A muse for the masses

Tijuana -- James Hubbell, nearly 71 years old and still inclined to daydreams of dragonfly wings, steers his white Dodge van with eerie calm through hellish binational traffic. Behind him, he keeps at hand a tape measure, a bag of mortar, a builder’s level, several trowels, a tube of sun block. Ahead, as usual, lies a building site.

“I don’t really know why I do it, except it’s an excuse to do something,� Hubbell has just been saying. “I just like to build.�

For more than four decades, Hubbell has been shaping walls that undulate, roofs that swoop and stained-glass designs of intricate abstraction. Known among his admirers as a sort of mystic with dirt under his fingernails, Hubbell has never landed a million-dollar commission or won a Pritzker Prize, architecture’s top honor. In fact, as he is quick to admit, he is neither trained as an architect nor licensed as one in the state of California. But he has conceived and built parks on three continents, lectured at UC Berkeley and Vladivostok, Russia, and designed (with licensed co-signers) several custom homes in California and Washington.

His palace doors hang in Abu Dhabi. Perhaps his most widely known design, a jewel-box chapel that seems to flutter in the breeze, stands in the elite Northern California community of Sea Ranch. And every June, when he and his wife throw open the doors of their home in the mountains east of San Diego for a single day, hundreds of San Diegans show up to gape at all the sinuous shapes and shake hands with the soft-spoken, blue-eyed host. He calls his style “the architecture of jubilation.�

So why does he drive south across the border at least once a month, then veer inland, turn off the main highway, climb a series of rustic roads and pull the Dodge to halt on a hilltop lot amid the heat and dust of a bedraggled Tijuana colonia?

Because he has clients here, scores of them, from preschool through sixth grade. For the last dozen years, Hubbell has served as in-house artist and designer, volunteer wrangler and construction-site grunt to the Colegio Esperanza and Jardin de Ninos La Esperanza, a struggling nonprofit kindergarten and an elementary school founded by a crusading mother from San Diego County.

A few strides from Hubbell’s parking spot on the Tijuana hilltop stands the campus, a complex of buildings bearing all the telltale Hubbell signs, from curved surfaces to mosaic tile work to recycled materials. On the bathroom walls, blue dogs cavort with red-winged birds. On another wall, stylized horses stand against shell-fringed starry skies. Outside, a tall, twisting trellis, devised by a group from UC San Diego’s short-lived architecture school, throws shade on a sitting area with a broad view of the colonia.

Inevitably, this marriage of site, design and social mission stops newcomers in their tracks.

“Es un cuento. It’s a story, like a fantasy world, when you first arrive,� says Tijuana architecture student Erendira Gonzalez, 26, who started volunteering at the site about a year ago. “It seems out of place, with all those curves. But since I’ve been going more, I see that it connects with the place, with the houses around it.... From the moment you go in, you sense that it’s a special place.�

This is the riddle built into much of Hubbell’s work: Organically inspired and whimsically suggestive, his projects look as if neither designer nor occupant should harbor a care in the world. In fact, however, Hubbell’s entire career has been shaped by his social agenda and his refusal to work the way most architects do.

In many respects, the school is an emblem for all of this. But for the man who designed it, there’s nothing complicated here.

“It was an excuse to build something,� says Hubbell. “I’m always looking for those excuses.�

Students and volunteers

The sun is high, the roosters have retired, and the dogs are curled up in the shade. It’s a working Saturday on the hilltop, and the volunteer crew at the Esperanza schools is larger than usual -- more than 50 workers, including several Mexican architecture students and a group from the San Diego Junior Chamber of Commerce, all laboring amid thick Tijuana dust and the scent of distant trash fires.

With noon approaching, one group of volunteers stacks stones and cement to fortify a wall. A second group is tiling nearby steps, while a third digs a trench in the garden. Others sort tile or pilot wheelbarrows, and a gaggle of neighborhood kids is inexpertly washing the volunteers’ cars at 50 cents per vehicle.

Around the corner, several mothers from the neighborhood are tiling the curb in front.

Hubbell, unshaven and grubby in a polo shirt but pacific as ever, chalks in the outline of a stylized white rose, then shambles off to sort through broken tiles for the right colors.

“He’s very shy,� says Christine Brady, the school’s founder. To understand Hubbell, she adds, it’s important to remember that “construction is very addictive. You know how those rock climbers go out to Joshua Tree and climb every Saturday? Builders love to build the same way. And Jim is an aficionado of the construction process. He likes to bend the rebar into shapes that are aesthetically pleasing. That’s the real Jim Hubbell.�

The hillside neighborhood lies nine miles south of the border, its streets sprinkled with the occasional middle-class home, but more often dominated by hovels of crumbling bricks, recycled plywood and jury-rigged tarps.

