An architectural mystery in San Diego

WHO REALLY DESIGNED THE TIMKEN MUSEUM OF ART IN BALBOA PARK? WHY TWO LOCAL ARCHITECTURE BUFFS THINK A PAIR OF LEGENDS HAD A HAND IN ITS CREATION.

- BY SAM LUBELL

FOR 60 YEARS, San Diego’s Timken Museum of Art has stood in Balboa Park — a travertine-clad Modernist jewel box showcasing priceless Russian icons and masterworks from the likes of Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck and Fragonard, floating among the park’s exuberant Spanish Revival fantasies. But beneath its calm exterior lies an architectural mystery that has captivated Stephen Buck and Keith York, local architecture lovers who have spent the last year obsessively piecing together evidence suggesting that the Timken’s true authorship has been misunderstood, if not deliberately obscured, since the day it opened in 1965.

Their investigation — which has caught the attention of the soon-to-expand museum, not to mention the city’s tight-knit cultural community — began with a secret. In 2013, York, founder of Modern San Diego, a digital archive devoted to the region’s Midcentury design, received a call from one of San Diego’s most respected architects, Robert Mosher. Then in his 90s, Mosher asked to meet for lunch in La Jolla. “I have something I need to tell you,” he said.

Mosher, recorded by York (who was sworn to secrecy until after Mosher’s death in 2015) recounted a story told to him decades earlier by his friend and colleague Richard Kelly, the lighting designer of some of American modernism’s most iconic buildings, including Philip Johnson's Glass House, Louis Kahn's Kimbell Art Museum and Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building. Kelly had been hired to design the lighting for the Timken. But according to Mosher, during an early meeting Walter Ames, the project's patron, made a surprising suggestion to Kelly: “You're the architect — why don’t you design it yourself?”