Celebrating A. Quincy Jones, FAIA - Part Two

A Conversation with Fred Fisher

Fred Fisher in his office.
Photo: Kenneth Caldwell

Fred Fisher is well known among the cognoscenti of American architecture. In addition to renovating noted buildings by A. Quincy Jones, he has designed numerous projects for the Annenberg philanthropies and buildings for Cal Tech, Colby College, and Princeton University. With the success of the new Annenberg Visitors Center and the renovation of Sunnylands, the Annenberg estate near Palm Springs, the awareness of his talent will spread even further. In 1995, Fisher purchased the office building that once housed the office of A. Quincy Jones and Fred Emmons from Quincy’s widow, Elaine Jones. For several years, he has been involved in projects relating to Quincy’s work, including several residences of varying scales. A few years ago, we met with Fred in his office on Santa Monica Boulevard to talk about this relationship.

Interviewer: I would like to focus on Quincy’s work and your relationship to it. There is your office, where we are seated, and of course there’s Sunnylands, which is the size of a city hall.

Fred Fisher: I’m not sure where I read it, but I think in the course of our research, there was a mention that Ambassador Annenberg actually wanted the home designed in a way that it could be converted into a country club.

Really?

It does have that feeling of a public space. It was conceived for large scale private entertainment.

A view into the atrium of the estate house. The sculpture in the center
of the atrium is an original casting of Eve, by Auguste Rodin, 1881.
Photo by Graydon Wood. Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.

When Elaine had to leave the Barn, there was a lot of concern over what would happen to the building, which has been a kind of cultural center in Los Angeles since the 1960s. Now it’s part of the Annenberg Foundation?

The Annenberg Foundation bought it from Elaine, and Wallis Annenberg’s daughter Lauren Bon has her own smaller foundation within the Annenberg Foundation that produces artworks and collaborative pieces that she’s involved with. That entity is the user of the building. It’s called the Chora Council.

Can you tell us a little about what she might do there?

Lauren Bon is an artist, and she is involved in producing artworks of others. She sees it as an actively used and publicly engaged studio for art production.

I think she understands the building as part of the Annenberg legacy, which is inextricably linked to Quincy Jones. There is Sunnylands, the Annenberg School of Communications at USC, and now the Barn. I think she sees the Barn as a collection object, as an acquired object in the collection of the Annenberg Foundation, not as a real estate acquisition.

The Barn
Photo: Takashige Ikawa courtesy Fred Fisher and Partners.

Have you changed much at the Barn?

Lauren has been very deliberate about what we call the Hippocratic philosophy of renovation, “first, do no harm.” Basically, we’re just cleaning it up and improving the forty-five year old mechanical and electrical systems. I mean, we’re literally rehabilitating the refrigerator and reusing a range.

I know that range had been broken for a long time. Elaine did replace some of those refrigerator units, and they were very hard to get, now impossible.

We couldn’t find one that matched it that would fit. So that pushed us in the direction of rehabilitating it.

It’s a 45-year old wood building, and it was ready for the care that the Annenberg Foundation is capable of giving. And they’re also capable of owning a piece of property in that location and not ripping it down and using it for the highest and best use. As a house, it only has a couple of parking spaces, which you don’t even want to use, because that’s the courtyard space in the back off the kitchen and studio.

Right. She always parked in front. She used that space as the garden. How did you first become aware of Quincy’s work?

I met him and visited this office shortly after I graduated from UCLA. I had a cursory meeting with him, like many students did, and then that was the only contact I had with either one of them for a while, until after he passed away. I began to see Elaine and meet her in the art world here.

We would see each other at art openings and things like that, and then I got invited to some events at the Barn, and she became a friend. In 1995, I was driving down the street, and I saw the for-sale sign on the office building, and I was shocked that this building would even be on the market. I called Elaine up, and she said that it just came time and that she was going to liquidate the asset.

