Pair of Schools Give S.D. Two Views of Design

Open only two weeks, UC San Diego’s School of Architecture is good news for San Diego.

Already, through first-rate faculty appointments, the presence of internationally known architect Adele Naude Santos as dean and several well-received symposiums presented as a prelude to opening, the school has injected new life into San Diego’s moribund design scene.

The school, which has 24 graduate students, is even being hailed as a positive force by educators at the New School of Architecture in downtown San Diego, an 11-year-old institution struggling to carve out its niche.

Both schools are in the business of turning out young architects, but they don’t see each other as direct competition. They have different purposes and philosophies, and they provoke different criticisms.

UCSD is in a suburban, beachy La Jolla setting. NSA is in a gritty section of downtown San Diego. UCSD offers graduate programs for both inexperienced architecture students and those with undergraduate architecture degrees. NSA is only for undergraduates, offering a bachelor’s of architecture through night classes, largely to working people.

UCSD has stringent admission requirements; NSA is open to high school graduates with a C average or better.

UCSD has the resources of a big university behind it, NSA is a scrappy low-budget operation not yet accredited by leading educational agencies.

UCSD has a well-paid, internationally known faculty, including historian and critic William Curtis. NSA relies on top San Diego design professionals such as architects Ted Smith and Ralph Roesling, and San Diego city architect Mike Stepner, who teach mostly for the love of it.

When it comes to cost, the two are comparable. UCSD is $3,500 a year for California residents, plus $7,700 a year additional tuition for non-residents. A year of undergraduate study at the New School costs $7,200.

Critics of the UCSD school say it is isolated geographically from the problems of a city, that it runs the danger of being too theoretical and not practical enough, that it is already bureaucratically bloated (including faculty members, there are 11 full-time staffers for this fall’s 24 students), and that its experimental approach, which includes a series of visiting lecturers, may seem chaotic to the students.

One source intimately familiar with both schools complained that Santos is too much of a theoretician and not enough of a hands-on architect familiar with the day-to-day work of designing and administering projects. She has designed buildings in the United States and abroad, but relegates some detail work to offices in San Diego and Philadelphia.

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From the top down, the New School of Architecture is suffering different growing pains.

Founded in 1981 by the late Richard Welh, a design instructor at Southwestern College, NSA has an enrollment of 93 this fall.

Without the backing of a major institution such as the UC system, NSA must make its own financial way, which sometimes causes profit motives to overshadow education, some critics observe. Its owner and president, Gordon Bishop, who bought the school four years ago, is a businessman and educator, not an architect. He is more concerned with business than with design, critics say.

“The way we set it up, we have safeguards,” Bishop counters. “We have a dean who controls curriculum, and the state insists that the faculty and dean control curriculum. This isn’t unusual. A lot of schools are run this way.”

Still, there has been administrative turmoil.

La Jolla architect Jeffrey Shorn, who had served as the school’s dean for the past 3 years and taught there for 10, left in July. Shorn had a contract through September but says the school stopped paying him. He is now suing for breach of contract and says he is owed unpaid salary, health insurance and vacation pay.

Bishop would say only that Shorn left by “mutual agreement.”

The school also lost faculty member Rene Davids last spring. Davids is an innovative architect with a national reputation for designing affordable housing. He left after a disagreement with Bishop over salary and school policies, and has been hired by Santos to teach design at UCSD part-time this fall.

Shorn’s replacement, beginning this term, is San Diego architect Jim Engelke, who works for Circa 9. Engelke acknowledges that “the pay is lousy,” but he says he is there not for the money, but as a practicing architect with a commitment to education.

Engelke said the school’s design courses are solid, and he hopes to improve the quality of general education, theory, technology and liberal arts offerings to produce well-rounded architects.

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Del Mar architect Gary Allen, best known as the lead designer of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, is familiar with both schools. He was dean of NSA from 1987 to 1989 and a member of a UCSD design review board while the architecture school was in its formative stages.

“UCSD, in my feeling, is grooming future heads of firms, and I’m not sure the education they’re going to get is going to give them the ability to perform the foot-slogging, very exacting technical aspects of architecture,” Allen said.

