I just returned from my too-short vacation to a pleasant discovery: the Mariner’s Medical Arts complex, Richard Neutra’s 1963 Newport Beach masterpiece, has been given a temporary reprieve from the wrecker’s ball. Last week, interested parties put pressure on the city to reconsider a building permit for the site. “After it came to my attention, I started looking into the … genesis of this whole project going back to 2004,” Newport Beach Planning Director David Lepo told the Daily Pilot. “And I don’t think the [California Environmental Quality Act analysis] was adequate.” The CEQA study determines a building’s historical significance, among other factors.
I wrote about the plight of the aging but still-stunning complex last week in a Morning Read. John Linnert, a Costa Mesa architect, had contacted me and told me of the owner’s plans to start a three-phase development that would, in its latter stages, result in the demolition of Neutra’s three-building complex. The first phase was scheduled to break ground later this summer.
My story drew an unusual level of interest from Register readers, even for a Morning Read. And when I was writing the story, my online appeal for more information and opinion about the building drew a torrent of replies from architects and historians around the country. Architecture is a topic that can elicit amazingly passionate reponses — a surprise to this theater critic who usually thinks about buildings, when he thinks about them at all, as places to live and toil in rather than works of art. It was a thrill to get a short thank you note from Dion Neutra, the famed architect’s son, who still practices architecture in Los Angeles and is a fierce protector of his dad’s often abused legacy.
The hero of the story, though, is Linnert, who seems like a man possessed when it comes to saving Mariners and was largely responsible for drawing everyone’s attention to its pending demise. “I was just the guy who pulled the fire alarm. The building itself is the real impetus for everyone’s excitement,” he told me this morning.