It’s a tricky place to introduce wavy walls. And Brady, who brought Hubbell into this project, is no easy client. Raised in Pennsylvania, trained in physics at Princeton and engineering at Stanford, she spent most of the 1980s as a civilian employee at the Navy’s Ocean Systems Center in San Diego, specializing in microelectronics and acoustics.

But in 1987, she started volunteering at a Tijuana orphanage and met a little girl she eventually adopted. Along the way she got interested in that girl’s old neighborhood, where many mothers were working in nearby maquiladoras, leaving a day-care gap in addition to a shortage of schools. Before long, Brady had launched the school and stepped into a role as headmistress and cultivator of donors.

But more than a decade later, as she hollers to round up volunteers for lunch or blurts a corrective suggestion to the mural-painting team, it’s clear that she’ll never be a smooth operator. If she and Hubbell were a crime-fighting team, she’d certainly be the bad cop.

“I’m more of a straight-talker,� she says. “A practical thinker. I took a personality test once, and they told me I could only do one of two jobs. The first was running Marine Corps field operations, and the other was being president of a corporation. With this, I got a little of each. But I’m not going up for any diplomacy awards.�

Her collaboration with Hubbell, she acknowledges, is a complex relationship. But in many ways, it has gotten easier.

“The things that I thought would be the most God-awful turned out to be the most beautiful,� Brady confesses. “I learned to trust him.�

Edges of architecture’s radar

Hubbell is far from the first person to seize on the idea of architecture as a tool for social change. But he’s among a very few working persons, architects or otherwise, to build their careers around the idea at such a grass-roots level.

Hubbell is revered in San Diego; the Oceanside Museum of Art gave him a retrospective in 1998, and the local public television station aired its second documentary on him Sept. 29. But many thoughtful, alert architects in Los Angeles have never heard of him.

Ray Kappe, director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture from 1972 to 1987 and an employer of organic shapes in his own designs, blames academic fashion for Hubbell’s obscurity outside his hometown. Basically, says Kappe, Hubbell hit his stride in earthy design and social crusading just as this country’s leading architectural tastemakers were turning away from those things and embracing aloof postmodernism.

“It’s too bad,� says Kappe, who recalls visiting two Hubbell buildings years ago. “I think he’s a very good architect.�

The roots beneath his nest-building, says Hubbell, are no great mystery. Born in New England, he calculates that he attended 12 schools in 13 years of near-constant motion. Though his mother’s family had financial means, she spent much of her life on a series of attempted new beginnings, in search of a mate and home that would last. By the time Hubbell finished high school, they were living in Rancho Sante Fe, in northern San Diego County.

Hubbell says his first career goal was to be a steeplechase jockey; as a boy, he loved horses. But in his late teens and early 20s, Hubbell traveled widely, served two years with the U.S. Army (mostly in Korea) and studied at Connecticut’s Whitney Art School and Michigan’s Cranbrook Art Academy. Looking at his work, you can readily guess the most influential stops on his itinerary: the hut-like organic forms (Africa), the leaded glass and dramatic play of light (Notre Dame in Paris), the fractured tile work and soaring rebar (Antonio Gaudi’s works in Barcelona, Spain).

In 1958, at 27, he started putting down roots. Back in San Diego, he began working with architect Sim Bruce Richards and married a teacher named Anne Stewart. For $350 per acre, Hubbell recalls, they bought 10 acres in the mountains of eastern San Diego County, just outside Julian, where he resolved to build a home. Digging holes for the first footings, he collected granite chunks that became the first walls. After so many itinerant years, says Hubbell, “I was anchoring myself. I was saying, ‘I’m tied to this earth.’ �

Over the years that followed, Richards, once a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, came to rely on Hubbell for delicately wrought, organically influenced detail work, from lamps to doors to windows. Meanwhile, Hubbell’s independent projects grew more ambitious, though he never bothered to secure a degree or license in architecture.

“If you’re an artist, you’re supposed to be eccentric,� he explains. “You’re not supposed to know anything. If you’re an architect, you have to fit this image.�

By the 1970s, he was designing restaurant interiors, the occasional home (with licensed collaborators) and many windows, including the stained glass above the altar at All Souls Episcopal Church of San Diego’s Point Loma neighborhood.

Back on that 10 acres in the mountains, Hubbell surrounded his wife and their four sons with a compound that is part western homestead, part Hobbit hole and part Yes album cover. The complex, which kept growing until 1987, now consists of eight structures, including a studio operation with half a dozen part-time employees.

“The first thing was nature. We put little stakes in the ground, around the trees and rocks,� says Anne Hubbell, explaining how the home’s site and floor plan evolved.

On normal workdays at home, Hubbell might sketch building plans or make jewelry, daub a watercolor or assemble a window, fire a sculpture in the kiln or hire a model and do some figure drawing. Lately, he’s been working on a poem inspired by the discovery of dragonfly wings at water’s edge during a lakeside hike. His days at the Tijuana school have evolved into a monthly routine, advertised in advance on the Hubbell and school Web sites (www.hubbellandhubbell.com and www.americasfoundation.net, respectively).

