San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
La Jolla architect still learning, creating at 90
Eugene Ray, the influential founder of San Diego State University’s former environmental design program, links his ‘radiant’ creative spark to a boyhood encounter with a UFO
Since he began his career in the 1950s, only a handful of architect Eugene Ray’s designs have been built. Yet his impact is significant. As founder and head of San Diego State University’s environmental design program from 1969 to 1996, he mentored students who designed dozens of San Diego buildings.
“He was an extremely inspirational person for me as a young student, because he thought and taught differently,” said San Diego architect Frank Wolden.
RNT Architecture Principal Kotaro Nakamura also praised Ray’s influence, saying: “When I was exposed to Eugene’s thinking, it opened my eyes that the built environment is much more than floors, walls and roofs.”
Chikako Terada, Nakamura’s partner at RNT, said she learned from Ray the “vibrational” power of spaces to provoke “wow!” sensations that words can’t capture.
While his students have realized countless buildings, the prime example of Ray’s own architecture is the hillside La Jolla home, also known as Silver Ship, that he designed and built of concrete and wood with his students in the late 1970s. Silver Ship is a “stretched dome,” supported by a cross-hatch vault of wood beams in a pattern that resembles the diamond pattern on a rattlesnake. He took the concept from “lamella roofs” designed by early 20thcentury German engineer Friedrich Zollinger, and the idea was also used at the Houston Astrodome and New Orleans Superdome.
With Ray’s extensive archive being processed at SDSU’S library, and with his
recent 90th birthday, I felt compelled to get in touch. It’s only been 33 years since I profiled him for the San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times. I figured we would talk for a couple of hours, I’d interview a few others, and I’d have a new story. Instead the “interview” morphed into a sprawling dialog via Facebook, Facebook Messenger, phone and in person. On the day of my deadline alone, he posted two dozen times, a bit more than your average 90-year-old.
Ray sold Silver Ship years ago following the death of his first wife, Marian, and a subsequent remodel added a metal roof and covered beautiful handbent redwood siding with corrugated metal. Undoubtedly it’s now more weatherproof, but to Ray, it’s beyond recognition.
Today he lives with second wife, Marianne, at Chateau La Jolla, a seaside retirement community. It’s across the street from the redwood cottages where he lived as a young architect, blocks from the Red Roost and Red Rest cottages he helped preserve back in the day. He opposed development of the cottages land through his activism and an extensive report he prepared for the La Jolla Historical Society. As a result of his stance, he says a bloody dagger was left in his mailbox and SDSU was pressured to fire him. Meanwhile, his efforts paid off over the long haul. The cottages are now slated for rehab as part of a new development.
A visit to his home
When I arrive for lunch at Chateau La Jolla, the Rays have just returned from an oceanfront stroll and they greet me in front of the building. Gravity and time have had an impact, but he is nattily attired in a sweater and slacks — and energized.
“This building is nothing to write home about,” he tells me at our courtyard table. But the staff is friendly, the food is good and the coastal location is gorgeous. And there’s this: “I have never seen hot water come on as fast as it does here! That was the first thing I noticed. And the second is levered door handles.”
A New York hipster’s loft has nothing on his spacious, sunny apartment. The most startling evidence of Ray’s vast oeuvre is thousands of drawing/collages he has assembled over the decades. They combine his elaborate designs with images from architectural, personal and historical sources, with themes highlighted in distinctive rub-on lettering that wraps curved corners. He says that sci-fi author Ray Bradbury (who wrote a treatise on architecture and consulted with Horton Plaza architect Jon Jerde) once proposed a film incorporating these graphics.
As a special exhibit for one (me), he has lined the apartment with books, artifacts, photos and dozens of his collages. Even closets and bathrooms serve as display spaces. Artifacts cover almost every available surface. On a living room table are international design journals such as Domus and A+U that featured his work. In his office are hundreds of books, a fraction of the 10,000 he once owned.
His vast archive at SDSU and at home is managed by his former student and longtime friend David Fobes, a San Diego artist and furniture designer who taught at SDSU and works closely with Ray. Thanks to Fobes, many videos of Ray’s lectures from the past 50 years can be found online. Fobes also co-curated a 2019 “Radiant Architecture” exhibit in San Diego devoted to Ray, with models and wall-size panels showcasing projects, mostly unbuilt, from Tanzania and Tehran, to California, Hong Kong and Bohol Island in the Philippines.
When Ray explains “radiant architecture” he speaks of biomorphic structures, biotronic energy and synergetic environments. Sources of inspiration run from Nikola Tesla (“If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration”) to Bugatti sports cars, and from nature to extraterrestrial life. Architects R. Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff and Goff ’s University of Oklahoma colleague Herb Greene — whose buildings were featured in the 1940s Life magazines that Ray’s father brought home — are also in the mix.
Ray admires the radical designs of his peers at Archigram in London as well as the work of outsider architect Paulo Soleri, who founded the Arcosanti experimental community in Arizona. He is fascinated with Imhotep, who designed ancient pyramids in Egypt, and with native American tipi dwellings — durable conical fabric structures not unlike the ones designed by Ray and his students. Years ago, he took a class to the Yucatan to study Mayan architecture.
According to a manifesto Ray prepared for a French government symposium on energy in 1985, radiant architecture “explores relationships between architecture and energy” and posits that “architecture can be organized to magnify and direct natural energy systems for human well-being.” Solar power is just part of the concept. Cones, domes and spheres transmit “bioenergy” to people inside them, Ray says. Such forms are beyond the architectural mainstream, which is one reason most of his designs were never built. Cubes, squares and rectangles are more familiar and marketable.
