Balboa Park - San Diego, CA

I was just in San Diego, speaking at the 2013 Crittenden National Real Estate Conference on a panel about "Adaptive Reuse of Distressed Urban Properties into Hotels & Revitalizing Downtowns & Historic Places".

I planned a bit of extra time into my trip to see the City.  The first evening I drove up to beautiful Balboa Park, located on a series of high ridges overlooking San Diego.  The Park boasts a spectacular, formally-arranged collection of museums, theaters and gardens in the Spanish Colonial Revival style with intricately-sculpted Plateresque elements:

Balboa Park's buildings are inhabited by 16 or so museums and cultural institutions.  The grounds and multiple gardens are open 24 hours a day. I drove up to stroll them in the moonlight each night before returning to my hotel.  I lunched at The Prado restaurant which boasts some of the best food in San Diego. I attended a marvelous Piranesi exhibit at the San Diego Museum of Art.  I attended a live figure drawing session one evening, hosted by the San Diego Art Institute in the Museum of the Living Artist.  (Luckily I had been sketching buildings in the Park and had my sketchbook with me!).  For me, Balboa Park is heaven on earth and I could easily spend a week there going to museums, sketching and painting!  

Balboa Park's bold, strongly massed classical forms in adobe are punctuated with moments of spectacularly florid sculptural detail, particularly around the entrances to buildings, and on focal towers:

  

The Park was the site of the 1915–16 Panama–California Exposition designed by Bertram Goodhue and the 1935–36 California Pacific International Exposition, designed by Richard Requa.  San Diego was the smallest City ever to host a World's Fair, so the designers were intent on making a strong impression with their works, in order to promote the City as a place worthy of international attention (and investment).  Both expositions left architectural gems.  

Goodhue is responsible for the Park's primary formal arrangement of buildings along expertly-composed axes and cross axes, linked by continuous arcades:

The buildings and arcades shape a network of beautiful, shady gardens and public spaces:

The formal arrangement of buildings is punctuated frequently by whimsical, focal towers and cupolas:

The approach to the Park is on Laurel Avenue via a very tall, arched adobe bridge spanning the Cabrillo Canyon:  

The California Bell Tower rises into view to the left of the main axis as one crosses the Cabrillo Bridge and then passes through a narrow arched gateway into the small arcaded California Quadrangle at the feet of the highly sculptured entrance to the Museum of Man:

Passage through a second small arched gateway leads to El Prado, the grand axis of the Park lined on both sides with spacious arcades linking the entrances to the various museums, all slightly different in their miraculously-conceived details but harmonious in general form and dispositions along axis and cross axis:

I returned to Balboa Park perhaps 6 times in my three and a half days in San Diego.  I have seen photos of so many other classic expositions like the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, yet only small fragments of them remain - the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Museum of Science in Chicago and the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco.  I have always imagined how these glorious expositions must have looked in their entirety and in Balboa Park I was able to experience it!  

Like other expositions, the future of Balboa Park's buildings was once uncertain. The City and numerous civic organizations have, with great foresight over the decades, coordinated the conversion of the Park's buildings from their original temporary materials into permanent structures to preserve them for future generations.  What a spectacular gift and legacy!