Trolley Helps to Put Design on Right Track Downtown
SAN DIEGO — As the city’s downtown grows up, new combinations of uses are giving architects fresh design challenges. The results are some of the most interesting buildings in years.
Take transportation systems, for example. Developers now realize that by integrating their projects with bus and trolley lines, they can make city planners happy while delivering office workers and retail consumers to their doorsteps.
As the San Diego Trolley expands downtown, architects are getting a chance to do lively projects along its tracks. Chicago architect Helmut Jahn’s new headquarters for Great American Bank, now being built on Broadway, will straddle the trolley line. The movement of trolley cars and people through these spaces should give the project the same kind of energy Jahn captured in his widely publicized Chicago terminal for United Airlines.
Across downtown, at 12th and Imperial avenues, the James R. Mills Building--a mixed-use project incorporating a trolley station, government offices and ground-level shops--shows how exciting the confluence of people, cars and trolleys can be.
The building, which opened early last year, has received several awards for its design. Last June, the local American Institute of Architects chapter selected it to receive an Honor Award, its highest recognition.
Instead of being just another government office complex, the building is a people machine. Walking toward it from any direction, you find yourself drawn by its graceful 220-foot-high clock tower ground-level activity.
Trolleys roll through, stopping to pick up passengers. People come and go. Some leave their cars in the parking structure and take the trolley into downtown. Others observe and are observed as they sit outdoors at a large circular plaza in front, at tables outside a deli and at a smaller outdoor area behind the main building. This last area will serve the trolley’s bayside line, scheduled to open this summer.
Inside the station’s convenience mart-snack shop, people relax with a newspaper, a deli sandwich or a soft drink from stools behind large panes of glass.
Such vibrant urban transportation hubs are common in the east, but are all too rare in California.
Deceptively simple in appearance, the complex marks a sophisticated departure from what’s been done downtown. The building’s strong, clean exterior geometries grew from its structural system, instead of being lifted from this year’s trendy design book or designed as an imitation of history.
Starboard Development was hired by the Metropolitan Transit Development Board to build the project on time and on budget. As part of its team, Starboard brought in the San Diego architectural firm of Delawie Bretton Wilkes Associates.
What a difference a client can make. The architects had also collaborated with Starboard on the city of San Diego’s downtown police station, completed in 1985, but with a much less impressive result. Michael Wilkes, a partner in the firm, defended the police station as a decent building on a limited budget. After additional prodding, though, he indirectly acknowledged the transit building’s more sophisticated design.
“Why the chemistry was better, I can’t tell you,” he said. One reason, perhaps, is that transit officials seemed to have an intuitive sense of what makes good architecture. MTDB General Manager Tom Larwin insisted that his company’s new office building incorporate the trolley station, instead of making it separate.
The architects’ initial design shows where the project might have gone without input from Larwin and others, such as City Architect Mike Stepner, Centre City Development Corp. urban design expert Max Schmidt and San Diego city planners Paul Curcio and Marianne Munsell.
A downtown train station designed early this century by San Diego architect Irving Gill served as a stylistic point of departure (it was torn down a few years later when the tracks were moved).
The early version of the MTDB complex was a weird combination of free-standing walls resembling mission ruins, in front of a low glass box. The trolley tracks passed behind the building.
Pressed by Larwin & Co. to provide a new building incorporating additional office space that could be leased to other users, the architects designed a clean-lined building with trolley trains running through its base and a clock tower as a focal point.
Eventually, MTDB decided to maximize development of its site. Starboard signed up the county of San Diego to take 75% of the space, and MTDB asked for a 10-story building with a six-story parking structure.
In response, the architects pulled the clock tower away as a separate feature. It serves as the project’s visual anchor, while giving downtown San Diego a significant landmark in an area mostly occupied by run-down industrial buildings.
Instead of completely covering the building’s steel frame, the architects made it a key feature. Painted red to pick up the color of the trolleys, the steel members form striking giant X’s at the building’s base. A single size of window, repeated many times, cut costs and generated eye-catching visual rhythms.
Between windows, the building is covered with a light, Styrofoam-like material called Sto. It had never been used in San Diego, according to the architects, and it gives the building a rich, solid appearance.
City planner Munsell gets credit for suggesting landscaping the top of the parking structure. Planters atop tall pillars contain creeping vines that will eventually spread along the structure’s perimeter, following a network of wires.
Despite its many successes, the Mills building has shortcomings.
For one thing, the clock tower should be more than a giant piece of art. At 30-by-30-feet square, couldn’t it have housed some uses? MTDB General Counsel Jack Limber, who departed from his usual legal and management duties to oversee this project, said the construction budget didn’t allow anything inside the tower.
But a 30-by-30 space could have become a 900-square-foot artist’s loft on each of several floors. It would have been interesting to see proposals for developing the tower’s interior.
Even without a useful purpose within, the tower needs something to animate its base. A ground-floor snack shop, sandwich counter, news stand or some other use would give people a reason to use the adjacent plaza more often. It’s not too late to consider this.
A final drawback is the shady central plaza, where the sun’s rays are blocked by the office building most of the day. That’s not a problem during the warmer months, but, on a breezy March morning, the plaza was deserted. People clustered in one splotch of sunlight at its outer edge.
DESIGN NOTES: Michael Graves, designer of the Aventine, the new La Jolla office-hotel complex that is not well-liked by many San Diego architects, gets heavy coverage in the March issue of Progressive Architecture. If San Diegans think the Aventine is wild, they should see Graves’ cartoonish Florida hotels for Disney, topped with giant swans.
