San Diego Athletic Club Building

San Diego Athletic Club Building
  1. About the San Diego Athletic Club Building in San Diego
    1. Building Catalogations
  2. Architect and team
  3. Architectural style
  4. Spaces and uses
  5. Structure and materials

The San Diego Athletic Club Building is an Art-deco skyscraper designed between 1924 and 1927 by William H. Wheeler, and built between 1927 and 1928, for a reported $850 thousand dollars, in San Diego, CA.

San Diego Athletic Club Building is not the only name you might know this building by though. It is common for companies to want to attach their names to iconic buildings when they move in, or for the general public to come up with nicknames, and this one is no exception. The San Diego Athletic Club Building is also known, or has been known as, HBJ Building, or World Trade Center San Diego Building.

Its precise street address is 1250 Sixth Avenue, San Diego, CA. You can also find it on the map here.

The San Diego Athletic Club Building is a structure of significant importance both for the city of San Diego and the United States as a nation. The building embodies the distinctive characteristic features of the time in which it was built and the Art Deco style. Because of that, the San Diego Athletic Club Building was officially included in the National Register of Historic Places on April 3rd 2013.

The building has been restored 3 times over the years to ensure its conservation and adaptation to the pass of time. The main restoration works happened in 1965, 1994 and 2012.

Building's timeline

Design begins
1924
100
Construction begins
1927
97
Construction completed
1928
96
a
Restoration
1965
59
b
Restoration
1994
30
c
Restoration
2012
12
Added to the NRHP
2013
11
years ago
2024
  1. 1965 - The building was converted to offices for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
  2. 1994 - The City of San Diego and the Port of San Diego made arrangements with the World Trade Centers Association to establish a San Diego center located in the Athletic Club building.
  3. 2012 - The Turner Construction Company restored the building to its original state and turned it into a homeless shelter.

Architect and team

William H. Wheeler was the architecture firm in charge of the architectural design.

But that's not all, there was also a whole team of architects involved, which included: Ilton E. Loveless, and Frank W.Stevenson.

That being said, architecture is a complex discipline involving many professionals from different fields, without whom this building would have not been possible. We will surely be leaving out a lot of names here, but here is a list of the people we do know also played their part in making the San Diego Athletic Club Building a reality:

  • Jarboe Construction Company as the Main Contractor
  • Katherine June Stafford as the collaborating Artist

Architectural Style

The San Diego Athletic Club Building can be categorized as an Art-deco building.

The Art Deco movement flourished during the 1920s and 1930s, with many historians marking the outbreak of World War II as its final decline. Even though a couple of decades might not seem as much, the Art Deco movement had a great impact on architecture, and it's widely represented in many American cities due to the development boom that happened during that time.

Art Deco marked the abandonment of traditional historicism and the embracement of modern living and the age of the machine. In architecture, that meant leaving behind the ornaments of Beux-Arts and Neo-Gothic buildings and instead favoring simplicity and visual impact through geometric shapes, clean lines, and symmetrical designs. Ornaments were still an important part of the design, but they became bold and lavish, and were often inspired by ancient cultures or industrial imagery, instead of nature.

The San Diego Athletic Club Building was designed in 1924. These were the early days of the Art Deco movement, when the style hadn't yet reached its maturity, and there fore it is more likely to to still have traces of the Classical or Gothic Revival periods which preceded Art-Deco.

William H. Wheeler took a risk by designing a building that was ahead of its time, and which other architects sure took inspiration from as the Art Deco movement evolved.

Spaces & Uses

It has a total of 14 floors, 12 above ground and 2 basements, served by 4 elevators.

When it opened its doors to the public in 1928, the San Diego Athletic Club Building was primarily used as Sports space. That however, is no longer the case, and today it mainly provides Residential space, with other complementary uses such as medical space.

About the residences

The San Diego Athletic Club Building has a total of 223 residential units throughout its 12 floors.

Materials & Structure

The San Diego Athletic Club Building uses a frame structure made of concrete columns and beams.

A frame structure uses a combination of beams and columns to sustain the building's weight. The walls in this case are non-load bearing, which allows for more flexibility when distributing the interior spaces.

From an aesthetic point of view, the facade features a poured-in-place concrete coating painted in a light gray tone. The decorative features like friezes, balconies, spandrels and horizontal bands are painted a darker shade.

The building consists of a central tower bay, where the main entrance is located, and two adjacent ones of equal size in a ziggurat-shaped structure. A balcony supported by carved corbels adorns the central facade.

An ornamental border hugs the building at the end of the broader four-story base. Starting from the fifth floor, the tower narrows, with a further setback at the eighth level. The ornamental border is repeated on the eighth floor and on the crown of the tower.

The roof is flat with parapets topped with decorative elements.

Sources

  • npgallery.nps.gov