Dog Salon’s a Paws-Down Winner in Design Awards

A beauty salon for pets won accolades Saturday night while some ornery residents of Carlsbad took a booby prize at the annual Orchids and Onions design and planning awards.

During festivities in UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium, 22 awards were given in categories including historic preservation, fine arts, interior design, architecture, graphic design and signs, landscape architecture, environmental design, and regional and urban planning.

Orchids and Onions is considered the San Diego people’s choice of local design awards programs. The nine-member jury selected winners from among about 680 nominating ballots submitted by the public.

In this presidential election year, the event’s organizers--members of seven professional design and planning associations including the American Institute of Architects--gave the event a political theme, calling it “An Election That Hits Home.”

This approach took an ironic twist when a pair of political controversies arose: an extreme case of ballot-box stuffing, and an unusual executive veto of one Orchid by the event’s organizers.

Jurors strongly suspected that Carlsbad residents had stuffed the ballot box in favor of an Onion for artist Andrea Blum’s “Split Pavilion” public art work. More than 100 nominating ballots came in nominating the project for an Onion, many of them Xeroxed and bearing similar handwriting.

Instead, jurors handed the Onion to the people of Carlsbad for coming out against “Split Pavilion” only after it had been approved and constructed following a lengthy public review process.

The executive veto came in the case of a proposal for a recycling center at Miramar Landfill, designed by WYA Associates of San Diego and artist Paul Hobson as an interactive environmental art park.

Despite protests from some jurors, organizers of Orchids & Onions caved in to pressure from the park’s proponents and vetoed an Orchid, according to jurors. Project proponents feared premature publicity might stir up controversy and hamper their chances for winning approval, including the blessing of nearby Miramar Naval Air Station.

Organizing committee member Sandra Wagenaar, in interior designer, said the project did not qualify for an Orchid because it is not yet built, but that did not placate some jurors.

“I was bothered by the fact that we reneged on giving them an Orchid when we’ve never given anyone an option in the past,” said awards juror Megan Bryan, an interior designer.

The jury did single out some controversial subjects. Among them were the new Mormon Temple (designed by Deems Lewis McKinley of San Diego) near Interstate 5 in La Jolla, the Miramar Metroplex office building on Miramar Road (designed by N. Charles Slert of San Diego) and San Diego’s City Council.

The temple, the Metroplex and the Richley Plaza Medical Office Building on Midway Drive in San Diego (designed by Golba Architects of San Diego) so divided jurors that they gave all three projects special “waffle” awards.

Categorized as “in-your-face architecture” by jurors, deemed worthy neither of Orchids nor Onions, these projects were recognized mostly for their value as high-profile conversation pieces that stir up healthy debate, jurors said.

San Diego’s council won an Onion for decimating the city Planning Department through layoffs and radical reorganization in the name of budget cutbacks this year.

My Beautiful Dog-O-Mat, a beauty salon for pets on Park Boulevard designed by San Diego architect James Brown, won an Orchid for interior design.

“Even the First Lady would wash her precious Millie here,” jurors commented.

In giving an Onion to the One Harbor Drive high-rise condominiums downtown, designed by Hawaiian architects Warner Boone & Associates, jurors renamed the project “corn dogs in the sky with a side of onion rings.”

And they said the Hazard Center in Mission Valley, an Onion winner designed by SGPA Planning and Architecture of San Diego, should be called the Traffic Hazard Center because of its poor circulation scheme.

Another Onion went to the Radisson Suites Hotel in National City, designed by Concrete Dynamics of San Diego.

Juror Gary Clossin, an environmental planner, described it as “eight or 10 Motel 6s stacked on top of each other.”

Some solid large-scale planning around San Diego impressed jurors.

They honored the Harborview community north of downtown San Diego with an Orchid, for “insisting that the (planned) trolley be changed from an elevated structure that would block the bay view to an underground structure.”

And they gave another Orchid to the public pedestrian path along the edge of the San Diego River in Mission Valley.

“Any constituent strolling next to the river would reminisce of going to the ol’ swimming hole,” jurors said.

Other Orchids went to the Norman Park Senior Center in Chula Vista, designed by Solana Beach architect Richard Friedson; Fifth Avenue’s Restaurant Row, for historic preservation; and CityFront Terrace, a new downtown condo development, for graphics and signage.

Also deemed worthy of Orchids were Sherman Heights Community Center, for preserving its Victorian house; Trolley Barn Park on Adams Avenue in San Diego; UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest, for a major addition designed by Kaplan McLaughlin Diaz of San Francisco and Neptune Thomas Davis of San Diego; Balboa Park, a sort of lifetime achievement award for landscaping and planning; and artist Alexis Smith’s “Snake Path,” public art next to UCSD’s main library.

Onions were given to eerie low-pressure sodium lighting throughout San Diego; Village Hillcrest, a mixed-use project designed by BSHA of San Diego and Ken Ronchetti of Rancho Santa Fe; the Clinical Sciences building at UCSD, designed by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson; and for graffiti in San Diego.

The graffiti Onion was presented to the Boy Scouts and Tigers youth groups of San Diego, with the hope that they will turn the Onion into an Orchid through their continuing commitment to cleaning up graffiti.