Inside the Design Center

This podcast interview is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Listen to the conversation between Dave Hampton, Steve Aldana, and Todd Pitman, and follow along with this transcript. Run time is approximately 40 minutes

Ron Kerner: Welcome to Art of the People, a podcast from Mingei International Museum, offering a glimpse behind the scenes of the museum world with the artists and staff who make the magic happen. I'm Ron Kerner, photographer at Mingei, and I have the honor of introducing a few friends of mine, curators of the upcoming exhibition Inside the Design Center.
I've known Dave Hampton, Steve Aldana, and Todd Pittman for quite a while. They share a wealth of knowledge related to the mid-century design world. The team at Mingei is thrilled to be working with them this season.
We're excited for you to hear more about this show, their history, and the celebration of mid-twentieth century folk art, craft, and design. Thank you for joining us.

RK: Maybe we can go around the table? You guys can all introduce yourself. Dave?

Dave Hampton: My name's Dave Hampton, and I was born in San Diego, and I've worked on a few exhibitions at Mingei over the last—I don't know—15 years or so. In 2011, we did a show called San Diego's Craft Revolution and got to do a book with that. That was really great.

RK: Right on. Todd?

Todd Pitman: Yeah, I'm Todd Pitman.
I'm a landscape architect and planner, and I've been researching the work of Lloyd Ruocco and, to a lesser extent, Ilse Ruocco for probably close to 30 years now. It's how I kind of became exposed to collecting, and I've been collecting furniture and art since then as part of my interest in their work.

RK: Cool. Steve?

Steve Aldana: My name is Steve Aldana, and I'm assisting Dave and Todd here in this exhibition. I'm an urban planner during the day, and on the weekends, I go out and search for design objects and such.

RK: All right, well, again, thank you all for being here. So, Dave, how did this exhibition come to be exactly—Inside the Design Center?

RK: Can you guys tell me a little bit more about the Ruoccos?

TP: Lloyd Ruocco was an architect, and a lot of folks will sometimes reference him as a philosopher. He was certainly a city planner. He was born in about 1907, and he practiced architecture in San Diego from the 1920s until the 1970s, roughly.

DH: Ilse Ruocco was born in Germany, but she grew up in California, and she went to UCLA in the 1920s. She was interested, there, in the arts. In fact, her roommate at UCLA was a really renowned ceramic artist named Laura Andreson. She taught for a while in the Los Angeles area, but eventually she came to San Diego State College in 1934, I think, and joined the art faculty at San Diego Diego State. She taught ceramics. She taught design class. She taught crafts. It was a small school in those days, but it was really the only institution of higher education in San Diego at that time. She taught there for many years. I believe she introduced the first environmental and interior design program there, and she was a practicing potter.

She was the first chairperson of the Allied Craftsman group when it was founded in 1946 and 1947. She, along with Lloyd, really shaped the careers and identities of lots of local young artists and creative people. She had a big impact, and when she opened her showroom at the new Design Center in 1949, it seems like she probably made less pottery at that point and focused on her interior design business. You can see, in the photograph of the Design Center that we're using to do this exhibition, you can see a lot of pots that look like they could be her work. We're going to include one of her ceramics in the show.

RK: How did Ilse’s Design Center showroom compare to other important modern retail stores at that time?

DH: So there are a lot of important stores as people begin to take apart Midcentury Modernism in the U.S. In many big cities, there's often one or two particularly influential stores.
I mean, in Chicago, there were places like Baldwin King Gray, and in Los Angeles, there was Frank Brothers. These are places that advertised a lot nationally at the time and kind of have made an impact. People have done books and exhibitions about those places because of their role as a distributor and a tastemaker for their geographical region.

What's interesting about San Diego in 1950 is, you know, it's a much smaller metropolitan area compared to those places. There's really only a couple of stores that decided to focus on strictly Modern design—furniture, objects, everything you might need for your house. There was a place in La Jolla called Armin Richter that had its own interesting story, and it advertised nationally, and there was this Design Center.

