James T. Hubbell, an iconic local sculptor, artist and humanitarian whose organically inspired works can be found in homes, churches and public buildings throughout San Diego County and beyond, died on Friday at the age of 92.
A famously soft-spoken and humble man, Hubbell is best known for his other-worldly “habitable sculptures” home and art compound in Santa Ysabel that’s listed in the San Diego County of Historic Places. Due to health challenges, Hubbell and his wife, Anne, left their mountain home in 2021 for a retirement community in Chula Vista, where he ed away with Anne and his family by his side.
Their property, which the couple deeded to their nonprofit, the Ilan-Lael Foundation, in 2003, will carry on as an educational center, artists retreat and museum-archive for his work. Marianne Gerdes, longtime executive director of the Ilan-Lael Foundation, said the response from the public to the news of Hubbell’s ing has been overwhelming and deeply touching.
“Through his art and his actions he demonstrated his love for San Diego, its nature, its culture, its people, and the beautiful ocean which inspired so much of his work. But I believe it is his kind and generous spirit, his humanity, that those of us who knew him will with the most fondness,” Gerdes said.
Art and architecture fans from around the world fly in each spring to tour the Ilan-Lael compound’s imaginatively shaped buildings, which resemble the Hobbit houses in Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” films, and the expressionistic organic style of Modernist Spanish architect Antoni Gaudí. (Spring tour season at the property began May 10 and continues through June 17.)
The Ilan-lael property was built to follow the natural contours of the land. Huge boulders were incorporated where they stood into the buildings and swimming pool, and the swooping roofs suggest the shapes of shells, leaves and bones. The property was built with local stone, wood milled in nearby Julian and adobe fired in Escondido and Tecate. Colorful mosaic designs flow across walls and floors like the stream that crosses his property. Stained-glass windows amplify sunlight, washing walls and floors with rainbows of color. Door handles and cabinet drawer pulls were hand-forged with metal and manzanita tree burls.
In 2008, San Diego County’s Historic Site Board voted unanimously to grant Ilan-Lael historic status, declaring the property as a good example of the “Hubbell style” of Modern Organic architecture, a “treasured resource” and “one of the most important historic sites in the county.”
“James Hubbell brought to his own work a love of nature, honest and clear intention, and a sincere appreciation for the impact of art upon our world,” Gerdes said. “I think Jim’s legacy could best be summed up by helping us realize that nature inspires art, and art builds a better, more comionate world where people are more sensitive to each other’s needs and just the immeasurable, immense value of protecting and appreciating nature.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdqiJrWKcx0
Working with his studio of artisans on commission, Hubbell created hundreds of works for private homes, commercial buildings and public art installations. Highlights include the Pacific Portal gazebo on Shelter Island, a mosaic fountain in Coronado, and numerous stained glass windows, gates, and mosaics in homes, libraries and churches.
In 1983, the Hubbells started Ilan-lael — a Hebrew phrase meaning “tree that is a gift from God” — with the goal of bringing art to the masses. He launched a magazine, Hidden Leaves, and became a vocal advocate for promoting peace and securing and protecting open space and nature.
His masterwork was Ilan-Lael’s Pacific Rim Park project, a series of eight seaside parks built from 1994 to 2018 in cities that touch the Pacific Ocean, from San Diego to Vladivostok, Russia, to Puerto Princesa, the Philippines. The goal of the project, which Hubbell designed, supervised and built on-site with local volunteers, was to foster international peace and connection through art.
Hubbell was born Oct. 23, 1931, in Mineola, N.Y. Naturally shy and uncomfortable in a traditional school setting, he turned to nature and art to make sense of his world. In his youth, Hubbell’s family moved constantly, fueling in him an adventurous spirit. After high school, he met and befriended Quentin Keynes, the grandson of Charles Darwin. They embarked on a one-year trip abroad, visiting great works of art in Europe and studying tribal cultures in Africa.
In 1951, Hubbell enrolled at the Whitney art school in New York and later studied at the prestigious Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield, Mich., where he majored in sculpture and learned the principals of how art and craft can be integrated into buildings. Later he moved to Rancho Santa Fe, where his mother ran a hotel. He served two years in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, not as a fighter but as a base artist.
Dave Hampton, author of the 2011 book “San Diego’s Craft Revolution: From Post-war Modernism to California Design,” said that Hubbell made his mark in San Diego’s art scene well before he began building his famous home.
Hampton said that after Hubbell met prominent San Diego architect Sim Bruce Richards in the early 1950s, they began collaborating on homes designed with artistic features like Hubbell’s carved doors and one-of-a-kind windows. In 1956, Hubbell had his first solo exhibition at the Capri theater in San Diego, where Hampton said he attracted a great deal of attention for his experimental works with resins, plastics, welded metal and other new materials.
