First, one of the many reasons I owe Mr. Michael J. Stepner, FAIA, FAICP, more than I can ever repay him is because he helped me find my professional path. My career as a planner started in Honolulu and then San Diego. I remember reading in the newspaper about Mr. Stepner being fired by a crude City Manager, Jack McGory, and then hired back by the city council, who overruled Jack, because he was rightfully leading San Diego towards its mixed-use, walkable, transit-supported future. Mike’s story resonated with me and that he had great credibility.

Second, here’s my new urbanist origin story. I was working for an architecture firm in Daegu, South Korea, during the Asian Tiger economic boom from ’93 – 97. And I found myself designing their first retirement communities using my suburban SoCal drive-thru lifestyle design tools. Traditionally, Korean elderly give their inheritance to their children when they moved in with their children’s family and they lived together in their compound housing (totally different from modern Western civilization tradition). And I designed their first car-oriented ‘silver towns’ because the middle class and car ownership was rising and they had money to put their elderly in homes. I met with the owners and looked into the sad eyes of one of the elderly men in the room who was envisioning his life isolated in a retirement box, alone.

I realized I was destroying a culture and that I had power as a designer and with great power comes great responsibility (credit: Stan Lee). So I knew I needed a deeper understanding of my craft and further my education. So I starting searching…

Around that same time, 1997, I took a job in Singapore to master plan port facilities with housing for imported labor… and none of those cheaper laborers imported had a car. These were exclusively walkable neighborhoods for 1,000s of workers. If the port facility was in Malaysia, they brought in Indian workers, if in the India, the brought in Philippine workers, and so on. Going into the interview, I remembered reading about Mike Stepner designing walkable, transit-station areas in San Diego and hiring Peter Calthorpe. So I bought Peter’s book, The Next American Metropolis, read it on the 30+ hour flight, copied his drawings into my notebook that I showed at the interview and got the job.

In Singapore, I found an older Calthorpe and Sim Van der Ryn book (’91), Sustainable Communities, and on the last two pages, they reference Leon Krier as the future guru of planning sustainable communities. Of course Leon is the godfather of the Congress for the New Urbanism because he taught at Yale when Peter, Andres Duany, Liz Plater-Zyberk, Stefanos Polyzoides, and Andrew Malick’s father were students there. And down I went, into the Leon Krier rabbit hole. Amazingly, within my own profession, I found the innately humane power in building walkable places that people loved. And it energized my career.

Unfortunately, in ’98 my father passed away but it left me enough money to go get my Masters in London (Univ. of Westminster, ’00) and put money down on a house in San Diego (’01). I went to London specifically to learn from Leon as I interned with the Prince’s Foundation, but I didn’t get to meet Leon…

Returning to San Diego, I worked on the County of SD General Plan Update and I’m asked by an NU colleague to go on a charrette in Chico, CA (’04), led by Leon Krier! My boss said I couldn’t take the time off to go so I quit the County and went (they hired me back as they didn’t expect me to quit). I purposely watched Leon and immediately sat at the same table as him, along with Geoff Dyer, who’d become my business partner and dearest friend. We sat there, stole scraps of drawings, listened, learned, copied, and soaked in the charrette that was a beautiful mess. Leon knew my London teachers and Princes Foundation colleagues and we became friends.

From there, Leon and I spent time together at New Urbanism’s annual Congresses. And when his book, The Architecture of Community, came out, he came to San Diego to lecture in Balboa Park, and we packed the Photograph Museum theater to the rafters, which was real meaningful to Leon at that time. He came back again a couple other times and together we drove my convertible Porsche across the desert for him to lecture at Univ. of Arizona. A memorable moment at one of his lectures in the NewSchool of Architecture, he asked the audience if anyone in the room had ever designed a tower… and in the front row, only Frank Wolden raised his hand!

We were able to spent a lot of time together then and during Covid, when he was trapped in his Cayala, Guatemala, studio for several months, we recorded these vlogs (and here) to talk about design, history, philosophy, and beyond.

And while in San Diego, he’s come up some of his more recent ideas that he’s published and we continue email debates on topics/issues, such as Corbu/Speer and vertical transects. His design idea for Coronado’s toll booth landing area is brilliant, using different height columns in a circle appear to ‘move’ when driving across the curve of the Coronado Bridge. 3-dimensional thinking. Here and here are a couple of links on his visits to San Diego.