Materials and methods he favors also fall outside the mainstream. Years ago he designed a La Mesa home featuring domes of ferrocement — a mortar that is spread over steel armatures to create lightweight, durable structures. In spite of a phone-booksize submittal with engineering specs calculated on the University of California San Diego’s supercomputer, the city of La Mesa would not approve the building because it did not fit within existing codes.
One of Ray’s collages depicts an elongated structure that resembles the ribbed body of a insect, anchored by volumes resembling plant or animal forms. “If the earth was going to grow buildings they would not be boxes.”
Extraterrestrial encounter
In fact, Ray’s life can’t be neatly boxed. It is well documented that he attributes his relentless creative spark to a boyhood encounter with a flying saucer, but he strikes me as much more than fanatic for space aliens.
“At 15, I saw a UFO over our house in Baton Rouge, a cylindrical craft, cigar shaped. A bunch of us were flying huge kites, made by my dad. We would fly them up out of site. We were lying there watching our kites, and all of a sudden this craft flew slowly overhead from west to east. And to this day I have the feeling they were watching us. Certainly my work has cosmic consciousness because of that.”
Alchemy is one of Ray’s favorite words. It dates from ancient times and elixirs prepared by shaman, and evolved over centuries to encompass science, technology, metaphysics, theology and philosophy. His interest in extraterrestrial life is creative, personal and scientific, and scientists are starting to agree it’s likely we are not alone.
Thanks to Elon Musk, Mars and other planets don’t seem so far away. Ray is an avid follower of Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb, who makes a strong case for life beyond our solar system. With this month’s Chinese surveillance balloon and other mysterious highflying objects, Ray’s astronomical beliefs sound more practical. Loeb will give an online lecture for the “Contact in the Desert” symposium in June in Indian Wells, and Ray hopes the talk from a scholarly source will mark a “crack in the wall” between believers and skeptics.
Ray studied architecture and taught at Louisiana State University and Tulane, where he earned his master’s degree. The region had a strong impact due to its diverse culture and his family ties. He recalls the early post-and-beam houses he designed there, along with a small jazz venue in New Orleans’ French Quarter. There was also a plantation owned by distant relatives that featured a domed structure.
In the late 1960s, San Diego architect Lloyd Ruocco and his wife, Ilse, an artist and textile designer who taught at SDSU, recruited Ray to launch an architecture program within the art department. Ray branded it “environmental design” to reflect a broad mission incorporating courses in art, sculpture, photography, ecology and engineering.
The program embodied the rebellious spirit of the times. He invited radical architects to lecture, such as Goff, L.A. modernist John Lautner, Archigram and Soleri. Ray says some lectures were boycotted by some San Diego architects, but he was eventually invited by Archigram’s Peter Cook to lecture twice at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
Computer-aided design (CAD) was part of Ray’s curriculum long before CAD software became standard. He and his students experimented with high-strength ceramic and glass to make lightweight affordable structures. He recalls how his students bested students from UC Los Angeles, the University of Southern California, UC Berkeley and Cal Poly in a competition. Their “biomorphic tensile structure” withstood an overnight windstorm, while a concrete block structure by another team collapsed.
Despite its success in launching important San Diego careers, the SDSU program created by Ray was eliminated shortly after his retirement in 1996. He came down with malaria during a visit to Brazil and says that when he returned, he could no longer continue teaching all seven of the department’s environmental design courses. Without Ray, support evaporated.
Looking ahead
Since retirement, Ray has devoted much of his time to genealogy. He traces his lineage to the medieval Knights Templar, whose fortresses, he says, were modern in their design. Their leader Bernard of Clairvaux was, according to Ray, “the most admired person in France in the Middle Ages.” Also way back when, in Europe, he says the Shroud of Turin was owned by distant ancestors.
Ray and his wife, Marianne, made a pilgrimage to the Château du Clos Lucé in France, where Leonardo da Vinci, another of his heroes, spent his final years as court artist and architect to King Francis I, and where models of da Vinci’s inventions are on display. Ray says that one of his ancestors was an associate of the king’s and brought da Vinci to Clos Lucé.
Plans are now under way for a new architectural degree program at SDSU to open within three years. San Diego desperately needs it.
UC San Diego launched a promising architectural school in the 1990s, but it was short-lived. The University of San Diego offers an architecture major within its arts and sciences department, but not a full degree. The Newschool of Architecture is struggling with financial problems and declining enrollment. Woodbury University is closing its San Diego campus, although faculty member Megan Groth says there are plans for a nonprofit successor.
Architect James Brown of SDSU’S interior architecture faculty says the new architecture program may not have the radical bent of Ray’s, but Brown hopes it will have the same sort of broad-reaching free spirit. Meanwhile, Nakamura had worked with Ray to design a Radiant Architecture Museum for SDSU, to honor Ray’s contributions. That project is in limbo, but the stunning building would make a suitable beacon for a new architecture program, and Ray deserves it.
Near the end of a life devoted to converting skeptics, Ray is optimistic about his legacy.
“You know something, my legacy is as strong now as it’s ever been,” he told me. “I have a huge international reputation. The material that’s been published around the world, lectures and exhibitions in 12 countries, has given me a huge audience. When I die I believe my legacy is going to expand considerably.”
Sutro writes about architecture and design. He is the author of the guidebook “San Diego Architecture” as well as “University of California San Diego: An Architectural Guide.” He wrote a column about architecture for the San Diego edition of the Los Angeles Times back in the day and has also covered architecture for a variety of design publications.