DH: The Design Center lasted for decades, and what I could tell in this photograph is that this place in San Diego, this image of this showroom, was particularly heavy on really amazing California design objects. They were combined with some other, sort of, better known, large, national brands like the Eames Chairs and pieces by Knoll. But what really captured me about this photo is that Ilse Ruocco had selected a bunch of really wonderful California design examples that you would not see in these other stores in other places. So there was a real regional flavor to her store, and the only evidence we've really seen of that is this one advertisement.

RK: So Steve, as a collector, you probably know a lot about what's going on in this historical photo. What can be seen in the Design Center's showroom photo, exactly?

SA: On the perimeter, you can see some typical Midcentury classics by Knoll and European designers and some American, like Florence Knoll and Richard Stein. When you go to the center, it gets a little bit more interesting. You have the more California-focused furniture by Eames, and then you get some obscure companies like Modern Color Inc. and Van Keppel-Green and some Pacifica designs by Luther Conover.

RK: Cool. So there's a lot of use of California design in this showroom that Ilse put together.
Can you explain what California design was at that time?

SA: Well, a lot of the focus was on outdoor/indoor living and the use of light materials—iron, mahogany. What's also interesting is how, I assume, Ilse selected a lot of these smaller companies and also the women designers and women-owned companies. There's a couple pieces by Greta Grossman, who is a Swedish immigrant. [Ilse Ruocco] chose to use a lot of smaller companies from Los Angeles and the Bay Area. We have Modern Color Inc., which was a company that was owned by Dorothy Schindele, and it was only around for about five years. It's just interesting to see that in a retail setting.

DH: So there's not a lot of their stuff floating around, then? You don't see their work. Or do you see it in vintage advertisements like this one?

SA: It was advertised in Arts and Architecture Magazine, but outside of that, there really isn't.

RK: Thanks, Steve! So, Todd, what led the Ruoccos to establish the Design Center?

TP: Yeah, you know, it evolved from their house in La Mesa, and I think what was happening was, they were thinking holistically about how creative people could benefit a city. So this is a really global topic. We're focusing a lot on the store, and that, I think, is really important, but what we kind of run into with the Ruoccos, often, is where do you start? Because the influence was so large. It wasn't just a store. It was a place where creative people would meet. It was a place where architects, landscape architects, artists, people from outside of San Diego would gather. They were doing that for years out in a very progressive piece of architecture out in La Mesa, built in the mid-1940s. I think, ultimately, those conversations evolved to the idea or the genesis of the Design Center—this place where people could come together to help influence the way we built cities. They could come together to discuss how they were to build their own homes, how they would decorate their homes, the artists they would use, the landscape architects they'd use, and it could all be found within the walls of the Design Center.

TP: In addition to the store, there were practicing architects that were working out of that building. There were landscape architects working out of that building. It was really a manifestation of an early idea that they had. They were involved with many groups that kind of attempted to do some of this, some of which persist to this day that would probably be worthwhile in our discussion today. But yeah, it started in La Mesa, and it was kind of the physical manifestation of these ideas that they had in the 40s. 


RK: Cool. Todd, what other commercial tenants were in the Design Center building at that time?

TP: I think, you know, another part of that story—when you're talking about the Ruoccos—that becomes pretty impressive as you dive into their careers, is how many people point to them as being an inspiration or an influence on their career. You constantly hear people say, “Oh, the Ruoccos! He was really influential to me,” or they'll talk about him in almost philosophical terms, and you'll hear the same thing about Ilse. So this wasn't just a snapshot in time—in terms of, in 1950, this was what was happening. This really was a legacy that continued all the way to the time when we were all interested. So you would talk to people like Homer Delawie, who also worked in that building. You would talk about people like Fred Liebhardt.
These were people who lived and practiced into the 90s. That place and those people and what they talked about at that time were tremendously influential. Things that you were seeing many years later, you know, kind of had their fingerprints on it.
I've met multiple people who point to Ilse Ruocco as being a major influence in their career. Diane Powers, at Bazaar del Mundo, was a student of Ilse Ruocco. She taught at SDSU. So, even when we're talking about, “Why is she representing California designers?” Well, I would assume, because she worked with many of those designers either professionally or perhaps even as an instructor and as a teacher, and the same can be said for Lloyd.


