In the popular imagination, Orange County has long been associated with suburbia run rampant. But here’s what has been lost: the knowledge that it has been a place of great architectural innovation, and an incubator for new ideas.

Consisting of primarily agricultural land before 1950, the building of major highways and the founding of UC Irvine created a construction boom the likes of which California had never seen. Though it was conceived and implemented by visionary architects, much of the subsequent work was carried on by developers, watering down and homogenizing many of the original ideas.

The Tustin Preservation Conservancy and the American Institute of Architects OC recently invited inspiration back with a design competition for Tustin’s Old Town.

As Mark Wilcken, one of the founding members, says, “The competition was a thought experiment to imagine what the future might look like.”

The conservancy was started more than 20 years ago by a group of local citizens advocating for the protection and preservation of the town’s architectural history. More recently they’d become concerned with the large number of empty lots in Tustin’s Old Town and, interestingly enough, the thoughtful redesign of infill, or in-between land, is a primary way to bring architectural individuality back to a town.

According to Wilcken, whether or not the designs were built was beside the point. Its mission was simple: Expand the possibilities. Dream a little. Give us your vision, your imagination, your ideas.

The contest started with land, specifically a nondescript L-shaped empty lot on the corner of Tustin’s El Camino Real and Main. After getting permission from the owner, the conservancy put out the word to regional architects, and offered a modest $1,000 prize. There were no requirements for the design, not even parking. Just come up with something cool.

Old Town Tustin as compared to, say, Old Towne Orange, is completely distinct. As Jeff Gill, executive director of AIAOC says, “For Orange the issue has to do with proximity. Old Towne Orange has a major thoroughfare connecting two freeways – Chapman Avenue – as well as a major road coming from Santa Ana – Grand, which turns into Glassell. And, a large, very well-known university, Chapman. The circular road surrounded by antique stores and restaurants also is a unique attraction and destination drawing people from all over Southern California. Tustin offers a quainter small-town atmosphere where you get the feeling everyone knows each other. Tustin is very neighborly.”

It’s that sense of community that binds the place, yet another reason to update Old Town. As Winston Churchill said, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Colin Ellard, who studies the psychological impact of design at the University of Waterloo, has found that something as simple as a complex building

façade can elevate mood. So too with curved rooms and objects arranged to bring people physically closer, such as benches in a park. This is yet another reason thoughtful redesign can not only invigorate a downtown but improve people’s well-being and lives.

With the contest, both the Tustin conservancy and AIAOC ended up being impressed. Wilcken even admits to being wowed by the response: 45 entries and 14 that ended up in the competition. “I was shocked,” he says.

What struck him most was the level of professionalism and dedication that generated so many well-conceived ideas for a comparatively tiny design competition. It was also immediately obvious that the top entries offered radically different alternatives for the approximately 20,000 square feet of space.

The winner was Wilson Deomampo from Wilson D Design International, who focused on connecting Old Town’s past to its future. Inspired by the town’s Victorian architecture, his design featured a walkable mixed-use space anchored by a fanciful brick turret and fountain. The architecture managed to refer to the past while staying curiously modern. Was it the curved windows in the presentation? The glass bridge? It looked like a fun place to walk and eat ice cream and meet your best friend for coffee, the kind of OC town center that has been conceptually lost in the onslaught of high-end specialty malls.

Peter Chang from Gradient Real Estate Group and Rodolfo Mora from TCA Architects won second place. They proposed something called Destination Nodes, or a collaborative evolution of the entire town. The idea was that private owners and developers could joint venture with the city, linking vacant lots around town into a web of venues offering a mix of art, dining, music, residential and open space.

A Judge’s Choice was given to another notable entry, a striking red-tiled music theater by Ivan Henson and Ricardo Molina of Ewing Cole. Both whimsical and futuristic, it featured a subterranean entrance with dangling white lights like Christmas icicles, the effect recalling Cesar Pelli’s iconic Red Building at the Pacific Design Center in L.A.