And when Hubbell needs to collaborate with a licensed architect these days, he need only turn to his son and business partner, Drew, who has become a proponent of ecologically sensitive design, especially straw-bale construction.

Perhaps the senior Hubbell’s most ambitious project is a string of parks around the Pacific Rim. The sites -- sculptured landscapes built by Hubbell, collaborator Milenko Matanovic and a corps of students and volunteers to carry a common “pearl� theme -- so far include San Diego’s Shelter Island (1998); Yantai, China (2001); and Vladivostok (1994).

But Hubbell is also especially excited about plans for an Earth Discovery Institute on the state-owned 2,600-acre Crestridge Ecological Preserve in southeast San Diego County. He’s designing a gateway.

“That’s a really interesting job,� Hubbell says. “And hopefully, I get paid.�

An alliance forms

Thirteen years ago, when Christine Brady realized she needed an architect, she’d never heard of Hubbell.

By that time, Brady had made the kindergarten a full-time crusade, operating out of a conventional rectangular building on site, handling donations through a U.S.-based nonprofit organization called the Americas Foundation. Though she hadn’t received any financial backing from the Mexican government -- and still hasn’t, she says -- state and federal officials helped her negotiate legalities there.

Because the colonia’s population was so socially and economically diverse, she was looking for design with a deeper identity, “something that would transcend class differences.� But her interviews with architects didn’t go so well.

“I was extremely harsh,� she admits. “I murdered their egos. I told one guy, ‘I’m not going to build a chicken coop.’ �

She had, however, always liked the stained-glass windows at All Souls, her church in Point Loma. So when a mutual friend told her more about the man behind those windows, Brady decided to call. Next came a visit to Tijuana, then a meeting in Julian, where after just a few days of pondering, Hubbell offered up rough models of three possible designs.

In September 1990 the two forged an alliance, and soon Hubbell was Brady’s leading volunteer, showing up in Tijuana every Friday and Saturday. By 1992, they’d expanded their ambitions to include Colegio La Esperanza, an elementary school about five blocks from the kindergarten. In the surrounding neighborhood, meanwhile, there was still no piped-in water or electricity, and the school’s power depended on “a two-mile-long extension cord.�

Utilities have since arrived. But Tijuana’s colonias, Hubbell says, “are sort of forgotten places. They spring up, and the government doesn’t have resources to help them. But say you have a famous murder. Then you exist. Well, if you’ve got the most beautiful school in Tijuana, then you exist.

“If you do a school with all that effort, a school that people in La Jolla would be jealous of, at least you get the kids confused, which is probably the beginning of change.�

Brady agrees with the sentiment. But as an engineer, she can’t help but point out that these buildings are more practical than they look: Construction costs have amounted to less than $40 per square foot, she says -- about one-fourth the going rate for public school construction in California.

Along with volunteers from the U.S. and Mexico, the school’s staff can rely on a nucleus of supportive families to turn up for workdays and student performances. But workaday operations are no fairy tale.

“The community is so schizophrenic,� says Bill Roley, a sustainable agriculture expert who has been working on an irrigation system for the campus garden. “Six months ago, somebody stole the valves. Then we replaced the valves, and they stole the faucets. This is a beautiful dream and a frustrating reality.� Brady blames a group of the surrounding area’s young men, and their trade in crystal meth, for the thefts.

Meanwhile, finances at the school remain tenuous. During the academic year, Brady says, operating costs amount to about $20,000 monthly, of which $10,000 is covered by tuition payments from pupils’ families. For the rest, Brady scrounges for endowment gifts and scholarship sponsors, and frequently digs into her own pockets. In one respect, at least, the school matches its surroundings: Rebar protrudes from the roof line, signaling incompletion, as it does from so many structures in Baja. In a room where a greenhouse was planned, hand-me-down computers are now arrayed. In a room earmarked for art projects, a ballet barre and mirrors are found because the school landed a pair of Russian ballet instructors who were looking for a challenge abroad. With their help, the children present a new production yearly. This year it was a balletic version of “The Little Prince.� Hubbell created sets.

In the remaining unbuilt school space, Hubbell would like to see four more classrooms, a library and storage area. Brady, who estimates that the elementary school is 40% complete, generally agrees.

“We’re either 20 years or three years from finishing,� says Hubbell.

“If we had $2 million, we could finish in two years,� says Brady.

Some might see that sort of uncertainty as a discouragement, and Brady certainly has her dark days. But if Hubbell does, he doesn’t let on. Instead, he keeps making his monthly visits, juggling the variables along with the other daydreams awaiting release through his sketchbook, tape measure and trowel.

“I’m pretty convinced,� he says, “that you could draw a line, or put three notes together, that could change the world. The trick is knowing how.