DH: The building exists today. It has a historic designation. It's in largely the same configuration and the same materials that were there when it was built in 1949. So, on the one hand, we have this story of the people, but the place is still there. The reverberations of this community, their efforts, is still standing in physical form. So that's a special thing.

This ad and the different kinds of people that were involved there—there's sort of lasting evidence. It hasn't been torn down thus far. There's still a remaining proof of what these people aspired to, their aspirations, what they realized together. It's a way to kind of connect the dots, too, to these abstract ideas that have gone into history, but there's a physical reference point where you can go and stand and look at the building, and it's an amazing space.
It's a fantastic space—really well-designed, really sensitive to the environment and the site.

RK: Tell me, why is this a Mingei exhibition? Like, how does this show connect? Or maybe you could talk about how this show connects to folk art craft and design?

DH: In some ways, it's sort of so obvious that it's a little bit hard to pick it all apart. The objects in the photo and the objects in the exhibition all relate to various creative processes and especially design processes. Someone had to imagine them in their mind, make some kind of a drawing or a model, and most of the people, I think—I mean, Steve, you can help me here—but a lot of the people that owned these smaller furniture companies would have probably had to figure out how to build these things, how to make these things. Steve, maybe you could talk about Luther Conover.


SA: Luther Conover actually used salvage materials when he first started building furniture from the World War II ships. The legend has it, he used local high school kids to help him actually construct the furniture.

DH: So there, that's one example. There are other people that had various amounts of architectural training. I mean, we could talk about the sort of Knoll end of this. In the photo, there's a bunch of pieces that were sold under the Knoll brand, some of them designed by Florence Knoll, who was a trained architect, some of them designed by other architects. There's an awful lot of complicated thought and production and problem solving that goes into making something like an excellent chair.

The shapes of these pieces, many of them, not all of them, but many of the pieces are fairly simple and use simple materials and are made, imagined, designed, and built in a fairly simple way.

TP: I think another piece of this that I referenced before, and this may be kind of a plain example in terms of how it ends up at the Mingei, but this is what the Ruoccos believed in. The organizations that they—and Dave, you can help me with this—I believe it was Allied Artists, which then morphed into what is still today, Allied Craftsmen. Part of their whole concept was how we could pool the resources of many people, who maybe didn't have a ton of resources on their own, for the betterment of all of these craftspeople and artists.

Perhaps they used that terminology a bit more broadly than we would today, but they saw all of these people as craftspeople, as artists that could benefit from one another that could show together. If you were a photographer, you could photograph the work for your friend who was a ceramicist. How could you help benefit one another? So really, the whole concept and genesis of Design Center was to further craft and to further art and creative thinking.
I would say that was fundamental to the building.

DH: It's a great way to look at it, and it's really important and revealing, but like, it's an integrative process, and it's a bringing together. It's a multidisciplinary thing. To repeat what Todd just said, the Design Center, in its bringing together of different kinds of creative practitioners—landscape designers, architects, people to do interior design and provide your furniture—that's similar to these larger community organizations like the Allied Craftsmen. Originally, it was a group of artists, galvanized right after World War II, that wanted to get together and help educate the rest of their community about this kind of idea of a modern way of life at the time, so that all these things could be brought together. You would have people from different kinds of disciplines—film, dance, writers—all in the same umbrella organization. That's kind of a lot like the Design Center. It's a different way of looking at this integrative idea of all these art forms being connected in different ways, but through the Ruoccos’ advocacy and activism and through their building and what it represented, they're doing a lot to integrate the arts into a collective body.

RK: I'm looking at this Design Center ad from this magazine, and it's full of amazing design. There's lamps. I see pots, tables, chairs, wall hangings, textiles, kind of all over the map of amazing things. I'm just wondering, how did you acquire or curate this show? I mean, were these pieces relatively easy to find?

DH: In order to put the show together,
I couldn't even approach this idea without first talking with Todd and Steve because of their different kinds of expertise. I just sort of had this ad, and I had a relationship with the Museum, and I thought, ‘Hey, we should really try and put that together, but I don't have the skills to do that.’ So I had to go to Steve, because Steve, in particular, over the last 20 years or so, has developed a really, really incredible base of knowledge and appreciation for the kinds of things you can see in the picture. It was really Steve's role to locate the specific pieces of furniture and Todd's role to provide the contextual information about the Ruoccos and the building that this photo is taken from. Without those two people, without Todd and Steve, the show wouldn't happen. It's as simple as that.

