Function Sacrificed for Form in Seniors Center
CHULA VISTA — In their quest for formal perfection, some architects will sacrifice function for the sake of eye-catching imagery.
The new $2.3-million Norman Park Center for seniors on F Street in downtown Chula Vista, which opened in March, is the most stunning new building the city has seen in years, but a close inspection reveals some serious flaws.
Architect Richard Friedson has combined basic forms such as cubes, cylinders, squares and rectangles into a light, pleasing composition that practically takes wing. A vaulted roof soars off one end of the building to provide sun shade. Broad expanses of glass lend a transparent quality, and wood beams line up in orderly rows to form outdoor trellises that soften the building’s crisp lines.
The 16,000-square-foot interior is spacious and inviting. Near the entrance, receptionists greet visitors through windows of a 16-foot, copper cube-shaped office, which also extends into the patio outside. Nearby a tall, cylindrical stucco-and-glass-block cylinder encloses another office.
Friedson’s building is cool and hip, but it also recalls the San Diego area’s architectural past. The curving sweep of a two-story wall captures the spirit of Streamline Moderne buildings from the 1930s, such as the Ford Building (now home to the Aerospace Museum) in Balboa Park. Simple stucco walls, trellises and the delicate relationship between the building and the surrounding landscape call to mind the work of early 20th-Century San Diego architect Irving Gill.
The expansive reading room, too, harks back to the grand old hotel lobbies of the 1920s and 1930s. Under a high, vaulted ceiling, west- and south-facing banks of windows soar to 24 feet, admitting vast quantities of natural light. A huge Arizona flagstone fireplace adds a warm, earthy touch.
Situated only a block from a busy downtown commercial district on 3rd Street, the Norman Park Center makes a graceful transition between the business strip and the residential neighborhood to the east. The center is set back from the street, like nearby houses, but a sizable raised planter and a hefty wood trellis extend to the sidewalk, continuing, in an informal way, the commercial district’s format of building close to the street.
The new center takes its name from adjacent Norman Park, a longtime hangout for area seniors, with its shuffleboard and horseshoe courts, open stretches of grass and outdoor picnic tables. Friedson established intimate relationships between the new building and the park by using tall glass doors, big banks of windows and an outdoor patio shaded by retractable canvas awnings.
Initially, Chula Vista hired Visions to design a minor addition to an existing center, but, as the city assessed its growing need for senior services, the project mushroomed to its current size, entirely replacing its modest, circa-1961 predecessor.
The Norman Park Center provides a full range of daily activities, from card games to lectures to Tai Chi lessons, serving hundreds of area seniors including a regular core group of about 2,000. The center contains offices, a kitchen, a huge multipurpose room that can be subdivided with sliding accordion walls and an expansive reading room. A variety of senior service agencies have been consolidated under one roof, including Meals on Wheels, senior legal services and a shared housing program.
Some of the seniors were worried that this sleek modern building would feel foreign to them, so historic photos of downtown Chula Vista were mounted on lobby walls to compensate with a sense of the familiar.
Still, the building gets mixed reviews from its users. Joyce Beardsley, the director of the center, is disappointed that the cylindrical element in the lobby, now used as an office, is not large enough to serve as a conference room, as was intended. As a private office, it’s not very private, since its open top allows anyone nearby to eavesdrop.
From an architect as talented as Friedson, this is a big disappointment. With a little more pencil-grinding, he could have incorporated a cylindrical feature into his design while giving it a more solid functional purpose worthy of its prominent position.
Client and architect also disagreed on some of the finish materials. Friedson wanted to use thin wood veneer on some cabinets and counters, but the center opted instead for durable Formica--in one case, the dreaded phony wood-grain variety. And, instead of colorful tile in key public areas inside, which would have provided welcome splashes of color, the center used off-white tile and paint.
Seniors who use the building aren’t all swept away by its design. On a recent visit, a group playing cards in a corner of the multipurpose room said the spacious new building does not feel as homey as the old one. They complained about the shortage of nearby parking, a major inconvenience for seniors who can’t walk long distances. And they noted that the kitchen is too far from the multipurpose room, where important functions requiring food are held--another inexcusable oversight in planning.
Friedson’s company, Visions, has become known for the design of senior centers. In conjunction with his former associate, Jennifer Luce, Friedson has designed four of them, all visually exciting, but with a tendency to let dramatic forms win out over purely functional concerns.
Like the new Chula Vista project, his Lemon Grove Senior Center, which opened in 1989, cuts a striking profile but poses problems for its users. Storage space at the Lemon Grove facility is inadequate, and some rooms aren’t well suited to their intended purposes.
Even with such shortcomings, Visions’ buildings are quickly changing the standard image of seniors centers as dark, dank, depressing places, what one seasoned patron of Chula Vista’s new center described as “rummage sales waiting to happen.”
Instead, Visions’ centers are fresh and imaginative, configured with open floor plans that allow easy, casual movement through interior spaces flooded with natural light.
The Norman Park Center is a boldly conceived, sophisticated work of architecture, a fact not lost on Beardsley, even though she is still smarting from all the last-minute haggling over design details.
“Since we’ve come here, we’ve attracted a whole lot of younger seniors,” she said. “They say, ‘What great programs!’ Well, we always had great programs, but now we have a building that is nice to go to. We don’t look like a rummage sale anymore!”
