Voice of San Diego asked architects, urban planners, and design leaders for their thoughts and ideas on how the City of San Diego could repurpose Qualcomm Stadium's site. AIA San Diego Public Awareness Commissioner, Kevin Bussett, AIA, along with other AIA members, offered up their insight on how to shape the Mission Valley land into a meaningful space.
"Housing, Soccer, Housing and More Ideas for the Qualcomm Stadium Site" by Voice of San Diego
A new proposal for the Qualcomm Stadium site includes a $200 million stadium, a river park, student housing and more. It’s unclear whether San Diegans will get to weigh in with a public vote, but there’s no shortage of opinions about how this should play out. We asked local urban planners, architects and community members what they want to see happen to the site.
It’s difficult to justify a large investment to upgrade/renovate the existing stadium or build a new one without an NFL franchise. In that context, a new downsized stadium (for college football and soccer) and a new arena combined with an imaginative mixed-use development might be the drivers for a redevelopment effort. If the site remains a sports venue, adaptive reuse should be considered. This approach would repurpose the structure in part or as a whole to underpin new uses like housing, shopping or other commercial uses. The stadium remains structurally viable and is nationally recognized for its design (it received a National Honor Award for Design Excellence from the American Institute of Architects when it was first built.) However, if it is ultimately necessary to remove the structure, then we must consider the site’s highest and best use for Mission Valley and the people of San Diego. Many architects and visionary developers have proposed visions for a “Village at the Q” that mixes workforce housing, academic uses, commercial office, shopping and enhanced recreation opportunities for all of Mission Valley’s residents along an accessible and preserved San Diego river park. This new neighborhood would be walkable, well-connected to public transit via the existing high-capacity trolley station and enhanced connections to I-8 and I-15, and provide a great opportunity for needed growth. — Kevin Bussett, AIA, architect with Studio E Architects in San Diego and 2017 public awareness commissioner for the American Institute of Architects San Diego Chapter
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First off, Qualcomm Stadium is no dump. I know the stadium well. I’ve been in the press box, locker rooms and even on the field. Qualcomm Stadium is a masterfully designed landmark with many decades of useful service remaining. The modernist structure is made of solid concrete and was built to last. It opened in 1967 as a state-of-the-art sports venue and is clearly in need of upgrades, like new video screens, scoreboard, locker rooms, a sound system, restrooms, lighting and seats. That’s a long list, but it equates to less than one-third of the cost of a new stadium. The concrete shell of Qualcomm Stadium is solid and simply needs a good power-washing. The winner of a national design award, Qualcomm Stadium is one of San Diego County’s most recognized structures – alongside the Hotel Del Coronado and Balboa Park’s California Tower. The stadium should be treated with the respect it deserves and be rehabilitated rather than imploded and sent to the landfill. Small minds in our disposable culture only want the latest new thing. But Qualcomm Stadium is a classic work of functional architecture, not an outdated iPhone. — David Marshall, AIA, architect and president of Heritage Architecture & Planning in San Diego
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I think that the Mission Valley site is most useful as a major regional River Park combined with a new lower campus for SDSU. Logan Jenkins got it right in his recent U-T column. It is critical to respect the historical status of Qualcomm Stadium and leverage it to become a new asset through creative adaptive reuse. From a sustainable standpoint alone, it would be irresponsible to grind tons of perfectly good structural concrete into dust. The only real problem with the Q is geometry – it has too much seating capacity and is too wide. For the price of the stadium demo proposed by some, you could sink the field a little and add very desirable seats close to the sidelines. Remove the horrible NFL additions and open the end back up. The lower seats will work as a more intimate stadium, and you can get creative with the unneeded upper deck. And how about the obvious – build a student trailer park. It’s proven low-cost housing sited with the romance of an Italian hill town. A village of recycled, colorful, funky trailers, repurposed as dorms and relocated to the slope of the upper bleachers will beat a boring dorm building every time, both in desirability and cost. Elevators and bathrooms are already there, just add showers. Save a few seats between groups of trailers for seminars. After three decades of endless abuse, it’s not clear that San Diegans would allow another NFL team here, even if they were adult enough to pay there own way. But should that happen, the trailer housing can be removed and the Q would be NFL-ready again. — Rob Quigley, FAIA, architect and urban planner who lives in East Village
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I think that the city should engage in an international RFP. We call ourselves America’s Finest City, and we have the greatest opportunity to design our city striving toward this goal, so we should open our biggest urban and landscape opportunities to world-class thinking. Not to say that there aren’t very skilled, visionary designers and planners in this city, because there most certainly are, but San Diego wants to be a global city, we want to be a world destination and so we should allow ourselves the opportunity to be flooded with far-reaching ideas. We should demand a development solution that promotes the very best urban planning concepts from around the globe, and to put them into practice here in San Diego. — Pauly De Bartolo, Assoc. AIA, principal at DBRDS architecture studio
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