DH: I'm sort of more coordinating and making some choices, but it has been way more challenging than other shows that I've done, because it starts from this idea. It starts from this picture in a magazine. So we set out to try and find these pieces in a 1950 photograph, and it hasn't been easy, and there are some things that, simply, we can't find. In some cases, we're having people that we know—that are sensitive to this kind of thing—fabricate models of these pieces so that we can create the environment that you see in the photos to the best of our [ability], within certain limits. The idea is to try to recreate this photo in a space where people can move around like they would have in Ilse’s design showroom, so they can move around the objects, so they can see them in the same kind of positions that they were in. That's the idea behind the physical show. 


Finding the pieces has been really challenging, and Steve, 100%, provides the expertise to make that happen.

RK: Oh, that's awesome! So how would this show appeal to someone that doesn't really know much about mid-twentieth century design?

DH: It's funny. I think the mid-century design is all around us all the time. It's in some of the neighborhoods that we walk through or drive through. It's on television and movies all the time and all kinds of ads. I always see different interiors that reference this time period. So you don't have to necessarily be someone that's super into architecture or design to feel these points of reference.

The other thing is that this is a special San Diego story about our history on a broader level and people that did interesting things here. They happen to be involved in this particular world, but you can find a way to be interested in things that creative people do across all spectrums, I think.

TP: I actually think that a lot of what the Design Center was about is kind of innately San Diegan. If you love living in San Diego, you don't necessarily have to be a fan of Midcentury design to appreciate the idea that this was a style that embraced the outdoors. It embraced our environment. It embraced a lifestyle. We hear that every day. Whether we're talking about a Midcentury design house or a brand new tract house, we're talking about open floor plans and we're talking about the way people move through a space, how they experience a space. That's what this was all about.

It was actually boiling it down to that kind of very base experience. Architecture, prior to this time, was imported. It came from other parts of the world or other parts of the country. It didn't necessarily respond to our environment, and that was what this was all about. I think, if you are a San Diegan and you love living in San Diego, you would appreciate what was happening in this building in the 1950s.

RK: Working here, I've been really keeping an eye on things that have been coming in for the show, and I got to tell you, my favorite piece is this lamp by Gilbert Watrous. Can you talk a little bit more about this lamp? I noticed I don't see it in the image of the ad, but the name is listed in the text.

DH: One of the objects in the exhibition [is] not physically in this photograph, but the person's name is mentioned in the text on the ad, his name is Watrous, Gilbert Watrous. He had been in San Diego, and he left San Diego and was studying design at the Institute of Design in Chicago at the time that this competition was announced for a lamp design that was between the Museum of Modern Art and this lighting company called the Heifetz Company.

DH: It was included in the second Good Design show. So it had a lot of publicity, and it had such a striking look. That's another reason why it seemed reasonable to include this lamp, even though it wasn't in the picture. It's really, really a clever, innovative, great design and an example of design thinking.

RK: Why isn't San Diego's distinct postwar design community better known?

TP: Yeah, I wonder that myself.
I think there's a few different things that happen here. One of them is that San Diego, as a region, often looks outside of itself for validation.

There's almost a history of this. If you think of Balboa Park and you think of the original design of Balboa Park, we had this amazing architect named Irving Gill who lived in San Diego and very much wanted the commission at Balboa Park, but we, instead, went for the New York-based architect, Bertram Goodhue—amazing architect. It's a gorgeous space, so I'm not necessarily disappointed, but we do tend to look outside of the city to kind of validate what we're doing inside of the city.

In fact, with Modernism, one of the things that I always find fascinating and perhaps a little disappointing, is that when I tell people, “Hey, I'm really interested in Midcentury design in San Diego,” often people will say, “Oh, I've heard Richard Neutra designed a few houses in San Diego.” He did, and they're fantastic houses, but to not know that people like Sim Bruce Richards, who was an architect in San Diego who did organic design—he did work here. Amazing work! Lloyd Ruocco did amazing work. Fred Liebhardt did amazing work.