Many artists who later came to the San Diego region were influenced by Hubbell’s work with new materials for home-based artistic designs, including Rhoda Lopez, Tosa and Ruth Radakovich, Kay Whitcomb and Ellamarie and Jackson Wolley.
“Hubbell became the backbone of an architecturally inclined art practice that developed in San Diego and flourished in the 1960s and early ’70s,” Hampton said. “And due to Hubbell’s decision to not practice elsewhere, he contributed to the flourishing of architectural art.”
Hampton said Hubbell’s peripatetic life and his exposure to so many cultures, places and artists’ work were clearly influences on his style.
Asked to describe his artistic inspirations in 2013, Hubbell told The San Diego Union-Tribune that he ired the principles of Frank Lloyd Wright, the expressionism of Antoni Gaudí (creator of the fantastical Sagrada Familia cathedral and Park Güell in Barcelona), the abstract forms of African sculpture and the meditative qualities of Buddhism.
After marrying the former Anne Stewart in 1958, he purchased the Santa Ysabel land just outside of Julian and built them a one-room cabin. In the years that followed, their property — much of which he hand-built with their four sons — would grow to 14 separate buildings that were connected by meandering paths. In 1968, the Hubbells’ home was featured in the Los Angeles Times, and was later the subject of a book by Otto Rigan in 1979.
Hubbell became well known for his nontraditional stained glass works, curved metal art for gates and sculpture, hand-carved wood doors, vibrantly colorful tile mosaics and imaginatively designed structures. In the 1970s, he created windows, doors and sculpture for the now-shuttered Triton restaurants in San Diego and Cardiff. And in the 1990s, he helped design and build a kindergarten in Tijuana named Colegio La Esperanza, where he volunteered his time and talent for nearly 30 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsVcby7hDw8
One of Hubbell’s best-known commissions is the whimsical Sea Ranch Chapel in Northern California, which was pictured on the cover of Progressive Architecture Magazine in 1985.
Preservation architect Wayne Donaldson, who is chairman emeritus of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation in Washington, D.C., said his chief goal is to get the Hubbell property added to the National of Historic Places.
“Jim was the only person I know that could reach into my heart and pull out my soul,” Donaldson said. “He was a very special spirit.”
Donaldson was a 22-year-old architecture student at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the mid-1960s when he first met Hubbell and was immediately impressed by his kindness, humility, curiosity and imagination.
“He pulled together all types of people, no matter their political persuasion. There was no border between Jim and other folks,” said Donaldson, of Sacramento. “I’ve never met anyone who didn’t like his art. The first time they see it, they’re blown away and they have to rush out and tell somebody about it because it’s so special. And I’ve never seen anyone more prolific than Jim. There was nothing he couldn’t do.”
Hubbell was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease several years ago and it gradually reduced his ability to paint and sculpt. Instead, he sketched rough designs in charcoal that his studio artisans finished under his supervision. He also continued to help Gerdes curate exhibits of his work right up to the end of his life. He is now represented in the four-part exhibit “James Hubbell: Architecture of Jubilation,” on display through Aug. 4 at the San Diego Central Library and its Scripps Miramar Ranch, Mission Valley and Otay Mesa-Nestor branches.
In an email to the Union-Tribune in September 2022, Hubbell wrote about how he always looked for the positive after every setback.
After the Cedar Fire roared through the property in 2003 and destroyed half of the buildings, Hubbell turned many of the burned items into art, like shattered dinner plates that became part of a mosaic. He also repurposed a Madonna statue that lost its head into an outdoor planter (with flowers sprouting from her neck cavity).
“I often tell students not to worry about what you’ve lost. Just use what you’ve got,” Hubbell said. “The ‘Headless Madonna’ reminds us that disasters can also release potential. Like the Madonna, I don’t have the use of my hands, but I’m using what I have and being open to change. Change is scary, but it can be a good thing. Even in the darkest of times, seeds of hope are planted.”
Hubbell is survived by his wife, Anne; sons Torrey, Drew, Lauren and Brennan; three daughters-in-law, six grandchildren and one great-grandchild. In his memory, the Ilan-Lael Foundation has established The James Hubbell Memorial Art Fund. A public memorial service is in the planning stages.
Hubbell talked openly in recent years about his death, which he saw as a natural process that all living creatures should face with an open heart. As a result, he left poetic written instructions for the dispersal of his cremains.
“Upon death, my ashes will be scattered from the hillside chapel of our property that faces southwest toward the San Dieguito River. Water from Volcan Mountain follows this river about fifty-five miles before emptying into the Pacific Ocean. My ashes containing my life’s elements will thus be united with the Pacific,” he wrote, adding that from there his ashes would follow the ocean current to South Korea’s Jeju Island and eventually end up as grist for a pearl in an oyster yet unborn. “There, the circle of one life is complete.”
