A Tribute to Architect Homer Delawie

By Ann Jarmusch

My favorite memory of Homer Delawie is of him standing quietly in the living room of one of his early houses in Point Loma. Perched on a hillside in a circuitous neighborhood, the modernist house was hard to get to and thrilling to be in because it seemed to thrust its glass-walled rooms into space over steep terrain.

The fact that a young couple had recently bought the house and were restoring it tickled the ageless architect and gentleman, then in his seventies, and he was there to help show it off during a Save Our Heritage Organisation Modernism Home Tour. He wasn’t grandstanding or holding forth as a master architect rediscovered by a new generation. He was merely enjoying being in the house again with others who appreciated its simple yet stunning design.

Homer T. Delawie, one of San Diego’s most talented and civic-minded architects, died at age 81 on June 26 at San Diego Hospice, a building designed by his firm, now known as Architects Delawie Wilkes Rodrigues Barker. He was a leader in architecture, city planning and the art of living, who never lost sight of the needs of others.

Delawie designed both intimate houses with surprising views and crowd-friendly attractions, such as the penguin and shark exhibits at SeaWorld. He and his firm created familiar landmarks: the MTS trolley building and clock tower downtown, Coronado Ferry Landing and a Balboa Park plaza with a fountain, where his memorial service was held next to Park Boulevard on July 20.

Delawie especially relished sharing the houses he designed, including three for his own family in Mission Hills and Point Loma. His residential clients were among his biggest fans. He once drove me around Mission Hills and University Heights in his smooth Jaguar sedan to visit three homes from the 1960s. “Your design is getting better all the time,” is how one homeowner of 38 years greeted him.

“I really feel like I’m living outdoors,” said another, whose glassy, canyon-hugging home weaves around gardens.

A Santa Barbara native, Delawie became the partner of Lloyd Ruocco, San Diego’s pioneering modernist architect, in 1958, then opened his own office in 1961. His residences celebrate Southern California’s ideal weather, penchant for casual indoor-outdoor living and astonishing natural beauty. “The simpler the house is the more it accents the landscape and terrain,” he told me in 1998. Not every architect seeks such a low profile.

The first house Delawie designed was so simple he called it the “boxcar.” Only 17 feet wide and built on a steep, narrow lot in Mission Hills, the wood-and-glass house (which has been significantly altered) looked deceptively forbidding from the street. But inside, focused views brought the outdoors into flowing spaces, an atrium garden was open to the sky and glass doors slid open to erase the distinction between indoors and out. This Delawie family house, built in 1958, earned the architect his first of many design awards and was featured on the cover of Perfect Home magazine.

Rob Wellington Quigley, as a young man just starting out in architecture, saw several of Delawie’s early modernist houses published in The Los Angeles Times’ Home magazine. “He was the face of San Diego,” recalled Quigley, who considers Delawie’s designs “California modernism at its best. There was a simplicity and directness” to the houses “floating amid eucalyptus trees.” Consequently, when Quigley moved to San Diego, the first place he looked for work was Delawie’s office, but the firm wasn’t hiring at the time.

For decades, Robert Mosher, formerly a partner in Mosher Drew Architects, competed with his friend Delawie for major cultural, commercial, recreational and academic commissions throughout San Diego County. “He was totally honorable and forthright in all respects,” Mosher said of his congenial rival. “As a designer, he was absolutely marvelous — he lived it, he believed it, he fought for it. As a personal friend, there was none better.”

Serving for many years on the city’s Planning Commission, Historical Resources Board and Park and Recreation Board, Delawie “really set a standard for civic involvement,” Quigley said. Delawie’s last public advocacy may have occurred last fall, when he urged the San Diego City Council not to erode the Mills Act, which offers preservation incentives to owners of historic properties. His voice was weak but his opinion carried weight, and he and other preservationists prevailed.

So far, several houses Delawie designed have been added to the city’s list of historic landmarks. He received lifetime achievement awards from the California Council of the American Institute of Architects (1997) and Save Our Heritage Organisation (2002). But his life in design was far from over.

“About three years ago, Homer told me he had been working on some furniture designs and asked if I’d like to see and possibly consign one,” recalled David Skelley, owner of the Boomerang for Modern store in Little Italy. “I said, ‘Of course. If it’s got a vibe like your architecture — we’re in!’ His approach was definitely architectural and the storage unit, dubbed The Delawie Solution, was modular and reconfigurable. He loved to come in and watch people’s reaction to it, then engage them in conversation … It thrilled him to have once again created something that could be used and appreciated.”

With Mosher, he was a member of a committee of local architects and others who met over several years to hammer out a definition of modernism and to identify important modernist structures in San Diego so that they may be preserved. Through the San Diego Architectural Foundation, this committee will soon release “Modernist Architecture in San Diego,” a publication which Mosher said Delawie read during his final weeks.

Once a month or so in recent years, when Delawie and Mosher had lunch or went sailing, they’d comment on their good fortune. “My god, aren’t we lucky to have lived in this era and to have been able to do our work and feel, really feel things, not just intellectualize” is how Mosher put it.

And aren’t we all lucky to have had the visionary, honorable and generous-spirited Homer Delawie among us.

Ann Jarmusch is the former architecture critic for The San Diego Union-Tribune. She writes about art, architecture and historic preservation for local and national publications. She can be reached at [email protected].