James Britton Ii
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ARCHITECTURAL AND CIVIC-PLANNING ARTICLES BY JAMES BRITTON II James Britton, who was San Diego’s most distinguished and opinionated architectural and cultural commentator from 1950 to 1983, was born on January 22, 1915 in Waterbury, Connecticut where his artist- father, also named James, and his mother, Caroline [Korner], were living in between sojourns in Greenwich Village, New York City, Sag Harbor. Long Island and Waterbury and Hartford, Connecticut. Sister Teresa, born in 1916, and Sister Ruth, born in 1919, completed the family circle. Finally, in 1925, the family moved to Connecticut where they lived in Waterbury and various other towns and cities. At the time father James had achieved considerable recognition as a painter and art critic for New York City publications, one of which, Art Review International, he founded and edited between 1919 and 1925. A San Diego Union obituary claimed son Britton was not formally educated, which could only be true in the sense that he did not matriculate in colleges or universities. He was, however, a student, beginning at the age of four, in the Bank Street [Progressive] School at Greenwich Village, New York City, and a graduate of South Manchester High School in Connecticut in 1933. As a versatile high school student, he played tennis, acted in school plays, and defended and rebutted issues on a debating team. The Depression prevented him, as it did so many others, from attending college. Obviously he was well- informed in artistic, architectural, musical and cultural matters. A part of this came from his artistic parents and their wide circle of culturally-attuned friends and another part from his voracious reading. In 1935, at the age of 20, son Britton became a sketch artist for the Hartford Courant and a year later for the Hartford Times, the same papers for which his father had written columns of art appreciation and criticism. The sketches were mostly of visiting celebrities, such as Katherine Hepburn and Noel Coward. A series of 84 portrait drawings of “Notable Men in Connecticut’s History” he did for Courant, between January and October 1935, included a portrait of Samuel Colt, the inventor of the famous multiple-shot Colt revolver. After leaving Hartford Times in 1938 Britton continued to work as an artist, designer, illustrator and writer wherever and whenever he could. References in his later writings indicate that during this interregnum period, he spent sometime in Florida, though the location of his residences and the nature of his vocations are not known. In 1945, James Britton II and Julia Eleanor [Meagley] Britton were divorced. His son, James Stevens Britton, was a product of this marriage. Sometime in 1948 James Britton II moved to San Diego, with his second wife, Elizabeth [Roberts] Britton, a pianist who had been trained in the New England Conservatory of Music, and two daughters, Barbara Roberts Britton and Ursula Roberts Britton. Though new to San Diego, Britton soon attracted a coterie of talented and influential friends from whom he acquired a grasp of local architectural, artistic and political conditions. Having read, and possibly met, city-planner and philosopher Lewis Mumford in New York City, Britton applied Mumford’s theories of civic development to local abysmal conditions. In short order, he went from anonymous writer for the San Diego Journal and Point Magazine to feature writer on Point Magazine and Magazine San Diego that later became San Diego and Point Magazine and finally in 1955 became San Diego Magazine only. He also contributed to the Los Angeles Magazine (1962-63) and founded, edited and published the California Review for a two-year period (1963-65). Britton’s winning of second prize in an American Institute of Architect’s (AIA) journalistic competition and his receiving a grant from the Ford Foundation (both in 1959) took him away from San Diego in 1960-61. During this hiatus from his regular writing chores, he studied at Harvard University and scrutinized plans for civic improvement in New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C. and other cities. His abilities as critic and writer got him an appointment as editor of the Journal of the American Society of Landscape Architecture from 1965-70 and in 1968 a position as Special Architectural Journalist for the AIA in Washington, D.C. In December 1977 the last article by Britton to appear in San Diego Magazine, titled “The Stone Flower,” anent the University of California at San Diego Library designed by Los Angeles architect William Pereira, was a repeat of an article he wrote for the August issue of the AIA journal. His generally appreciative attitude toward the library’s stunning spheroid exterior was tempered by a detailed physiological description of its indigestible interior. The following year Britton became a full-time architectural critic for The San Diego Union, writing