I knew it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and called in all kinds of favors and scraped, begged, borrowed, and would have stolen the money if necessary to put a down payment on it, and crossed my fingers. This was not a good time economically, but it was just something I knew I had to have. I’m very lucky that we were able to work something out that could work for both of us, and so we bought it, and just did a very light refurbishment before we moved in.

I continued to see Elaine and talk to her, because we’ve been involved in a few other of Quincy Jones’s houses, including Frances Brody’s house. I am also friends with Cynthia Lasker, Frances’ sister-in-law, who had a house designed by Quincy.

Who published that house after you renovated it?

Interior Design.

The one with the red doors?

Rob Maguire, who bought the house at that time, loves the primary colors. We always wondered whether or not Quincy and his partner Fred Emmons had slightly different aesthetics, because Fred’s house in the Palisades is almost like a Marcel Breuer house. The Lasker House was like that too. And yet it had a real formal symmetry to it, which was unlike either one of them. That might have been the influence of Billy Haines. Billy Haines was involved first, as I understand it. The first collaboration with Billy and Quincy was the Brody House. She brought them together, and then they did many more things together, such as the Lasker House and Sunnylands.

A. Quincy Jones, Sidney F. and Frances Brody House,
Los Angeles, California, 1948-51.
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

What have you come to learn from knowing these buildings so intimately?

His work had an informality. The obvious thing was the openness and the organic quality of a lot of the materials, expression of structure, and openness to the outside environment, although he’s not the only one who was doing that.

But he was unlike some of the other Case Study House architects, closer to Cliff May, in that he had almost a ranch house domestic vernacular. He employed a strong roof with the low-sloped gable and big overhangs. I live in Crestwood Hills, which he planned with Edgardo Contini and Whitney Smith. I don’t live in a Quincy Jones house, but I moved into that neighborhood before I bought this building, pure coincidence, and I now live and work in environments shaped by Quincy Jones.

In Crestwood Hills, the facility with which he and his collaborators fit those houses onto the hillsides and nestled them together kept their privacy and exploited the views; they have a similarity but a variety. It’s a really unique and successful subdivision and a very good example of the best of that era. There’s a kind of warmth and informality that is different than, for example, Gregory Ain’s subdivision in Mar Vista. There is variety there, but less so, and of course, the flat land makes a difference. And then being in this building, Quincy’s office, day after day, year in, year out, it’s had an effect on me. Most significant is the absolute integration of indoor and outdoor space. Here there are the equivalents of horizontal flow to vertical flow.

A. Quincy Jones, Whitney Smith, and Edgardo Contini, Architects and Engineer.
Site Office, Mutual Housing Association (Crestwood Hills), Los Angeles, California, 1946-50.
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

What do you mean?

I like tall spaces. I had a big loft space before, and when I came in here I thought, boy, am I going to get used to this eight-foot ceiling? But I never even think about it anymore, because the visual flow is horizontal, and there is a lot of it. And then the simple gesture, it’s a rectilinear building, and yet there is one property line, this one, which has a slight angle, and that adds a subtle but significant dynamism to the whole composition, and he plays on that very well.

I also appreciate what I’ve considered to be the Japanese aspect of it. I’m a great lover of Japanese architecture and gardens, and this has that aspect of the intimate gardens, connected to the indoor space. Look at the informal use of organic materials, like the pebble-seeded concrete.

That flows indoors and out.

Right. And the use of the wood paneling, exposed structure, and the indoor/outdoor gardens. I think that’s one of the distinguishing factors of West Coast modernism versus East Coast modernism, the awareness and embracing of Japanese architecture.

Frederick Fisher and Partners Architects

You can see that in Quincy’s travel sketches. From working on Sunnylands, what else have you gleaned? Of course, that’s an extraordinary project. While the Brody House is large, Sunnylands is baronial.

