2025 Posthumous Legacy Award
Kay Kaiser, longtime architecture critic for the San Diego Union-Tribune, focused her efforts to elevate the discussion of architecture on the lofty goal of helping San Diego find its architectural identity during a time when seemingly all of San Diego was trying to understand and live up to the city’s moniker of “America’s Finest City.” During Kay’s tenure debates over the construction of the Convention Center were commonplace, Post-Modernism was waning while Deconstructivism was emerging, and our own AIA chapter pondered whether we were “Brats” or “Debutantes.”
Kay’s use of pithy and straightforward comments was meant to help local architects up their game. Her invective and often witty analogies encouraged, cajoled and often chided, but rarely mocked or ridiculed the designers of the 1980s and 1990s who were in a position to change this city.
Locally famous for turning a phrase, Kay once observed:
Architecture’s last five years have produced walls and roofs that have been so
unnaturally manipulated that they bring to mind pirouetting poodles in a circus dog act.
On a kinder note, she penned an eloquent description of the roof of James Alcorn’s First Church of the Nazarene in Pasadena, calling it:
A geometric dance of interlocking timbers, trusses and roof-mounted stained glass.
Her words are as wise today as they were when she wrote:
While it is important to think big, this race for world-class status can make us miss the details we need to be happy while wandering through the high spine of our city. If we can take the time to choose each new piece of San Diego and make sure it fits, in not too long a time other people will call us world-class. That’s the way it should be. Start thinking what you want.
This award is a tribute to Kay’s commentaries and critiques, which raised our collective consciousness towards creating a special identity for San Diego and making our buildings, our surroundings, our community and our world a better place in which to live. It is more than appropriate that Kay Kaiser receives this posthumous AIA San Diego Legacy Award.