twice a month for the Sunday Home Section. His provocative, sometimes mocking, sometimes scathing, columns continued to razzle and rankle in the Union until he died of a heart attack on January 4, 1983. His wife, Elizabeth had predeceased him in 1977. San Diego city planners and architects expressed sorrow at Britton’s passing and acknowledged him as the person who set the high standards to which they aspired. As Britton said of himself his mission was to keep the cause of city-planning alive and to make the city he loved, and in which he lived the longest, become a leader in all the cultural, philosophical and spiritual matters that made his life and—he thought—a city’s life worth living. To its credit the City of San Diego has tried with some degree of success and with some degree of failure to accept the challenge of civic improvement first postulated professionally by city planner John Nolen in 1908 and nobly continued by critic and scold James Britton between 1948 and 1983. Why James Britton? He was a significant voice in advancing the causes of good architecture and city and regional planning in San Diego through magazines such as Point, Magazine San Diego, San Diego and Point Magazine (1950-55), San Diego Magazine (sporadically ,1955-71), and The San Diego Union newspaper (1978-83). Some of his opinions reached a wider audience through Los Angeles Magazine (1962-63), Journal of the American Society of Landscape Architects (1965-70), and American Institute of Architecture (AIA) publications (1968). His own self-published California Review (1963-65) was really a San Diego Review, complete with flattering prose and handsome photographs. It lasted two years and failed because of a lack of advertisers and subscribers. As a San Diego commentator Britton was both a guide and an irritant. His full-fledged guidebook, “You See San Diego,” was published in 1977 in conjunction with an AIA national conference in San Diego. While his prose has the appearance of spontaneity, Britton wrote many drafts before he sent his writings off to be published. His puns were both maddening and dazzling and his coinage of new words was the despair of orthographers and grammarians. His writing style may have been idiosyncratic, but he was conscious of what he was doing and was offended when well-meaning editors tried to correct what they—not Britton—perceived as grammatical or stylistic errors. His pronouncements sometimes reached impractical levels: a double-decker highway along Highway 101 as it skirts Mission Bay Park and another double-decker, paralleled by skyscrapers, on Mission Boulevard; skyscrapers and condos in Balboa Park; an Atlas rocket atop the entrance rotunda to the Ford Building; a railroad terminal in Del Mar, instead of San Diego; an earth causeway that would link San Diego and Coronado, a co-operative of blacks in Logan Heights, that would cure blight and social inequities; a Champs Elysee in University Towne Center that would be better than the original; an international airport in Tijuana, owned by the United States, to be acquired by giving Mexico the Tijuana River Delta that has been part of the U.S. since the signing in 1848 of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Whatever he wrote, Britton evoked a vehement response in his readers that was either hot or cold (No Laodiceans there!). Reading him caused his readers to chuckle, chortle or choke. His writing was alternately exhilarating and exasperating, but, unless his readers were inert, it never put them to sleep. He believed in esthetic greatness in all the arts and he urged San Diego to strive for architectural, artistic, musical and urban planning heights. His heroes were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Lewis Munford, Frank Lloyd Wright, and—locally— architect and designer Lloyd Ruocco. How much he understood about the waverings of these men may be questioned but he clung to their self-confident and ebullient spirits. Britton’s praise of pots and pans in Fine Arts Gallery Director Thomas Robertson’s controversially-mounted exhibit, “Art, Utility and You,” (Magazine San Diego, December1950) was more elitist than democratic. (“See! There is Benevenuto Cellini holding up to the light our coffee pot and breathing incredulously the wondrous phrase ‘stainless steel.’” This is the 16th- Century Cellini whose famous gold, enamel and ivory salt cellar (“Saliera”) has been reproduced many times, possibly even in “stainless steel” to the great disadvantage of the copies.) He appreciated the glories of Nature—the capitalization was his—but, as a confirmed urbanite, he sought to provide a place for expanding populations to live with little or no disturbance to natural beauties. Britton’s support of the Save the Canyon movement was after the fact. According to him the movement began when Mission Hills residents agreed to an “open-space assessment to keep some canyons in their area from development to “protect” views.