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San Diego, California
Come meet me by the ocean in your dream
Before we go on, I need to get some unpleasantness out of the way.
I was only able to sign up for three tours this year (far less than any other year) because I was speaking on Wednesday afternoon which conflicted with a lot of the available tour times. On Wednesday morning I was still able to book a tour but my choices were limited by time so I ended up with a walking tour focusing on local San Diego architect Irving Gill. I checked my confirmation email and the schedule on the official AIA26 app to make sure I had the correct time (as I always do) only to show up at the tour desk and be told that the tour had already left and that the confirmation email and the official AIA26 app both listed the tour time an hour later than it should have been. Sorry.
I am normally somewhat mild mannered (unless I’m driving) and I was as upset about this as I could possibly be. How could this happen? When no one showed up, did they possibly notice something was wrong? Why wasn’t any effort made to notify me about this? I go to these very expensive events to pay more to go on these tours and after all these conferences and all these tours I’ve never ever seen anything close to this big of a screw up, and trust me, I have seen a lot of screw ups over the years with these tours.
My complaining did nothing. Sure I got a refund and even an email from the AIA apologizing for their unforgivable mistake. I was even offered any additional tour (even a sold out one) at no additional cost but that didn’t help me at all since I already booked every available tour I could and there were literally no other times tours were available, sold out or not. I’m still obviously upset about this and imagine I will be upset about this as long as I draw breath. So after telling you all about one the best AIA tour experience I ever had at Cuatro Cuatros, we’re now faced with the stark reality of the worst AIA tour experience ever. Thanks AIA.
The tour I didn’t want to miss was ET122: Safdie Rabines at Scripps: Coastal Architecture for Marine Conservation up in La Jolla. This tour was pretty short and wasn’t amazing like Cuatro Cuatros (an unfair comparison in any year) but was still ok. We visited two different building complexes, the Institute of Oceanography on the hill and the more impressive Seaside Forum on the beach.
One of the reasons that I chose to stay on the Scripps tour was that I wanted to skip the bus ride back to the convention center and instead stay in La Jolla, at least for a little while. After all the Scripps Seaside Forum is right on the beach (something which might explain why “seaside” is in its name) and also right by the pier, a place I had been to before and a place I wanted to see again. Even on a “June Gloom” morning, it’s hard to find a better place to spend some time than the beach at La Jolla.
The AIA tour to Scripps and my visit to La Jolla were on my last full day in San Diego, I had an all day flight the next morning scheduled to take me back home and I was prepared to do everything I could that last day to make the most of whatever time I had left. From the beach, I headed uphill, first on La Jolla Shores Drive then Downwind Way and then Expedition Way up to the UC San Diego campus. If you’re familiar with La Jolla, you’ll know that the balance of that walk is uphill and, if Google Earth is to believed (and in this case I am not sure it is to be believed), the walk comprised an over 1,100 foot gain in elevation in a relatively short two mile distance.
I walked all that way uphill (it really wasn’t that bad of a walk but in hindsight I probably should have just done an Uber) all just to see the second most famous modern building in La Jolla. This is the oh so dramatic (in a good way) Geisel Library on the UCSD campus. The library opened in 1970 and was designed by William Pereira, the guy responsible for all of the parts of LACMA that were recently torn down as well as that omnipresent Transamerica Pyramid Tower in San Francisco. The library building consists of a hard to miss six story tower atop a much larger and much easier to miss two story (mostly) underground base.
My visit to the Geisel Library (named in honor of Dr Seuss whose real last name was never Seuss) started with circling the outside and then spiraling on in where I rode an elevator up to the eighth floor and then started working my way down the stairs exploring whatever I could. The library is generally open to the public except for the last week before the end of the semester, which of course was almost all of the week of AIA26 (great timing AIA). Luckily the library was open but only for that last day which also happened to be Graduation Day on the UCSD campus, something that brought extra crowds and lots of graduates posing for portraits all over the campus.
The tower was interesting to visit inside and the sixth floor (third from the top) had the most fun views. Below that the views were good but hard to see, apparently it isn’t too easy to wash the windows on those floors and those noticeably dirty windows really impacted the experience. The big surprise for me though was the lower two floors which are really large and also kind of underground. When I say “kind of underground” I mean that yes, they are underground but when you’re there you don’t feel underground since the floors have lots of open courtyards and skylights throughout.
