After more than three decades in downtown San Diego, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) at 1001 Kettner Boulevard has handed over its lease to the new Navy Seal Museum. The smaller of MCASD's two downtown buildings will serve as the future site for the military museum, while plans for the larger space—the historic former baggage-claim processing facility for the Santa Fe Depot at 1100 Kettner Boulevard, which is owned by MCASD—remain unknown. MCASD's main building in La Jolla, about 13 miles north of downtown, is now the museum’s only location.
"The design is complete," Todd Perry, the Navy Seal Museum’s director, tells The Art Newspaper. "Now we can start, as they say, to get in there and start swinging hammers."
The Navy Seal Museum will use the space as both a historic survey of the military branch and for recruitment, as the building is near Naval Base Coronado—a training facility in a region where more than 600,000 active and retired personnel reside. "The art of serving and the inspiration to serve is something we're very proud of," Perry says. "This isn't a war museum, it's a museum of tremendous sacrifice and service." The Navy Seal Museum is scheduled to open in late December.
After several years of hosting small storefront gallery spaces downtown, MCASD Downtown officially opened in 1993 at the One America Plaza building (1001 Kettner Boulevard), designed by the architect Helmut Jahn with interiors designed by the artists Robert Irwin and Richard Fleischner and the architect David Raphael Singer. MCASD Downtown’s larger building at 1100 Kettner Boulevard opened in 2007.
The completion of a gut renovation of MCASD’s La Jolla location—combined with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in early 2020, dwindling attendance numbers and an overall change of landscape in the downtown San Diego harbour area—led to MCASD’s decision to transfer its lease on 1001 Kettner Boulevard to the Navy Seal Museum. (The building is owned by the Irvine Company, a real-estate giant that holds many notable properties across the country, including the MetLife Building in New York.)
Meanwhile, the fate of MCASD Downtown’s Jacobs Building and Copley Building at 1100 Kettner Boulevard (above) remains unknown Photo: Courtesy the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
MCASD’s La Jolla building was fully transformed when it reopened in 2022 after a $105m renovation by the architect Annabelle Selldorf, its exhibition space quadrupled. "We're investing in our infrastructure, as we are a collecting institution," says Kathryn Kanjo, the director of MCASD. This all marks a turning point in the museum's more than 80-year history.
For years at 1001 Kettner Boulevard—the future site of the Navy Seal Museum—the triangular sliver of a building housed MCASD’s educational department along with off-site installations that were smaller but cosier and often featured student work and public-facing programming, like workshops and family events.
Across the street at 1100 Kettner Boulevard—the larger structure with an as yet uncertain future—what made the building architecturally interesting also made it challenging. Without a proper loading dock, parking facilities or climate-controlled storage, it maintained an exigent profile for both museum staff and visitors. The building functioned as an urban satellite for the main La Jolla location, which does not have a feasible public-transportation option for art-lovers without cars.
These days, some MCASD employees are able to work from home or off-site at least part of the time, and many educational partnerships take place outside of downtown, diminishing the need for keeping the lease on 1001 Kettner Boulevard.
But programming with theatre and performance groups, like Blindspot Collective and La Jolla Playhouse, has made use of the MCASD-owned 1100 Kettner Boulevard building since 2022. Notable past exhibitions at the old train depot include Viva la Revolucion, which occupied downtown with graffiti interventions in 2010; Liza Lou’s Color Field, thousands of colourful glass beads made in collaboration with museum staff and community members; Ten Thousand Waves, an immersive film by Isaac Julien that filled the cavernous space; a blockbuster Tara Donovan show in 2009 and an impressive Do Ho Suh installation in 2016. The final exhibition at MCASD Downtown, Carmen Argote: Filtration System for a Process-based Practice, closed out the location's run on 23 October 2022. As for the future of the building, the museum’s official stance is a vague one. According to a spokesperson: “1100 is currently closed, and the future purpose of that building has not been identified yet.”