Yes, Depending on how many guest wings you figure in, you consider it upwards of 30,000 square feet. It’s hard to exactly know what the program given to him was, and how much was Billy Haines’s thinking, and how much was Walter and Lee Annenberg’s thinking, and how much was Quincy Jones’s thinking. It’s grandiose in a way that none of his other domestic spaces are. The Brody House is sizable, but it’s not grandiose.

The spaces in the Brody house are informal in their planning, whereas Sunnylands is very formal and very grand. Perhaps it had to do with how the Annenbergs imagined who they were and what their position was. Remember, they lived in Philadelphia, and this was their winter house, almost like an extended vacation house, but still a place to entertain on a grand scale.

President Eisenhower, as I understand it, was the first guest. Unlike Jones’s other projects, the house had an intention of social positioning, especially with the idea of a private golf course. You can’t put a bungalow in the middle of a 200-acre site. And yet they didn’t always entertain on a grand scale. Originally, there were only two guest suites, and then there were three more guest rooms added.

I think that the dinners would be at most 24 people, except the famous New Year’s Eve party, where there would be a smaller dinner first and then more people invited for drinks and dancing afterwards.

The living room of the estate house, which features
 many original furniture designs by decorator William Haines.
Photo by Graydon Wood.
Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.

Do you feel that Quincy was able to extend the principles that you see in his more modest buildings to that larger scale?

Nominally yes, but I think essentially not so much. It’s also a different kind of environment out there in the desert. The Annenbergs didn’t live in it five months of the year, because it’s basically uninhabitable out there when it’s 110°. You played golf outside, and you could eat lunch and get in the pool, but the house didn’t embrace the outside in the same way as a part of everyday life, as an extension of the interior spaces. I think it’s more contained, even though there’s lots of glass, and you can look out. It’s a more introverted house.

And more formal?

Very much more formal. The main space is very symmetrical. The different wings, the kitchen, dining, and the guest wing, go one way, and the master suite and office area go another way.

So now that you’ve looked at so many of his projects and worked on all these buildings, has it changed your architecture?

Being in this building has definitely changed my architecture. I’ve always loved California for the connection to Japanese architecture that I mentioned and the Wrightian tradition of use of woods and other organic materials. Being in this building all the time has imbedded some of the ideas we’ve been talking about more essentially than might otherwise be the case, because I live in it. The subtleties of proportions and scale take a while to get into your blood.

Even though this is a commercial building, it really has the scale of a house. It’s attuned me more toward a fine-grained scale of his rooms in relationship to outside spaces: the absolute continuity of materials inside to outside and the particular areas of the sizes of the gardens.

It wasn’t an epiphany or a whole new way of thinking about architecture, but it was an immersion and increasing understanding and absorption of those kinds of relationships and sensibilities.

After looking at a lot of Quincy’s buildings, I would say he seems very focused on the roofline and the experience of the roof visually. Of course, I am not the first to observe this.

Yes, the roof was big. And Sunnylands is a perfect example of that. He liked a statement roof. The new visitors center at Sunnylands is meant to have some of the Quincy Jones DNA, and yet it’s not Quincy Jones. But the thick floating roof is a statement, the way that he liked to do those for even the smaller houses. I wanted to be deferential and not compete with the statement pyramidal roof that he had for the estate, which was definitely driven by the client.

View of the reflecting pools and the rear of the Center,
 with the Palo Verde trees in bloom.
Photo by the Office of James Burnett.
Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands.

Bust of Diego on Stele III, 1958, by Alberto Giacometti.
 This sculpture from the estate house has been
re-installed in the Grand Hall of the new Center.
Photo by Mark Davidson.
Copyright The Annenberg Foundation Trust at Sunnylands. 

Interviewer: While Quincy focused a lot on the roof, he didn’t seem to obsess so much over the elevations. They could be very simple, sometimes even plain. But it was the experience moving through the building that was what mattered. The spatial experience is the thread, not the thing that’s recorded in a photograph that ends up in a magazine. Do you think that’s an accurate assessment?