One last icon to see in La Jolla and that’s Fallen Star by Do Ho Suh, a house just sort of hanging off the edge of the Engineering Building on the UCSD campus. Is there a reason it does this? It’s part of an art program called the Stewart Collection, so while there probably is a reason maybe it’s best not to think to hard about that and just enjoy it for what it is.
If you were expecting to see pictures of that other icon in La Jolla then (just like me) you would be out of luck. The AIA offered just a few tours of the Salk Institute, Louis Kahn’s masterpiece, and those tours weren’t even announced or available when I booked my tours on the first day I could. If I’m being honest, this was a huge miss by the AIA. They should have done whatever they can to get as many people as possible out there, maybe even hold an event or have special sunset or sunrise tours. Of the 15,000 (or so) attendees probably only about 240 (or less than 2 out of every 100 people) were able to get out there when (in all likelihood) those other 98 decided to go to San Diego and expected (like me) that a visit out to the Salk was a given.
The next piece of my well thought out plan was to take a very long ride on the San Diego Trolley Blue Line all the way to 24th Street Station (about 45 minutes, but it took closer to an hour because of frequency and timing) to (what I believe at least) was the most trolley accessible In-N-Out Burger around. Everyone seems to have strong opinions about In-N-Out Burger and my strong opinion is that if I’m going to spend six hours on a JetBlue flight to the west coast you can make damn sure that a Double Double will be in my future.
The next step of my well thought out plan was to double (double) back on the Blue Line back to downtown, board a ferry to Coronado, walk to the ocean and wait out the sunset. It was a pretty solid plan and it’s always good to head out to Coronado to see the hotel anyway, a place that is still wonderfully public- something I really appreciate as a member of said public but something I might not appreciate as much if I was a high paying hotel guest.
My well thought out plan hit a snag. It turns out while there was a sunset, it was not an especially good one. I knew this going in after checking a few sunset prediction sites which put a good sunset opportunity in the low 20s (out of a perfect 100 score). Still it was wonderful to be on the beach for a while and I found a great place to hang out, an almost perfect sitting rock near the end of the jetty in front of the hotel. It was so perfect however that during my time there I was (almost) part of several semi professional looking photo shoots and one on the beach planned surprise marriage proposal. I guess when it comes to beach rocks I really know how to pick them.
As for the sunset, it might have been in the low 20s but the beach and the twilight sky by the dock did their best to make up for it.
I chose to take the Coronado Ferry that leaves by the Convention Center, a massive wall of a building that blocks the waterfront from the trolley station, Gaslamp District and baseball stadium. Although unlike most convention centers there is a workaround, or rather a workover. If you’re feeling brave, you can climb a whole bunch of steps right in the middle of the building and walk right over the convention center like it’s not really there, something I found myself doing more than I expected to. Once you clear the building you find yourself right by the (somewhat) hidden ferry dock and this, the Rady Bandshell designed by Tucker Sadler Architects. That Saturday the bandshell was hosting the San Diego Smooth Jazz Festival, a really long (and really smooth) festival that I saw and heard parts of both before and after sunset. The event is ticketed but there are no obstructions to stop that smooth jazz sound and, due to the location of the bandshell, it’s pretty easy to catch a free glimpse from all those free unticketed areas all around it.
And with that my well planned (though long) last day and all too short trip to San Diego and AIA26 comes to an end. Since 27 unequivocally comes after 26, next year is AIA27 in Philadelphia, a place I have been to previously for both an AIA Conference and for Greenbuild. It was nice that the AIA went somewhere different but now it seems we’re back to more of the same. Not sure how I feel about that, but it’s not (really) up to me where they decide to go. So with that last ambivalent thought, it’s time to say goodbye to San Diego and it’s perfect weather and maybe just for once just be thankful for an AIA Conference that may have had some issues but certainly tried its best to be as memorable as possible.
See you next year.
But wait, there’s more
I go to these AIA Conferences almost every year and San Diego is the eighteenth one that I have been to, meaning that there’s lots of slideshows and pictures and stories from all sorts of different cities, showing off their best architecture and design for all to see.
