For 60 years, San Diego’s Timken Museum of Artwork has stood in Balboa Park — a travertine-clad Modernist jewel field showcasing priceless Russian icons and masterworks from the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Fragonard, floating among the many park’s exuberant Spanish Revival fantasies. However beneath its calm exterior lies an architectural thriller that has captivated Stephen Buck and Keith York, native structure lovers who’ve spent the final yr obsessively piecing collectively proof suggesting that the Timken’s true authorship has been misunderstood, if not intentionally obscured, for the reason that day it opened in 1965.
Their investigation — which has caught the eye of the soon-to-expand museum, to not point out the town’s tight-knit cultural neighborhood — started with a secret. In 2013, York, founding father of Fashionable San Diego, a digital archive dedicated to the area’s Midcentury design, obtained a name from one among San Diego’s most revered architects, Robert Mosher. Then in his 90s, Mosher requested to satisfy for lunch in La Jolla. “I have something I need to tell you,” he mentioned.
Mosher, recorded by York (who was sworn to secrecy till after Mosher’s loss of life in 2015) recounted a narrative advised to him a long time earlier by his buddy and colleague Richard Kelly, the lighting designer of a few of American modernism’s most iconic buildings, together with Philip Johnson’s Glass Home, Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Artwork Museum and Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Constructing. Kelly had been employed to design the lighting for the Timken. However in keeping with Mosher, throughout an early assembly Walter Ames, the venture’s patron, made a shocking suggestion to Kelly: “You’re the architect — why don’t you design it yourself?”
Kelly, who skilled on the Yale College of Structure however had by no means designed a constructing, discovered himself out of his depth, Mosher added. He turned to his shut buddy and frequent collaborator Johnson, who helped him sketch an idea that Kelly would refine right into a design Ames accepted. The plans had been handed off to San Diego’s Frank L. Hope & Associates to provide the working drawings.
When accomplished, the rigorously composed, traditionally impressed stone pavilion bore all of the hallmarks of Johnson and Kelly’s greater than half dozen collaborations. But when the Timken opened, solely Hope’s agency was credited. One among Hope’s architects, John R. Mock, later took credit score because the chief of the design. This remained the accepted story till final December, when Buck, a medical analysis entrepreneur and structure buff, found a long-ago submit by York about Mosher’s story. He couldn’t cease enthusiastic about it.
Architect Philip Johnson with Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis in entrance of New York’s Grand Central Terminal in 1977.
(Dave Pickoff / Related Press)
“Why would someone like Robert Mosher, at the end of his life, make this up?” Buck requested. “If he was telling the truth, this is one of the most important uncredited works of Midcentury architecture in California.”
Buck and York joined forces, combing via Kelly’s archives at Yale (with Yale pupil Macarena Fernandez Diaz) and thru the Timken’s personal information. Along with proof of copious correspondence between Ames, Kelly and Johnson, they discovered Kelly’s detailed architectural drawings of the museum, and a 1959 contract asking Kelly to organize elevations, plans and different design-related paperwork. Hope’s agency, in keeping with a separate contract, would “prepare working drawings.” Collectively the physique of proof appeared to verify a lot of Mosher’s story.
It additionally pointed to why Kelly (and doubtlessly Johnson) was neglected. In a single letter, Ames wrote that “due to local political cross currents, it was advisable that all plans be filed locally.” In different phrases, bringing in East Coast modernists like Kelly and Johnson risked a public outcry. “Ames wanted the best design he could get,” Buck says. “But he also wanted the museum built.”
The Timken positively feels acquainted to somebody who has visited a number of Johnson/Kelly collaborations: the bronze accents, the H-shaped pavilion, the glass partitions that will let you see straight via the constructing, and the pristine travertine — light-colored limestone that originated from the identical quarry in Tivoli, Italy, used for Johnson’s New York State Theater (renamed the David H. Koch Theater in 2008) at Lincoln Middle. All echo the minimalist precision and classical proportions of their museums throughout the nation. On the Timken, Kelly integrated downlighting to intensify the constructing’s travertine partitions, and engineered grids of soffits and louvers that wash the galleries in tender, ethereal gentle.
Keith York of Fashionable San Diego.