I haven’t thought about it that way, but I think you’re right. The elevations are not in and of themselves seemingly highly studied compositions. It does have more to do with the views from the inside out. He was very sensitive to, and very good at, movement through a building. Again, our office building is a nicely choreographed set of spaces.

Perhaps this was his greatest talent, the choreography, and then all of the things that influence that: the lighting, the color of the materials, and so forth. Architectural writers focus so much on the object.

It’s so intangible. And you have to experience it to understand it, and so there aren’t that many people who have carefully gone through and experienced those things in order to write about it. It’s one of the hardest things to observe and critique and express about architecture. It’s not seen as a significant part of all architecture, and yet it’s an important part of his work and one of his strengths.

Do you have other aspects, beyond Quincy’s work, that you want to talk about?

As we been having this conversation, I’m reflecting a little bit on how it was a completely unexpected dimension of my career, and yet it’s such an important one. I’m an architect, like most, wanting to do my own work, and I do. And yet this kind of relationship to Quincy Jones has added to it. It has added a fascinating dimension to my practice and a set of fascinating relationships. It is a legacy that I am connected to and feel and obligation to support. I wouldn’t feel that way as much if I didn’t feel empathetic toward his practice, and what he did, and its relevance. I just find it to be one of those surprises and accidents of life that turn out to open up whole new avenues.

Collaborative design session between FFP Partners and artist Roy McMakin.

www.fisherpartners.net
www.sunnylands.org
http://www.annenbergfoundation.org/
http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5970

Celebrating A. Quincy Jones, FAIA

Part One: The Exhibition and Catalog from the Hammer Museum

A. Quincy Jones Installation
Photograph by Brian Forrest.
Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

I became interested in A. Quincy Jones, FAIA, sometime in the late 1970s because of the modernist tract homes he designed for Joseph Eichler in the Bay Area. In the early 1980s, I bought a monograph about him published by Process in Japan and studied his work more carefully. In 1985, I met his widow (and the editor of the Process book), Elaine Sewell Jones, at the AIA convention in San Francisco. Without realizing it, I found a mentor. When I moved to Los Angeles in 1989, I interviewed Elaine for LA Architect and gave a lecture/tour about Jones’s work for UCLA Extension. For several months, I spent every Friday afternoon at their home, known fondly as the Barn, reviewing images and talking with Elaine. This was my real education in both communications and modern architecture.

The Barn
Photo: Takashige Ikawa courtesy Fred Fisher and Partners.

This summer, UCLA’s Hammer Museum mounted the first museum retrospective devoted to Quincy’s work (curated by San Francisco’s own Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher.) There are many reasons it took so long for him to be recognized in this way. While Quincy, with Elaine’s support and expertise, was very skilled at promoting the work in design publications, he was not looking for fame. He was running a business. As the exhibit suggests, he did not think this work was art, even though it involved artistry. He was happy to collaborate with others and was scrupulous about mentioning those contributions. Perhaps most importantly, his goal was to create not an iconographic photographic image, but a rich experience for the individual as s/he moved through a space from indoors to outdoors and back.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, Architects.
Fairhaven Tract Eichler Homes Model LJ-124,  Orange, California, 1961.
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, Architects.
 Milton S. Tyre House, Los Angeles, California, 1951-54.
 Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, Architects.
 Marvin and Sandy Smalley House, Los Angeles, California, 1969-73.
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Elaine spent the many years I knew her processing Quincy’s enormous archive before sending it over to UCLA. It would be a daunting job for any curator to select a few hundred pieces from an archive that must number in the tens of thousands. Which projects merit mention? Which should be given a lot of space despite a lack of a model? Fletcher was a fine editor for this show. I might have a favorite project that was not included, but with so many completed projects, she has done an excellent job of selecting works that represent either Quincy’s approach or were noteworthy because of an innovation or a client.