A Judge’s Choice was given to another notable entry, a striking red-tiled music theater by Ivan Henson and Ricardo Molina of Ewing Cole. (rendering courtesy of the architect)

The outdoor space surrounding the music theater by Ivan Henson and Ricardo Molina of Ewing Cole, gives the neighborhood a park-like atmosphere. (rendering courtesy of the architect)

Sound The gallery will resume in seconds

The red-tiled music theater includes an interactive outdoor space for community engagement. (rendering by Ivan Henson and Ricardo Molina of Ewing Cole)



Additional presentations included a block of sleekly designed residential space, and others incorporated food halls and trucks, outdoor stages, boutique hotels and even hanging gardens. What unified them all was pedestrian engagement, space for people to walk and talk and just be together and hang out. Faced with sprawl the of California, of suburbia, this was a vision of engagement, of enjoying a community instead of just going to the market and the bank and the post office and then hurrying back to your house.

According to Gill, one of his goals with the contest was to avoid putting the lot owner in a corner and making him feel as if these developments had to be built. Instead he wanted the entries to inspire new possibilities, and he felt especially good about connecting AIAOC members with the community because, to him, architects are a driving force to creatively problem-solve better ways to live, work and play.

Orange County is known across the country as the center of residential design because of its planned communities.” Many were created for people on the run from the traffic and congestion of L.A. “This was the center of new creative ideas,” he says. “We’re going back a few years now. (The innovations) came out of here, and then spiraled out… today you can see designs in China that mimic 100 percent of an Orange County community.”

While it’s amazing to think of OC teleported across the globe, Gill also emphasized the revolutionary residential design concepts that started here. In addition to the Victorian and art deco buildings often focused on for preservation, OC’s modern architectural signature began with William Pereira, the architect who designed UC Irvine in the ’50s and ’60s. Designing forward-looking campus buildings with light sculptural forms, his priority was diverse housing types, neighborhood villages in walking distance, and the integration of nature, of green. In addition to countless California landmarks such as LAX, the TransAmerica building and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, he went on to design the city of Irvine. With the help of talents like Frank Gehry, who also was one of the main architects of South Coast Plaza, the original structures became a remarkable collection of mid-century modern buildings, many of whose significance is often lost in the sea of Mediterranean stucco we have such a love/ hate relationship with now.

If you ask Gill, he thinks it’s unfortunate that developers instead of architects were subsequently allowed to take on the role of designing. “You’ll see a lot of those tans and creams. Very safe. We are fortunate, though, that we have some good contemporary residential architects … and also a heritage of good architecture.”

Gill says that countywide, “we’ve had some ’60s, ’70s office buildings come down and residentials get built. It’s starting to change a little bit to try and get people off the roads. Maybe they can bike to work. Maybe they can walk where some of these new areas are coming in.”

OC’s population has tripled in the last 60 years. In response, people are being asked to think greener and smaller. According to Martha Thorne, dean of the IE School of Architecture and Design and executive director of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the great challenge of architecture has to do with its capacity to create denser metropolises that have high urban quality and offer residents a better quality of life. This concern extends to suburbia too. Ultimately what it all comes down to is what is worth keeping, what is worth updating, and how can smart design make it so.

“Tustin doesn’t have many historic buildings left, so these days we’re concerned with almost all of them,” Wilcken says. “Tustin Garage isn’t an architectural marvel, but it has historic meaning for the city, and that’s why it’s significant that it wasn’t demolished but adaptively reused into a restaurant.”

Beyond the obvious houses worth preserving – the Victorian Stevens House, the Bowman Craftsman, the Queen Anne Vance, and the low-slung Cliff May neighborhoods in the hills – there’s the past laid out in Old Town. Constructed in 1885, the very first doctor’s office still exists, as well as the neo-classic revival Artz Building, the Cox’s Market originally built in 1925, and even more historic sites mixed in with not-so-fabulous development.

And then there’s also the empty lot of the competition itself, now filled with possibility. A roomy L with bare patches of earth and springy grass, now it’s not hard to see a plaza with a tinkling fountain, a theater with streams of people heading in for a show, a spoken word act on an outdoor stage, as well as bustling galleries, cafes and restaurants. One can even imagine the sound of people laughing and chattering, of little kids playing tag, of people connecting and relating and experiencing the place where they live. And all of it was thanks to one local neighborhood contest and the inspiration of good design. ■