“The type of architect that’s coming out of New School is a hard-working person who will not be afraid to get in there and do any task an office asks of him.”

Allen criticized the New School, too.

“They don’t have a strong direction,” he said. “I think it’s gotten a little too artsy.” But, he added, he plans to teach there again.

Santos acknowledges her school’s commitment to research, but points out that students there also deal from the start with real-world design problems.

Students with no background in architecture enter a three-year master’s program. Instead of taking several courses toward their degrees, they are immersed in a single design studio. Subjects are presented as they relate to design projects.

For example, San Diego architect Rob Quigley, an adjunct faculty member, will team with former Yale instructor Ed Allen for a portion of the fall studio, with Quigley’s design expertise complementing Allen’s knowledge of structural systems. Students will thus get an agreeable initial exposure to the potentially dry subject of structures, since structures will be an integral part of their creative design work. In another project, Davids will be paired with full-time professor Susan Ubbelohde, with Davids’ design abilities playing off Ubbelohde’s special knowledge of day lighting and energy conservation.

In the advanced design studio this fall, grad students at UCSD are exploring new styles of affordable housing, including shelter for migrant farm workers, thus addressing vital but unpopular issues that have both local and broader implications.

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“We will design housing prototypes,” Santos said. “In one quarter, we will teach all subjects as they relate to this topic--philosophy, technology, theory. They’ll come away with a large depth of knowledge. It won’t be superficial.”

Students at the New School, partly because of its location, focus more on urban design and planning issues.

This fall, students in the school’s design clinic, an outreach program, are studying development options for an important piece of land in the Gaslamp Quarter. With guidance from Stepner, and from Max Schmidt, vice president of planning and engineering at the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s redevelopment agency, the students are shaping proposals to be presented to the Gaslamp Quarter Association, which advises the city on Gaslamp planning issues.

The projects aren’t intended to be built, but this gives students a chance to interact with the city’s power brokers.

Another drawback of the New School is that it will never be able to match UCSD’s resources.

UCSD students have access to a library packed with as many as 40,000 volumes on architecture, and they can borrow from extensive collections at sister campuses in Los Angeles and Berkeley.

UCSD also has the ability to lure superstars to town. Already, internationally known architects such as Richard Meier, Richard Rodgers, Ricardo Legoretta, Balkrishna Doshi and Theo Bosch have participated in symposiums on campus.

In addition, Santos has the reputation and drive to carry the school’s banner out into the community.

San Diego City Councilwoman Abbe Wolfsheimer is backing Santos for a seat on the board of the Centre City Development Corp., the city’s redevelopment agency.

Santos has also met with officials at the San Diego Housing Commission and in Encinitas to discuss how the school might contribute to affordable-housing programs.

Both UCSD and the New School have their work cut out for them. NSA must chart a stronger direction and repair its administrative reputation by keeping its best faculty members happy. UCSD must prove that its experimental graduate programs can produce well-rounded architects.

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The best thing for both schools would be if they worked more closely together.

New School students have benefited from several lectures presented by UCSD. UCSD’s Hodgetts visited the New School to participate in a critique of student work last year, and UCSD has even referred some students to the New School.

While Ralph Roesling, chairman of the New School’s design department, says he is eager to work with UCSD, Santos sounds lukewarm on the idea. She said only that the New School may have an occasional visiting lecturer who might interest her students.

Intensive cross-pollination between the two schools could benefit both. UCSD’s grad students would do well to see how urban design really works downtown. They could learn a lot from New School faculty members such as Stepner, Smith and Roesling, who deal with the problems of San Diego architecture and planning on a daily basis.

New School students could gain from consistent exposure to the raw thinking power present at UCSD. They should be invited to visit a graduate design studio once or twice every term, and hear talks by such respected architecture professors as Curtis, Ubbelohde, Craig Hodgetts and Dana Cuff.

In the meantime, San Diego is lucky to have both institutions. They should help gain the city some much-needed national respect in the realm of architecture, and promote more active public dialogue on the subject.