The influential founder of San Diego State's former environmental design program links his 'radiant' creative spark to a boyhood encounter with a UFO
Since he began his career in the 1950s, only a handful of architect Eugene Ray’s designs have been built. Yet his impact is significant. As founder and head of San Diego State University’s Environmental Design program from 1969 to 1996, he mentored students who designed dozens of San Diego buildings.
While his students have realized countless buildings, the prime example of Ray’s own architecture is the hillside La Jolla home, also known as Silver Ship, that he designed and built of concrete-and-wood with his students in the late 1970s. Silver Ship is a “stretched dome,” supported by a cross-hatch vault of wood beams in a pattern that resembles the diamond pattern on a rattlesnake.
“This building is nothing to write home about,” he tells me at our courtyard table. But the staff is friendly, the food is good and the coastal location is gorgeous. And there’s this: “I have never seen hot water come on as fast as it does here! That was the first thing I noticed. And the second is levered door handles.”
When Ray explains “radiant architecture” he speaks of biomorphic structures, biotronic energy and synergetic environments. Sources of inspiration run from Nikola Tesla to Bugatti sports cars, and from nature to extraterrestrial life. Architects R. Buckminster Fuller, Frank Lloyd Wright, Bruce Goff and Goff’s University of Oklahoma colleague Herb Greene — whose buildings were featured in the 1940s “Life” magazines that Ray’s father brought home — are also in the mix.
“At 15, I saw a UFO over our house in Baton Rouge, a cylindrical craft, cigar shaped. A bunch of us were flying huge kites, made by my dad. We would fly them up out of site. We were lying there watching our kites, and all of a sudden this craft flew slowly overhead from west to east. And to this day I have the feeling they were watching us. Certainly my work has cosmic consciousness because of that.
The program embodied the rebellious spirit of the times. He invited radical architects to lecture, such as Goff, L.A. modernist John Lautner, Archigram and Soleri. Ray says some lectures were boycotted by some San Diego architects, but he was eventually invited by Archigram’s Peter Cook to lecture twice at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London.
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