We have an incredibly robust legacy of architecture and design in San Diego. For whatever reason, I don't know that we've ever done a great job of showcasing that work. We often go elsewhere. I'd say places like Palm Springs do an incredible job of saying, “This was what was happening in Palm Springs, and it's why Palm Springs is so incredible.” L.A. does a lot of that, but for whatever reason, San Diego—I don't think they've always embraced their own design community. I think that's changed to an extent, but I think, certainly historically, that was something that we struggled with—having kind of a little brother syndrome to some of the other cities that are close by.

DH: For sure. Another part of this—like you're talking about—over time, even the example of groups like the Allied Artist Council or the Allied Craftsman, the need was there to educate the community. People weren't very familiar with Modern design ideas, Modern architecture, Modern furniture. It was not well understood here. So there was almost a climate where there was sort of a vacuum, but there have always been people doing really interesting creative work here in San Diego. The reason, I think, is because they liked it here. It's beautiful. It's comfortable—great beaches, great mountains, all of that—and it's not a big city. It wasn't a big city at the time in 1950. The same could be said for now.

It takes a certain mentality for someone to decide to pursue their own interests or career or creative path, but often without the bigger accolades or the larger financial successes or commissions or what have you that might have happened in a larger city environment. There's a kind of a certain person that decided to stay here, and with examples like the Ruoccos and other people we were talking about, to make a vibrant, active community here in San Diego.

The thing was, a lot of the people that contributed to that weren't great publicity hounds.
They weren't great marketers. They had their hands full. A lot of them chose to be teachers during the day, and they had to advocate for their interest in Modern architecture or Modern design to begin with.
That was a big job.

To be a part of San Diego's small Modernist community in 1950 would have been a little bit demanding, but there was enough of a community that a place like the Design Center could bring everyone to this one location that's still standing—there was just nothing else like it in San Diego. There was nothing with the layers that the Design Center had, where it was specifically created to play host to the different parts of this community. I like to think of the Design Center, when it's up and and running, when you could—if you had a house or if you were interested in having a house, you could go there to get a chair, and then later, you could go there to get a house designed or planned for you, and then you could get the landscape for that design there, and you could get it photographed by the photographer that was in residence there. It's an entire ecosystem related to design, and there's nothing else like it that existed then or now that I'm aware of.

TP: I actually think that's part of what makes the Design Center so impressive in terms of what kind of place it was. A lot of other cities embraced progressive ideas. I think that in San Diego, at least at that time, I don't know that it as true today, but, you know, we were a military town. This would have been around World War II. We weren't necessarily embracing the most progressive design. We were often doing, again, these Revivalist styles. Think of Spanish eclectic architecture, what you'd see in places like Kensington. When you start to look at the Design Center and the work that was being done, much of which is in the show, and put that in the context of the 1940s and '50s in San Diego, it would have looked very, very different.

In 2025, I don't think people necessarily see that building or these types of pieces and say, "Oh my gosh, that's so different!” Because a lot of things that are built today are built of steel or iron or wood or bent plywood. [It] isn't some miraculous thing, but back then, it was pretty different.
If you would have been driving up Fifth Avenue and come across a building that was built in 1949, that was predominantly glass, that looked like this little light, one story elevation from the street—which, in fact, is three [stories], kind of cascades down into the canyon there—it would have looked very, very different.

We have a video that's in the show that actually shows the construction of that building, and I'd really encourage people to see it, because what's the most fascinating is the equipment that's being used to build the building, how they're building the building, the cars that are driving by, the way people are dressed. All of a sudden, you're like, “Wow!” That building that's Modern—which I think, to a lot of people, translates to new—was built in the 1940s. That puts some context on that building that I think is otherwise lost.

RK: Well, listen, guys, thanks so much for coming in and talking about all of this. I'm really looking forward to seeing this show, and again, thank you for your time.

DH: Thanks, Ron. That was great!

TP: Thanks, Ron!

RK: Check out Inside the Design Center at Mingei International Museum in Balboa Park—on view September 6, 2025 through April 12, 2026. Learn more and get tickets online at Mingei.org.