Historic materials, carbon footprints and freedom led a few particular plans.

Laying out their visions for respecting the past while moving design into the future, three local architects well-versed in La Jolla revealed projects that focused on the details.

Architect and La Jolla Historical Society board Vice President Laura DuCharme Conboy led the discussion, titled “La Jolla’s Redeveloping Neighborhoods 2024: Reflections on Design” Oct. 8, during the organization’s Architecture Week. 

From left, La Jolla architects Trace Wilson, Ione Stiegler and Lisa Kriedeman explain their approach to revitalizing La Jolla neighborhoods.

“Architecture should be timeless,” said panel member Lisa Kriedeman, principal architect at Island Architecture. “We value the traditional aesthetics and believe that they can be added to more modern projects as well.”

Kriedeman’s example of this was her renovation of the 1923 home at 1834 Spindrift Drive, a “truly amazing site,” she said.

The home was thought to be Spanish Colonial Revival, but a closer inspection of the original roof revealed shingles, not keeping with the expected tile material.

Kriedeman then worked to “pay homage to the Spanish Colonial Revival style” intended, she said.

She designed improvements to the home that included special attention to details in iron, woodwork and plaster, ensuring the home aligned with particulars consistent with time and place.

“We were sticklers for tradition,” she said, calling out her sourcing iron work from a longstanding Italian ironworker and borrowing from Moorish inclusions, as is typical of the style, with features like a ceiling detail called a “Turkish fold.” 

Specialty knives were made for the hand-plastered details, Kriedeman said.

Ione Stiegler, founder and principal architect of IS Architecture, presented two midcentury modern designs. 

The first, at 8015-8017 El Paseo Grande, shows how historic preservation often considers the carbon footprint, she said. 

“There’s a hokey saying that ‘the greenest building is the one that’s already built,’ and it is true,” she said. 

The project integrated “both historic integrity and contemporary design with the embodied carbon benefits of an existing building and the potential for deep operational carbon improvements,” she said.

The duplex, with an owner’s side and a renter’s side, incorporated the modernism movement’s philosophy of connecting indoor with outdoor in design and carbon footprint consciousness with the added greenery and skylights.

The reuse of materials and attention to solar panels also demonstrate the home’s carbon efficiency, Stiegler said.

Stiegler also presented the Loch Crane home at 5950 Avenida Chamnez.

Though the project, which had to switch contractors halfway through as the first didn’t follow the plans, can’t be considered environmentally friendly, Stiegler highlighted the home’s restoration to its “original concept” as an “organic home that was supposed to be able to expand forever.”

La Jolla urbanist and architect Trace Wilson’s plans to revamp the La Jolla Recreation
Center are a study in freedom.

Redesigning the Rec Center, via a committee of the nonprofit Friends of the La Jolla Recreation Center, will upgrade some spaces and repurpose others, freeing up space that has gone under- or unused for decades, Wilson said.

Renowned La Jolla philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps bought the land and commissioned famed architect Irving J. Gill to design the Rec Center, which opened in 1915, as a community space for all. Currently, the lower floor is “pretty much unused,” Wilson said, adding his plans would use the basement as a gym.

The renovation would also bring “a breezeway or hallway through the building from Prospect [Street] to the play area,” he said, further promoting unfettered movement. 

And the main auditorium, which Scripps envisioned as a space for anyone “to speak freely,” Wilson said, will be brought “up to current [technological] standards so that we can use it.”