by Roger Showley
In recent months, the San Diego Museum of Art (SDMA) met with various groups, including C100, to discuss plans for replacing its West Wing.
But based on Foster + Partners’ preference for modernist designs, it’s unlikely the firm will propose reproducing the 1915 Science and Education Building, built in a Spanish Colonial style. Conceptual plans have not yet been released.
A look back at post-World War II America puts the future of Balboa Park’s architectural legacies in perspective.
For a while, there was a flight from historical architectural styles across America, including San Diego. Buildings were either replaced or remodeled to show off a new, sleek, modernist “form follows function” look. That’s when Gaslamp Quarter buildings were refaced with unadorned “modern” exteriors and schools, courthouses and countless public and private buildings followed. This was the “City in Motion,” the era of “urban renewal” – freeways, suburbs, shopping malls and office parks.
Balboa Park was not immune from these space age trends. By 1947 most of Balboa Park was back from service in World War II, and a series of studies explored what to do with deteriorating expo buildings, some of which were remodeled for the 1935-36 California Pacific International Exposition but faced condemnation and removal.
SDMA was one of the first park institutions to reopen and it needed more space than was available in the 1926 Spanish Renaissance-style building architect William Templeton Johnson, had designed. He proposed a similarly styled east wing in 1947 and planned a matching west wing. But local architects and museum directors took a different direction a few years later. The glass and marble Timken Museum of Art opened in 1965 on the site of the Home Economy Building and SDMA’s modernist West Wing and courtyard/sculpture garden opened on the west side in 1966.
A national backlash against the rash of demolitions (particularly the massive Penn Station in Manhattan), prompted Congress to pass the 1966 National Preservation Act, and in San Diego, Bea Evenson gathered 100 of her friends to form C100 in 1967. Its watchword was the “preservation of Spanish Colonial Architecture” in the 1915 expo grounds either by repair or reconstruction. The city declared the Prado the city’s Historic Site No. 1 in 1967, added it to the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and incorporated it into a national historic landmark district. In 1981 the City Council adopted Policy 700-24 to “preserve the comprehensive expression of Spanish Colonial architecture in the Prado area.”
Voters approved bonds to reconstruct the Varied Industries/Food Products Building as the Casa del Prado that opened in 1971. Reconstructions followed in the 1980s and ‘90s of the Casa de Balboa (1915 Commerce and Industries), House of Hospitality (1915 Foreign Arts Building), House of Charm (1915 Indian Arts Building) and the arcades along El Prado. The 1973 Fleet Science Center at the Plaza de Balboa included some Spanish-Colonial-inspired flourishes. The 2000 Natural History Museum north wing added a glassed-in atrium but preserved the look of the rest of the 1932 building, which had replaced the original Southern Counties Building that had been felled by fire in 1925.
In the 1970s and ‘80s, cities joined the Post-Modern revival of ornamentation with a nod to historicism (Horton Plaza shopping center was a leading example). Back in Balboa Park, few San Diegans remember SDMA’s West Wing’s predecessor. Carleton M. Winslow designed it under the direction of consulting exposition architect Bertram Goodhue, who described the Science and Education Building in his 1916 book The Architecture of the Gardens of the San Diego Exposition. The two-story building contained a tower or turret, interior patio and attached arcades. Some excerpts:
• “From one corner rises a stair turret decidedly Moorish in character but harmonizing well with the Renaissance style of the rest of the building, its top covered with bright black and yellow tiles. At each end of the patio a faun spurts water from his mouth into a tiny pool.”
• “Though Moorish in design and decoration, the tower of the Science and Education, or Science of Man Building, fits well with the east facade of the structure. The upper stories of the flanking bays both bear three decorated windows on their fronts, framed with twisted columns and consisting of two arches supported in the middle by a slender column of Sienna marble. The soffit and frieze of the corner are decorated with rich coffering and support roofs of mission tile.”
• “The tiny patio at the northwest corner of the Prado and Plaza de Panama includes one of the most charming bits of gardening in the exposition... A tiny balcony is set back into the shrubbery, completing a picture of a veritable ‘Hortus Conclusus’ [enclosed garden].”
• The front of the Science and Education or Science of Man Building, facing the Plaza de Panama, is different in style from the Prado front of the building, and was designed to recall the Churrigueresque as locally developed in Puebla, Mexico. The motive of the frontispiece is easily seen to be taken from that of the Church of San Francisco in Pueblo, though modified to harmonize with the other buildings in the plaza. The important use of tile on the tower of this building is appropriate, Puebla being famous for its glazed and colored ceramics.”
The full text and photos are available online at c100.org/books/Architecture_&_Gardens_Goodhue.pdf
As for that council policy, here it is, effective Aug. 24, 1981:
“The Spanish Colonial architectural style of the [Panama-California Exposition] shall be incorporated into new structures through the use of architectural design, style and ornament similar to, or compatible with, that of the other Spanish Colonial buildings in the area.”
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