2nd STREET ARTS DISTRICT
San Diego, CA
The Second Street Arts District master plan acknowledges the visual complexity and jarring juxtapositions that make cities exciting. The project's overall goal was to create a place fundamentally grounded in an experience of the real. Furthermore, the scheme was offered as a critique of the "themeing" of downtowns. The plan is suggestive, rather than prescriptive, establishing a formal framework that invites improvisation and invention.
Forming the spine of the plan, Second Street is developed as a stage. The public right-of-way and the buildings enfronting it acts as platforms for activity and intervention.
Specific used include: New and recycled lofts, restaurants, galleries and studio space, and "alternative" retail center that includes an outdoor cinema, a graduate art department facility for a local university, and a temporary home for a proposed Institute of Contemporary Art.
In collaboration with Spurlock Poirier Landscape Architects