While it would have been a more varied exhibit with more models, I think that Quincy’s process relied largely on drawings to explore spatial relations and program. The Case Study House Exhibit of 1989, one of the great architecture exhibits about the modern era—indeed, I think it helped launch our renewed interest in mid-century modernism—had two full-scale houses rebuilt and the living room of the Eames House partially rebuilt. It would have been wonderful to have one of Jones’s Atrium model Eichlers in the middle of the show, but I suspect the budget didn’t permit it. Fletcher tries to strike a balance for the viewer who reads plans (i.e. design professionals) and those who do not. There are a lot of photographs, many of them contemporary.

The overall effect of the exhibit is humility, which was the hallmark of Quincy’s work. He used to design buildings that almost disappeared so the individual could have a light-filled experience adjacent to nature. A dramatic gesture had to support the experience of place. In the early work, especially the Brody residence of 1948–51, there are a few more flourishes that show a Wrightian influence, but over time, he achieves a more mature and minimal vocabulary.

A. Quincy Jones and Associates, Architects. Warner Bros. Records building,
Burbank, California, 1971-75. Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012.
Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

A. Quincy Jones, Whitney Smith, and Edgardo Contini, Architects and Engineer.
Gross House, Mutual Housing Association (Crestwood Hills), Los Angeles, California, 1946-50.
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, Architects. Jones and Emmons office building,
Los Angeles, California, 1954-55 (phase 1), 1957-59 (addition).
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

The wall text and catalog speak to Quincy’s designing from the inside out. As Elaine told me, he could see the experience that a visitor would have from every room. She used to say something like, “He walked every inch in his mind.” The plan is key to understanding the work. The show might have benefited from a few more notated plans, but then it would be tilted more to the architecture crowd than to the general public.

These two sections and single sketch show Quincy's thinking about
how an individual experiences space. Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012.
 Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

For any student of modern architecture or West Coast culture in the middle of the twentieth century, the accompanying catalog would be a good investment. The format, considerably larger than Cory Buckner’s earlier Phaidon monograph, allows the plans to be read relatively easily. To supplement the several vintage photos on display, the Hammer commissioned Jason Schmidt to record several buildings as they exist currently. Many of the houses have had loving owners who have kept them intact, or in the case of the Gary Cooper residence, tried to return them to their original glory.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, Architects.
 Milton S. Tyre House, Los Angeles, California, 1951-54.
Transverse section through living room, dining room, and maid’s quarters.
 Courtesy Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA Library Special Collections.

One of the most telling drawings is a section through Sunnylands, the Annenbergs’ massive estate in Rancho Mirage. In this drawing, you can see Quincy’s idea for the furniture, which was far less opulent than the result. Billy Haines and his associate Ted Graber (who lived in an A. Quincy Jones house) were quite capable of doing restrained work, as their early collaboration at the Brody house shows. In his essay, Mayer Rus explores how the openly gay Haines (well, open for the times) and the more traditional (in appearances at least) Jones built a strong bond. Both individuals celebrated modern innovations, and yet both could bend for the sake of strong-willed clients like the Annenbergs.

The next post will be an interview with Fred Fisher, who owns and works in the office designed and occupied by A. Quincy Jones and his partner Fred Emmons. Fisher recently rehabilitated the Jones residence known as the Barn for the artist Lauren Bon. He also renovated the Annenberg Residence, Sunnylands, in Rancho Mirage and designed the new visitors center for the complex, which respects Quincy’s approach, but is of this moment.

