites, floor plans, views, materials and other key elements.

To an extent, their logic is solid. But in the end, they helped promote an unhealthy narrow-mindedness with their opinions about what is and is not acceptable.

The three architects--Anthony Ames of Atlanta, Carlos Jimenez of Houston and Hank Koning of Santa Monica--were in San Diego to select winners of this year’s American Institute of Architects local chapter design awards. From nearly 70 entries (down from 109 last year), they found nine worthy of recognition. The awards presentation and an open discussion of winners and non-winners were held at UC San Diego’s Mandeville Auditorium on Saturday.

Only two buildings won the top Honor Awards. These were the Norman Park Senior Center in Chula Vista, designed by Visions Studio, and the trolley station at One America Plaza downtown. Both the plaza high-rise and the station were designed by Chicago architects Murphy Jahn. (San Diego architects Krommenhoek McKeown & Associates provided working drawings and construction supervision.)

Rob Wellington Quigley’s proposed College of Architecture for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, (which, ironically, placed last in the university’s design competition for the job) won the only second-level Merit Award.

The five Citations of Recognition, the third-level awards, went to Studio E Architects’ “The Wedge” (a house); another, not-yet-finished house by Studio E; “Housing for Extended Families,” a multi-unit building designed by Davids & Killory; the Malibu Studio Hotel, a 184-unit single room occupancy hotel designed by Quigley, and some recyclable, temporary greenhouses for Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation, designed by Delawie Wilkes Rodriguez Barker Bretton & Associates.

Finally, the indoor cafe designed by BSHA at the San Diego Design Center received the award for Divine Detail, which is given to an inspiring portion of a building.

Yes, the jurors selected some excellent architecture. Visions’ building is original and exciting. Studio E’s houses represent two intelligent, energetic and different responses to two vastly different sites. Davids & Killory continues its intriguing exploration of the low-cost housing problem.

Overall, though, the winners represented only a limited view of what makes good architecture, architecture that can delight a broad range of people of diverse backgrounds and tastes.

Based on their comments, the jurors prefer ordered, clean-lined buildings. Ames doesn’t like color, and all three jurors generally don’t like decoration--or any hint of fun or good humor. The impression the jurors and audience, mostly architects, gave was that architecture must be a deathly serious proposition.

The narrow focus of the awards is not entirely attributable to the jury. It is the local AIA chapter that selects jurors, usually assembling a group whose work reflects the current vogue as represented in architectural journals. Unlike AIA chapters in other cities including San Francisco, San Diego’s limits entries to AIA members.

Among the many valid architectural approaches excluded from the awards by the members-only format is the so-called “organic” movement. Such talented San Diego architects as Wallace Cunningham, Ken Kellogg and James Hubbell are unconventional and self-taught. In the free spirit of Frank Lloyd Wright, the original organic architect, they choose not to join the AIA.

Anyway, it’s hard to imagine a jury like this year’s appreciating the warmth and originality of the best organic architecture, most of which is far from simple and none of which is pristine or boxy. It’s the original forms and odd juxtapositions of materials that make the best organic buildings exciting.

The high costs of AIA membership, and of entering the awards program, are two other deterrents to diverse entries. Annual AIA membership dues are $508. Cost per entry is $50 to $100, depending on the type of project. Many young architects, or architects stung by the recession--of which there are many in San Diego--are unwilling or unable to shoulder such expenses.

The AIA’s narrow approach is frightening. Architecture could again become as sterile as it was during the 1950s and ‘60s, when incompetent practitioners of stark modernism, during a different period of the status quo, filled the nation’s downtowns with bleak, anonymous, glass-box high-rises.

But architecture, as advocated by the AIA and covered by the architectural trade magazines, is usually more about trendiness than genuinely fresh thinking. This year’s awards program illustrated how quickly architectural fashions change. Late-1980s “postmodernism,” with its color and sometimes elaborate decoration, is out. So is circa-1990 “deconstructivism,” which introduced dynamic, fractured, colliding forms.

Ames, the most rigorous modernist among the jurors, with his penchant for minimal white buildings, explained that he liked the design for the unbuilt Housing for Extended Families project because it is “free from the trappings of postmodernism and applied decoration.” He also mentioned his disregard for deconstructivism.

During the discussion phase of the program (attended by less than 100, about half of the awards audience), Ames was pressed as to why he prefers white buildings by Harriet Gill, founder of Friends of San Diego Architecture, an organization that presents architectural forums aimed at the general public.

“Whiteness accentuates between different forms,” Ames said. “The eye is not distracted by color. The emphasis is on architectural form or sculptural form.”

Sometimes this is true, but it is also true that many architects, including internationally known Richard Meier and Batter Kay of Del Mar, have beat their white horses to death.

A trip to the Mediterranean or as close to home as Tijuana shows how splashes of color can bring vibrant life to a neighborhood. A few randomly tossed buckets of paint could work wonders in many a San Diego neighborhood.

Jurors rejected Quigley’s Island Inn, a new SRO downtown, because they thought it too frilly or busy. Instead, they gave a Citation of Recognition to Quigley’s unbuilt Malibu Studio Hotel, a design they deemed straightforward enough.

This disdain for decoration is another cause for concern.

Entire neighborhoods and cities of minimalist modern boxes would be a Salvador Dalian nightmare. Take a trip through any of San Diego’s most-interesting neighborhoods, from Golden Hill to Mission Hills to several beach areas, and note that their warm, inviting quality comes from a broad mix of architectural styles from different periods.

What should be most encouraged, then, is healthy, mature acceptance of variety. But this is not human nature.

Carried to the extreme, an event that occurred toward the end of the afternoon discussion showed how narrow-minded attitudes could lead to an architectural syndrome of misunderstanding and disharmony.

Gill asked to hear more from the jury about a non-winning entry she described as a “gigantic automobile muffler.” When the slide of San Diego architect Charles Slert’s as-yet-unbuilt design for the Ministry of Tourism in Valencia, Spain, was displayed, snickers could be heard around the room.

Granted, it would be a wild building, a reflective glass wedge with the point aimed skyward, with two glass cylinders protruding from each side at the top, and with one glass wall rippled from top to bottom.

Jurors didn’t know, or didn’t mention, that Slert wants the building to look like a large propaganda machine of some kind-- a metaphor for its true purpose of drumming up new tourism--and that the ripples in the glass are a reference to the Rio Turia (a nearby river).

Regardless of whether people liked the building or not, such unaccepting, cynical attitudes toward something new, before investigation, are not healthy. Dreamers should be encouraged.

Frank Lloyd Wright was often laughed at during his lifetime, but he persevered. San Diego architect Irving Gill, was not broadly appreciated or understood by the time he died in 1936. He only gained critical acclaim after the publication in 1960 of the seminal book “Five California Architects” by Los Angeles historian Esther McCoy, which included an astute section on Gill.

The awards program needs to be overhauled and given a format that leaves more room for variety. It should be open to all comers for a nominal entry fee. Who knows, if non-members like the experience, they may eventually join up. Also, the jury should be more varied. It will still need to be composed of architects, since this is a professional awards program. But jurors from a much broader range of stylistic and cultural backgrounds would make the awards a much more productive affair. Award winners might be a truer reflection of the range of architectural types that make interesting, livable cities.