CityScape: Exchange Pavilion in Balboa Park Bonds San Diego and Tijuana Through Design

Designed for World Design Capital San Diego Tijuana 2024, the sunny orange Exchange Pavilion on the Plaza de Panama in front of the San Diego Museum of Art, christened in August, is the yearlong celebration’s much-anticipated centerpiece.

In keeping with WDC, the pavilion represents the complex relationship between San Diego and Tijuana, two very different metropolii divided by a border but bonded to each other by various forces.

Llke any longterm relationship, this one is complicated. It ranges from conflict to collaboration, commerce to art, governmental influence to border policy, transportation and urban planning to tourism, homelessness to new housing development.

“Exchange” signifies our interconnectness. The pavilion is a 45-by-75-by-15-foot flare that grabs your attention and urges you to consider the forces at play in our binational region.

San Diego-based architects Carlos Hernandez, Barbara Leon and their staff at Heleo collaborated with Tijuana artist Daniel Ruanova on the design.

Much to its credit, the City of San Diego funded the $300,000 project and expedited its trip through permitting and approval — for instance, it meets earthquake standards.

The translucent corrugated polycarbonate orange panels wrap a steel exoskeleton fabricated at EMP Steel Solutions in Tijuana — the orange was carefully matched to WDC’s signature orange. The pavilion’s mirror-image swoopy sides come together at the top and flair out at the ends to create broad, inviting openings. Along each side, elongated arches also lure pedestrians.

Bilingual LED texts crawl along the edges of the structure, with flashes of chromatic color punctuating each excerpt. The texts come from writers on both sides of the border, ranging from binational author Chris Kraus (“I Love Dick,” “Aliens and Anorexia”) to San Diegan Megan Groth, editor of Places We Love: San Diego Tijuana, as well as various poets.

These scrolling ticker-text displays call to mind airports, border crossing signage, stock market tickers.

Sustainability is a WDC2024 theme. In the shade beneath the shiny orange canopy are places to sit and consider the spectacle, cubes and benches crafted from a material called ByBlock, which from a distance resembles granite, but is in fact recycled plastic. Each block diverts 90 pounds of waste from landfills.

On a recent afternoon, children ran, laughed and rolled past on scooters. People of many ages, faces, colors and costumes provided a cast worthy of Fellini. These characters wandered in and out, sometimes staying an hour or more to ponder the parade against a backdrop of historical buildings, blue sky, shadows and sunlight filtering through the translucent panels.

This crowd was very different from the throngs of mostly white people frozen in photos of the 1915 Panama-California Expo, this orange pavilion a remarkable contrast to the park’s old Spanish Colonial architecture.

The pavilion is also the venue for a series of WDC2024 lectures, discussions and performances, as the regional conclave approaches its climactic Nov. 16 World Design Capital Convocation Ceremony.

Unfortunately, the pavilion will remain in place only through Thanksgiving, but it will rise again. It is designed to be disassembled and transported to new sites.

Meanwhile, this fleeting presence sets the stage for what could be a striking-but-permanent new structure in the park: the proposed major addition to SDMA’s west wing by UK-based starchitects Norman Foster & Partners, designers of sleek and glimmery contemporary projects such as the Great Court addition to the British Museum in London and many large developments around the world.

The first version of Foster’s design is making the rounds of prospective donors and could be unveiled to the public this fall as part of the exhibit “Foster + Partners: Architecture of Light and Space,” which opens Oct. 19 at SDMA.

If the addition is funded and approved, a huge challenge given a cost many times the $55 million cost for the major makeover of the nearby Mingei, plus inevitable opposition from defenders of historic architecture — it could break ground in 2026.

Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California and is the author of architectural guidebooks to San Diego and UC San Diego. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego.

CityScape is supported by the San Diego Architectural Foundation, promoting outstanding architecture, landscape, interior and urban design to improve the quality of life for all San Diegans.