A. Quincy Jones and Frederick E. Emmons, Architects.
St. Michael’s and All Angels Episcopal Church, Studio City, California, 1960-62.
Photograph by Jason Schmidt, 2012. Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

For more information:
http://hammer.ucla.edu/exhibitions/detail/exhibition_id/230
http://www.kennethcaldwell.com/blogdocs/LA-Architect_Elaine-Jones-09-1989.pdf
http://designfaith.blogspot.com/2010/09/elaine-kollins-sewell-jones-1917-2010.html

Postcard from La Jolla

The Scripps Lab
Architect: Irving Gill

La Jolla Shores Beach
There are few houses right on the beach at La Jolla Shores, just north of the village. They tend to be large and nondescript. It’s not a community full of those “my architect is more famous than your architect” houses that you find in Malibu. Nobody is bothered too much with style. This is odd, given that it could be argued that American modernism was born and dramatically furthered here in La Jolla.

Our modern beach house for a week
Photo: Connie Poor

Our good friends David and Cherie rented the best of these large houses for a week to celebrate a milestone birthday. The arrangement of volumes was like a modernist puzzle, while the décor was faintly baroque. Most importantly, every room faced the ocean. I can’t remember when I last slept so well. Our constant companions (and entertainment) were the surfers, who never crashed into each other despite their numbers. They would shoot inside the water tunnel and fly over the top of the cresting wave to ride the backside. Invariably, we put our novels down to watch the neoprene-clad dancers wait and then suddenly cast their fate to the curl. Of course, the coup de grâce was when they pulled off their rubber skins.

Our view of the surfers

The hosts with your loyal correspondent
Photo: Connie Poor

La Jolla Village/Gill’s Corner
The best parts of the village are the coves where the seals have taken up physical and olfactory space. Up the hill is the landmark pink hotel, La Valencia, and what perhaps was the center of early American modernism, a neighborhood full of the works of Irving Gill.

The cove now taken over by seals

La Valencia

San Diego has a touch of the Texas. By that I mean questionable zoning practices.… One highrise right on the ocean in the village is the kind of carbuncle that Prince Charles goes on about. I assume it was built before the coastal initiative. No detail, no materials, no grace, wrong scale. Should be removed. There are still a number of historic buildings, but most of the contemporary buildings could be anywhere suburbia.

Carbuncle at the shore
Photo: Connie Poor

However, around the intersection of Prospect, Silverado, and Draper Streets is the heart of America’s own modernism. Known mostly to the cognoscenti, Irving Gill was one of the country’s architectural pioneers. Practicing at the same time as the Viennese Adolph Loos (Esther McCoy would argue that he was already practicing before Loos), he was creating a new architecture that paid attention to tradition and the vernacular but was built for the 20th century. He made concrete humane.

His lessons still hold. He very nearly shaped an entire precinct with his work for the Bishop’s School and his patron, Ellen Browning Scripps. (Gill designed the original building for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography a mile or so up the coast. That building still stands, although the west façade has been somewhat obscured by later construction.)

Gill’s largest commission was the Bishop’s School (1910-1916), which Scripps underwrote. A nostalgic spire designed by Carleton Winslow, who had worked for Bertram Goodhue, replaced his original tower. Unfortunately, the complex is nearly impenetrable from the street. During this period, Scripps also commissioned the La Jolla Woman’s Club, which can be seen easily from the street and is a popular destination for weddings and other social events. The columns that hold up the arcade have inspired several other buildings, including the nearby Brooks Brothers retail building by ELS.

The Woman’s Club was one of the first buildings built with tilt-slab construction. The same method was used across the street at the Scripps Recreation Center. This public building shows the wear and tear of public maintenance and is currently painted pink. But at least it still stands. Next door to the Woman’s Club is the Kautz Residence, which is now a bed and breakfast. Across the way is Ellen Scripps’s own residence, which has been engulfed by Robert Venturi’s Contemporary Art Museum. There are more beautiful examples of Gill’s work throughout San Diego and Los Angeles, and one beautiful complex in Piedmont is attributed to him. His story is tragic, but his accomplishment is immense.