(Keith York)
“He was experimenting — making light itself architectural,” says York. This was a trademark of Kelly’s, notes Dietrich Neumann, professor of the historical past of contemporary structure and urbanism at Brown College and writer of “The Structure of Light: Richard Kelly and the Illumination of Modern Architecture.” “He emphasized materials in a very skillful way. His lighting creates spatial depth. You get a different idea of what the architecture consists of.” Neumann notes that Johnson preferred to exclaim: “Kelly is my guru. He’s the greatest lighting designer ever.”
Famous Buck: “There’s nothing in Frank Hope’s body of work that resembles this.” Hope’s agency is finest recognized for its designs of McGill Corridor at UC San Diego, the Union-Tribune Constructing in Mission Valley, and the all-concrete San Diego Stadium, later generally known as Qualcomm Stadium.
When Buck and York introduced their findings to the Timken’s management earlier this yr, the preliminary response was enthusiastic. However because the museum started its personal assessment, the tone grew extra cautious. Trustees revisited Buck and York’s analysis and carried out checks within the Timken’s archives. Govt director Megan Pogue later summarized their place in a letter to the researchers:
Stephen Buck on the Timken Museum of Artwork.
(Stephen Buck)
“Based on these findings, we reached the unfortunate conclusion that Mr. Johnson was not ultimately involved in the building’s design, although the specific architect or architects within Frank Hope & Associates responsible for the final design seem to remain unidentified. We continue to welcome and encourage further scholarly investigation into this question, particularly given that John Mock has long been credited as the architect — an attribution he personally confirmed in recent years.”
When requested later why the museum didn’t verify or deny Kelly’s connection, Pogue famous, “Everything in our files is that he was limited to the lighting.” When pressed on the analysis unearthed at Yale, she acknowledged, “we were so focused on Philip Johnson I don’t know that we did as deep a dive on this issue.”
“I can find no reason why they wouldn’t want to look through this research [at Yale] and come to their own conclusion,” responded Buck.
The inside of a gallery on the Timken Museum of Artwork in San Diego.
(Timken Museum of Artwork)
Behind the scenes, sensible issues loom. The Timken is making ready to launch an underground enlargement designed by Gensler, which is able to double its sq. footage and supply much-needed new exhibition, workplace and studying areas. It’s a course of that has taken seven years to navigate via the town’s (and Balboa Park’s) public course of. The adjoining San Diego Museum of Artwork is about to embark by itself enlargement, changing Mosher’s west wing with a design by Norman Foster.
“Any new attention, especially about the building’s authorship, could reignite old debates,” Pogue mentioned in an earlier interview. “We’re fascinated by this history, but we have to be careful about how it’s shared.” After consulting with the board, Pogue later famous that proof of a brand new architect, significantly somebody of Johnson’s stature, “could be really good for the museum.”
The museum’s nebulous, cautious positioning in some ways mirrors the politics that will have buried Kelly’s and Johnson’s involvement six a long time in the past. Within the early Sixties, Ames confronted fierce opposition from civic teams, who decried modernism as a risk to Balboa Park’s Spanish coronary heart. To get his venture accepted, he seems to have localized the credit score.
“It’s the same story, says York. “Silence as strategy. But silence also erases the people who made this building extraordinary.”
Neumann pointed to the lengthy historical past of architectural creators who’ve been neglected, whether or not it’s a agency proprietor taking credit score for his underlings’ work or a reputation being omitted to keep away from political crosswinds. “It’s a system driven by the old idea of the master architect … and the actual work is often done by others,” he says.
Neither Buck nor York desires to strip all credit score from Hope’s agency. “We think of it as a collaboration,” York says. “Together they made something greater than the sum of its parts.”
Whereas the pair are assured that their analysis has confirmed Kelly’s authorship, Johnson’s position stays a thriller.
“We know Johnson and Kelly were working together at exactly this time,” says Buck. “Whether or not his name appears on a drawing, it’s clear that he was advising.”
Till that proof emerges, the Timken stays an architectural whodunit.
“We’re always searching for this elusive drawing by Philip Johnson that’s gonna be a smoking gun,” says Buck. “But this wasn’t necessarily a formal thing. Sometimes that piece of paper doesn’t exist.”
