Onion 
I say this as someone who genuinely likes Home Depot and appreciates its vast inventory that has everything one needs for maintaining a home and garden: but the company’s new Mission Valley store represents a significant missed design opportunity. A big-box program has been crammed onto a shoe-box site, resulting in the multistory parking structure’s inglorious backside becoming the project’s most prominent public façade, fronting Interstate 8, one of San Diego’s most heavily traveled corridors. Apparently recognizing how many San Diegans would encounter this elevation on their daily commutes, the big design move was an attempt was to animate it with decorative screens, applied trim and an enormous, Star Trek-inspired orange arrow marking the pedestrian entrance from Camino del Rio South. The entrance may be impossible to miss, although one wonders how much pedestrian traffic it will actually serve on Camino del Rio South?
For a company whose business is building materials, the project offers surprisingly little design nuance or meaningful response to its context. Its familiar corporate vocabulary, beige stucco, faux stone, orange stripes are admittedly its core brand, but even the massively corporate McDonalds attempts to respond to context. When coupled with the equally odd adjacent Scottish Rite Temple with its Greek Styled columns that float above the ground a third of the way up the elevation only amplifies the missed opportunity. The math doesn’t compute in this case because two negatives do not equal a positive. This is not Mission Valley’s first example of “phone it in” design, merely the latest. As the valley continues to densify, convenient businesses like Home Depot will be welcome, but buildings of this scale also occupy the public realm and should contribute positively to it. San Diego is an “A” location and should not accept “C-minus” architecture on such a prominent site. Go Home Depot, I respect and appreciate you, but you can and should do better.
It appears like the diamond-shaped motifs and pedestrian entry are intended as a tribute to the Googie-style 1957 Bowlero Bowling Center that was demolished to make room for this big orange box. A better tribute would have been saving and adaptively reusing the Bowlero and restoring the 1950s facade elements that were stripped off when it became the Scottish Rite Temple. Another missed opportunity in MISS-ion Valley.
Home depot along with the Scottish Rite Greek revival architecture demonstrate a lack of cohesive vision at the city. Another giant box store with 100,000 square foot roof and the minimum required solar to get through city approval. The roof could have supported 100% of the store energy requirements.
I like it!
Unfortunately I agree with the prompt that San Diego is A+ and this shoe box/parking lot is C-. Really unfortunate to see them not utilize the plants they have in store to use on their outside, like come-on use some native plants to fix the torn up land you cemented over in our valley.
If I remember correctly… I thought when they tore down … Scottish Rite — they said they were going to “Save” or reimagine the Googie architecture of that building…
Also they could have created some synergy with the New Scottish Rite .. the thousands of people that see those buildings everyday .. it’s a missed opportunity
This missed opportunity breaks my heart every time I drive by. The horrible color and attempt to dress it up with inappropriate detailing — like sticking on fake stone — just makes it worse. San Diego deserves better!
This deserves a TRIPLE ONION: one for the demolition of the Scottish Rite building, another for the horrible quasi-Greek temple for the new SR headquarters, and a 3rd for the HD pastiche. Just all around awful design decisions.