Bishop School detail
Architect: Irving Gill

Ellen B. Scripps residence surrounded by Robert Venturi

Ellen B. Scripps residence surrounded by Robert Venturi

La Jolla Recreation Center
Architect: Irving Gill

La Jolla Woman's Club
Architect: Irving Gill

Kautz Residence now a bed and breakfast
 Architect: Irving Gill

http://www.sandiegohistory.org/online_resources/gill.html
http://www.amazon.com/Irving-Gill-Architecture-Reform-Architectural/dp/1580930166

Safari Park
I was worried that the Safari Park would be like Disneyland. And while there are Disney touches (Land Rovers parked in the trees?), the park is beautifully landscaped and goes to great lengths to educate the public about the animals. Our hosts treated us to a photo safari. We got on a truck (with a canopy, thank God) and drove out into the savannah to see the giraffes, rhinos, and impalas in something close to their natural habitat.

Disney-like display at Safari Park

The giraffe’s tongue was the longest I’ve ever seen. The beast can find your food and reach its tongue out several feet to get it. But the color of the tongue was not, as I imagined, a range of pinks, reds, and maroons—instead, it was the ugliest grey, like a slug. But those beasts do have the prettiest eyelashes. When they lean over to drink water, they can’t get oxygen. Just before they appear to pass out, they swing their long necks into the air and fill their lungs. Although enormous, the rhinos were quite gentle. In a photo, their hides look like metal plates, but in person they are suppler, bending and creasing as they waddle along.

The giraffe nibbles at our hosts at Safari Park

The gentle rhinos come in for a snack

http://www.sdzsafaripark.org/ 

Salk Institute
For architecture junkies, Salk is a kind of Mecca. For agnostics (about God or concrete), the place can also make you a believer. The genius of the place is that the architect integrates the ineffable and the real. Spirit and science. Space and concrete. Infinity and walls. We were lucky to get Ellen Zimmerman as our guide. She talked about Kahn as an existential architect and spoke of his masterwork in philosophical terms. Although we didn’t get to see the private offices, we did see the library and an interstitial floor. Vierendeel trusses and the full-height interstitial floors allow the lab floors to be completely flexible. This was one of the highlights of the year so far. If you go, be sure to book a tour in advance.

The ethereal and very real Salk Institute

http://www.salk.edu/about/architecture_tours.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Salk_Institute_outline_of_laboratory_floor_and_Vierendeel_truss.jpg


UC San Diego
Built in the second half of the 20th century, UC San Diego is a modern campus that will take a few years to explore. That’s a good thing, because my niece Jaclyn starts school there in the fall. We explored her college, Eleanor Roosevelt, designed by Moshe Safdie and opened in 2003. It’s an interesting experiment in the scale of outdoor space. The buildings on the west side of the road are much more inviting because of the scale of the courtyards and the landscape. The east complex has few plants, and the courtyard doesn’t feel quite right. Hopefully, my niece will get an ocean view room! Then she will also have a fine vista of the Salk Institute.

Eleanor Roosevelt College
Architect: Moshe Safdie

The other goal of this visit was to see Mandeville Hall by A. Quincy Jones. It was one of the few buildings of his in California that I hadn’t seen. It is a tough building, but given that it was designed to house visual arts and music students, it had to be tough. (The art students are probably a tougher lot.) The concrete work doesn’t compare to Salk. But I doubt the construction or maintenance budget did either! His building altered Robert Alexander’s master plan forever, blocking his grand axis and resulting in a more meandering pedestrian experience.

Mandeville Arts Center
Architect:  A. Quincy Jones

We were also lucky to see Robert Irwin’s “Two Running Violet V Forms,” which gave me pause. They change the landscape if you take a few moments to slow down. Look for more reports in the next few years!

"Two Running Violet V Forms"
Installation: Robert Irwin

http://www.dah.ucsd.edu/events/ubd.shtmlhttp://www.amazon.com/University-California-San-Diego-Campus/dp/1568988605

What would a trip to San Diego be without some pink flamingoes?