Unlocking Landscapes’ Latin Logic : Contrast: Elements of chaos and order give grace and balance to Mediterranean-style gardens and buildings, a local architect says.

Contemporary San Diego grew out of a Mediterranean past of mythic proportions. The missions in San Diego and Oceanside were the first obvious symbols.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, real-estate campaigns marketed California as a new Mediterranean-style paradise, replete with brilliant sunshine, orange groves and adobe, tile-roofed dwellings.

In 1992, Mediterranean influences still prevail in San Diego architecture and landscape design, the most obvious examples being the endless tile-roofed tract houses and bleak corporate landscape highlighted by fountains. Such cliched extensions of Mediterranean design should be discouraged, but the Mediterranean can still provide vital, appropriate inspiration for this region--if designers interpret its principles on deeper, more meaningful levels in their buildings and landscapes.

San Diego landscape architect Ignacio Bunster-Ossa is a convincing advocate of Mediterranean design. In a talk last Friday night at the Athenaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla, the first of five Friday lectures being presented by the local chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects to accompany the exhibition “New Directions in Landscape Architecture,” Bunster-Ossa showed how several new projects by his firm, including a new plaza at UC San Diego, employ Mediterranean principles in fresh ways.

By way of defining these principles, Bunster-Ossa traced the history of Latin design--a broader category that covers the Mediterranean--from the garden of Eden to contemporary California.

Bunster-Ossa’s ideas about Latin design traditions are rooted in a 1952 essay by Barcelona architect Nicolas Maria Rubio y Tuduri, who outlined the spread of Latin garden traditions from ancient Persia, Rome and Mesopotamia through Europe, Africa and Asia. Rubio’s thesis was that Latin gardens respond to a subconscious human desire to return to paradise, to nature, to primal gardens such as the Garden of Eden.

Latin gardens can be distilled to basic elements, Bunster-Ossa says: the “wilderness,” represented by random plantings or a sky-reflecting water feature; a grid pattern of plantings or paths that provides contrasting order and dates back to early irrigation systems laid out in rows; garden walls, man’s attempt to impose order upon nature; and, frequently, the division of the garden into quadrants, which Bunster-Ossa says may date back to the Biblical tale of the parting of the waters of Eden into four heads.

Bunster-Ossa has extended Rubio’s work, tracing the spread of Latin design even further, from Spain to South America and Mexico, and eventually California. In modern times, Mexican landscape designers such as Luis Barragan and Roberto Burle Marx have admirably re-interpreted Latin traditions in fresh ways.

Barragan blended these ideas with forms and color from his native Mexico to achieve exciting, minimal landscapes that contrasted strong, orderly layouts with water features and random plantings--the control-chaos, order-disorder, formal-informal dialectics, Bunster-Ossa says, are central to Latin design.

Several California designers have extended Barragan’s concept of abstracting Latin elements. San Francisco landscape architect George Hargreaves’ garden court at the Regents Square II office development in the Golden Triangle (1985) uses triangular ponds instead of traditional Mediterranean circular, but to Bunster-Ossa, a basic Latin idea is still apparent: the presence of powerful geometry, as in the ancient irrigation systems, which plays off a wilderness element (a water feature).

UC San Diego is leading the way with inventive interpretations of Latin traditions, Bunster-Ossa says.

Santa Monica landscape architect Pamela Burton has proposed a courtyard that plays an orderly layout of agave cactus against a random arrangement of olive trees. While the approach is contemporary and minimal, agaves and olive trees are an old California tradition, illustrating how new landscapes can still feel familiar.

Wallace Roberts & Todd, the company at which Bunster-Ossa is a partner, is designing a new pedestrian mall to the east of the main library at UCSD. Bunster-Ossa has spearheaded the creation of a wildly imaginative scheme which he says expresses basic Latin principals, dating back to the story of Paradise Lost and mankind’s efforts to regain it.

The landscape will tell its mythic story in three parts:

* The dispersal of the seeds of knowledge from the library, represented in the landscape by a continuation of various materials used on the slope next to the library and a variety of trees (the diversity of nature)

* The entanglement of the seeds in the land (the pattern of trees and paving)

* And the reconstruction of paradise, in the form of forecourt to a new engineering building at the east end of the mall, where a single, out-of-center date palm will contrast with an orderly grove of trees.

