Architecture-focused travel
“We narrowed the Mira Mesa branch down to a design we liked, one with a roof we thought was very attractive. But the community group didn’t like it: they thought it looked like a Quonset hut.”
McDonald’s, once known for its exuberant golden twin parabolas flanking a glass-and-steel pavilion, is now the most boring recitation of mansardism. Only the Wienerschnitzel chain still clings to its defining, red-roofed mini-A frames.
"One of the county’s most appealing concentrations of ranch houses occurs in an unlikely place, the steep hillsides and winding streets of Del Mar…. several of these May mass-market houses were built in Del Mar as second homes.”
Two factors helped bring the artistic use of stucco to a halt: modernism, with its emphasis on simple, unbroken planes, and the invention of the stucco “gun,” a machine process for blowing stucco onto walls.
Pine Valley is famous among bridge engineers. The first prestressed concrete bridge in the U.S., built using a particular kind of cantilever technology, it appeared to defy gravity during construction. It is located near two earthquake faults.
One disturbing element of the Mercado Apartments is its parking facilities. The two lots accommodate 100 cars each, and until shade trees (jacarandas and other flowering species) take over, will invite comparisons to a small Wal-Mart.
People wanted SLOW signs in their neighborhoods, on dangerous curves, intersections. But “slow is no longer a legal sign,” says Levy. “It’s too general. Now it must be why you’re supposed to go slow.”
Landscape architect Roger DeWeese cites Balboa Park’s landscape as San Diego’s most enduring feature. “Our society has been borrowing on the foresight of some real visionaries for three or four generations now,”
In San Diego’s towers we find our final denial of the endless plains and deserts that brought us to this Western shore. We embrace the power of mountains, the connection between man and the firmament.
A $30 million development covering 69,000 square feet at the intersection of 15th Street and Camino Del Mar, it styles itself as a “European retail village.” Gone, we gather, are megalomaniac spaces of yesteryear’s malls.
Its skeletal frame, with rectangles of empty space, gives it the half-ruined aspect of an ancient arena like that in Arles or the Coliseum itself, as if the architects had been unable to resist a pun.