Architect who ‘saved’ Coronado bridge dies

Robert Mosher, the last of San Diego’s first generation of post-war modern architects, put the blue and graceful curve in the San Diego-Coronado Bridge.

He took over the master planning of UC San Diego’s second college and softened the brutalist concrete design with some human-scale spaces.

And his design for a house in Point Loma got him a two-year gig at a New York design magazine when he spent two weeks interviewing his hero Frank Lloyd Wright.

Mosher died at the age of 94 Sunday at his apartment in La Jolla, but leaves behind decades of rethinking San Diego design.

“His view of modernism was much more about the quality of the human spirit,” said Larry Hoeksema, principal and former president of Architects Mosher Drew, the firm Mosher founded with his business partner Roy Drew in San Diego in 1948. “The human element and how people interact and move through and around (a building) was something they were very much concerned about.”

The iconic San Diego Bay bridge that opened in 1969 represents Mosher’s most visible imprint on the local architectural landscape. But as he told an interviewer six years ago, he didn’t want it built because he feared it would forever mar the cityscape as another bridge had done in New York Harbor.

He also didn’t like the red color favored by state transportation planners.

Hired as the design consultant, Mosher fought to save the budget for a gracefully curving design, necessitated by the need to let Navy ships pass unimpeded below. He also campaigned for blue not red, even though that requires a never-ending paint job.

“I saved the bridge, literally,” Mosher said.

At UCSD, Mosher became the supervising architect for Muir College in the 1960s when the original designer was fired.

“I was instructed to make fresh start,” he said later.

The high-rise buildings were still built of poured-in-lace concrete but Mosher saw to it that landscaped spaces and gathering areas were inserted throughout the campus. He designed two of the buildings and assigned the rest to other firms. The complex is now considered a prime example of local mid-century modern architecture.

The Frank Lloyd Wright encounter came after Mosher’s design for a home for Herbert and Minerva Kunzel in Point Loma, featured in Sunset Magazine, came to the attention of the editor of House Beautiful in New York City.

The editor, Elizabeth Gordon, invited Mosher back for a two-year sabbatical as architectural editor and among his assignments was a two-part retrospective on the legendary designer of the Guggenheim Museum, innovative residences in the Prairie-style and even a never-built mile-high skyscraper.

“He traveled the world, came back to San Diego and joined back up with Roy,” said Keith York, who maintains the Modern San Diego website and conducted public interviews of Mosher in the last 10 years.

Mosher was born Sept. 27, 1920, in Greeley, Colo., to Jack and Alice Mosher. The family moved to Los Angeles and first visited San Diego in 1925. His brother Larry, a Copley Press correspondent, was born in 1929.

According to Mosher’s wife, Joany, Robert first learned about architecture at the age of 9 from a neighbor involved in Pasadena development. He was educated at the Art Center School in Los Angeles, the University of Southern California and the University of Washington and served briefly in the Army during World War II before he was discharged because of asthma problems.

He and Drew met when they joined a new firm opened in Los Angeles as draftsmen and moved to San Diego, where Mosher had convinced his father to buy the Green Dragon Colony buildings on Prospect Street in 1944 for $50,000. That property would cause Mosher untold grief decades later.

San Diego in the late-1940s was on the cusp of a second growth spurt, following the wartime boom years.

“We got more work and just chugged away at it,” Mosher recalled in 1988.

He designed an early version of UCSD’s La Jolla Playhouse and cofounded the La Jolla Town Council and La Jollans Inc.

His commissions included the Golden Door spa near Escondido -- a lush, getaway that opened in 1958. Its design was inspired by a field trip Mosher took with developer Deborah Szekely to Japan to gather ideas from 16th and 17th century ryokans, the traditional inns where the serene atmosphere calms visitors.

He also dipped into historical architecture with his 1965 design for the west wing of the San Diego Museum of Art, where the columns are a modern takeoff on the Spanish Colonial revival architecture used for Balboa Park’s 1915 Panama-California Exposition.

A similarly inspired approach was taken at San Diego State University’s Aztec Center, recently replaced by a much bigger student union.

When the La Museum of Art, now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, wanted to expand, Mosher oversaw additions to the original building that was designed by Irving Gill as a home for Ellen Browning Scripps.

In the 1980s Mosher battled preservationists over hotel plans for the Green Dragon Colony complex, a one-time vacation getaway for early 20th century artists and writers that he had remodeled years before. Four original cottages were eventually demolished with the consent of the California Coastal Commission. Offices, shops and restaurants operate in the complex today.

Other Mosher projects include the NBC Building next to Horton Plaza shopping center, numerous private homes, banks, churches and a home office for Theodor “Dr. Seuss” Geisel.

At the office, firm partner Hoeksema, who joined in 1979, said Mosher said was “very sensitive but knew exactly what he wanted.”

“One of the things that impressed me about him was the longstanding relationships he maintained with his clients,” Hoeksema said. “He maintained those friendships for the most part.”

In competition with other firms, Mosher would join rivals at the San Diego Yacht Club and treat each other to dinner and gin martinis to celebrate a win or bemoan a loss. He and Drew, who died in 2004, owned a boat together named “Friendship.”

Hobbies included photography and wood working and he enjoyed going to concerts, ballets, plays and movies, but not the opera. “His mother was a singer and he’d heard enough,” Joany Mosher said. During his courtship, he cooked up a caviar omelette that apparently won her over.

Mosher used to join other buddies -- all named Bob -- at weekly lunches at the UCSD Faculty Club, which he designed. That’s where a remembrance ice cream social is planned on what would have been his 95th birthday Sept. 27.

Mosher is survived by his wife Joany; a son Stephen of Eugene, Ore., and a daughter Karen of Las Vegas, from two previous marriages; a granddaughter; and a brother Larry of Crested Butte, Colo.

The family suggests donations to the UCSD Cancer Center and the Museum of Photographic Arts.