San Diego architect Rob Quigley and landscape architect Andrew Spurlock are also searching for fresh expressions of Mediterranean ideas.

Quigley is fascinated with what he calls “the Arcadian dream,” his parallel to Rubio’s concept of humanity’s subconscious desire to regain paradise.

“The dream has two components,” Quigley says. “The authentic component, which is what Ignacio is talking about, has to do with this idea of the garden in the desert, a green sanctuary in a brown landscape. The other component, which is equally fascinating, is the marketing--this myth of the Arcadian dream was really just a marketing program that started around the turn of the century to get people to move here.

“I think as architects we are called on to respond as much to that hype as to the authentic dream. Design-review boards, tract housing--people who have bought into the whole idea usually render it without substance.

“We recently designed a golf clubhouse in Tustin, and we were asked to create a building that would be the heart of the community--with the community already established through corporate design guidelines as being “Mediterranean,” with tile roofs slapped on rather generic tract homes, and cutesy wrought-iron details around the windows, but very little truth or soul to the architecture. The floor plans and exterior proportions would have been exactly the same with any style they chose.

“In the tract house-suburban landscape, you never sense the heritage of the agricultural history we have here--the eucalyptus wind rows or the wonderful orange and avocado groves. The only places you feel that are UCSD or Rancho Santa Fe. Fairbanks Ranch was originally sold as wonderful and Mediterranean, but as soon as sales lagged, they decided you could build anything you wanted. It’s a horrible mishmash of suburban landscaping concepts that have nothing whatsoever to do with Mediterranean ideas. The guidelines for landscaping were never as pronounced as the original Mediterranean architectural guidelines.”

Quigley points to spare 1930s and 1940s modern-style houses by architects such as Richard Neutra in Los Angeles as more admirable, if less obvious, interpretations of the Mediterranean design aesthetic. In appearance, they looked new and different, but, with their open floor plans and abundant glass, they promoted a casual Mediterranean lifestyle and made intimate connections to the landscape, in the Mediterranean tradition.

Like Quigley, Spurlock is a progressive designer who acknowledges his debt to the Mediterranean and is finding new modes of expressing it.

“I think I am very influenced by Mediterranean landscape design,” he says. “But it’s not so much a formal response as a feeling I have that the climate and topography of San Diego are similar to the Mediterranean.”

Spurlock points to the Salk Institute of Biological Sciences in La Jolla, designed by architect Louis Kahn with a spare courtyard suggested by Barragan, as a prime example of non-cliche Mediterranean design.

“The power of Salk is that it’s a sequence of experiences, not just a space,” he says. “The sequence includes going through the shade--the darkness of the overhanging trees (Rubio’s wilderness), to the bright of the plaza (man-made order), contrasted against the blue sky and the rough texture of the ocean bluff and sage scrub (nature again).”

In his own work, Spurlock is looking for subtle ways to extend threads of Latin design--abstract plays on basic elements outlined by Bunster-Ossa, and materials appropriate to this region, such as decomposed native granite and concrete colored to complement southern California’s predominant blue sky, golden earth and gray-green native plant materials.

Concluding his talk last Friday, Bunster-Ossa suggested a couple of ways by which Latin concepts might be creatively extended. In these environmentally sensitive times, gardens that use very little water, recycle their own waste or produce food will become increasingly relevant. Also, landscape designers and architects are working more and more with artists, poets, philosophers and other creative types from different disciplines. These people may shed some welcome new light on the Latin-influenced landscape.

* The ASLA’s lecture series continues Friday night at 7:30 at the Athenaeum, 1008 Wall St. in La Jolla, with a talk by Andrew Spurlock and his partner, Martin Poirier, on the relationship between art and landscape architecture. Reservations for lectures are required and can be made by calling 454-5872. The exhibition “New Directions in Landscape Architecture” continues through Sept. 5; hours are 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday, until 8:30 p.m. Wednesday.