The Personal Residence of Architect Loch Crane
Originally constructed in 1964 as the personal residence of Loch Crane, an apprentice of renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the Loch Crane residence remained vacant on the San Diego coast following the architect’s passing in 2016. With extensive termite damage amounting to over a million dollars, the project aimed to rejuvenate and enhance the home’s inherent geometric beauty while preserving its essence.

Integration of Design: At the core of the project lies the intersection of design excellence and sustainable performance. The design exemplifies the firm’s ability to embrace and express the client’s aspirations while honoring the property’s heritage. By revitalizing the midcentury modern home, the design team successfully prepared it for a new family, preserving its finest elements while infusing modern sensibilities.
The unmistakably Californian character of the house takes full advantage of the coastal views, incorporating new outdoor living spaces, expansive geometric windows that welcome abundant sunlight, and an abundance of greenery visible both from inside and outside. The restoration work focused on reinstating the original exterior aesthetics, accompanied by the addition of a primary bedroom, while completely rehabilitating the interior. The transformation expanded the house from its original two-bedroom layout to a four-bedroom dwelling, with family living areas thoughtfully distributed across three levels. A lower-level primary bedroom addition was carefully designed to maintain unobstructed sightlines from the rest of the home, featuring modern low-carbon siding material.
The home’s ambiance promotes relaxed outdoor living with tasteful lighting, gently sloping roofs that radiate a warm glow, and exposed concrete and wood paneling that exudes natural beauty. The geometric wooden front of the fireplace, complemented by concrete accents, creates an inviting space for fireside conversations, while ample windows connect this living area with the surrounding environment.
Through the integration of sustainable and thoughtful design practices, the Loch Crane residence represents a seamless fusion of design excellence and sustainable performance.
The project successfully revitalized the home, ensuring its timeless appeal and adaptability to modern living while respecting its architectural heritage.

Sustainable Performance: The project showcases a commitment to sustainability by focusing on the rehabilitation process, resulting in a lower carbon footprint. By reusing original resources, such as renovating, remodeling, and repurposing existing buildings, the project significantly reduces embodied emissions compared to new construction. Reusing buildings has become an increasingly important strategy for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and the project highlights the value of saving existing structures rather than demolishing them. Additionally, reusing buildings offers the opportunity for deep energy upgrades, leading to a reduction in current operating emissions and long-term sustainability.
The project’s emphasis on reusing the buildings’ foundations and structure is particularly noteworthy, as these components typically contribute the highest percentage of embodied carbon. By repurposing existing framing, concrete paving, and slab foundations, the project significantly minimizes embodied carbon emissions when compared to new construction. Studies indicate that reuse and renovation with system upgrades generally result in 50% to 75% less embodied carbon emissions.
Embodied Carbon: The project effectively utilizes the existing framing for 2,200 sq. ft. walls and roof, minimizing the need for new construction materials and reducing embodied carbon. Additionally, the project makes use of the concrete paving and slab foundation, avoiding unnecessary carbon emissions associated with their replacement.
Deep Operational Carbon

Improvements: To further enhance sustainability, the project incorporates various measures to reduce operational carbon emissions. These include enhancing the building’s insulation, ensuring it is ready for the installation of photovoltaic (PV) panels, implementing LED lighting, utilizing electric appliances, employing mini-split heating and air-conditioning systems, utilizing a tankless water heater, and incorporating daylight design principles. These measures collectively contribute to lowering the building’s energy consumption and carbon footprint during its operation.

Water Savings: In addition to its focus on carbon reduction, the project also prioritizes water conservation. It achieves this by converting all fixtures and fittings to low-flow and low-use alternatives. This proactive approach to water efficiency helps minimize the building’s overall water consumption, promoting sustainable water management.
By considering both embodied carbon and operational carbon emissions, as well as implementing water-saving measures, the project showcases a holistic approach to sustainability. Its emphasis on reusing existing resources and adopting environmentally-friendly practices contributes to a more sustainable built environment.

PARTIAL BIOGRAPHY OF LOCH CRANE
LOCH CRANE’S EARLY LIFE: 1922-1945
Loch Crane was born on December 21, 1922 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His family relocated to Point Loma in 1929. As a young man, Crane was celebrated as a talented artist and craftsman with an eye towards detail. During high school, Crane interned in the offices of well-known San Diego architects Richard Requa and William Templeton Johnson. With the help of a portfolio from Templeton Johnson’s office and a $1,000 tuition check, Crane became a Taliesin Fellow by April 1941. He formally terminated his Taliesin Fellowship in April 1942, a year after he began, to join the Army Air Corp. Crane served throughout the remainder of World War II and remained in Japan as a flight instructor through 1945.

LOCH CRANE’S ARCHITECTURAL CAREER: 1946 – 1977
Crane returned to San Diego 1946 and founded his first firm. He was not yet a licensed architect and so billed himself as a Building Designer. The early years of his career were characterized by modern, residential projects for private clients and small, professional buildings for prominent San Diego builders Bob Golden and Gene Trepte.

Crane was prolific enough in his early years to draw the concerned attention of the City of San Diego. Crane was producing a large volume of architecture without a formal architectural education or State licensure. In response, Crane enrolled in the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1954. Crane completed the five-year program in three years, graduating Cum Laude in 1957.

By 1961, Crane had returned to San Diego, finally become a licensed architect, and established the firm of Loch Crane & Associates. He picked up where he had left off, acquiring both residential and commercial contracts throughout San Diego and nearby cities. He quickly became a well-cited, local expert in Modern architecture. His opinions and his work appeared regularly in the San Diego Union starting in 1960 and continuing into the 1980s. He gave his opinion on the Modern housing trend in 1960 and 1961, on designing Modern churches in 1961 and 1967, and on the design of Modern entrances into homes in 1966. Homes he designed were featured four times in 1963 alone with further, regular features between 1964 and 1980. His work won a number of awards, including House Beautiful Magazine’s Home of the Year in 1963 for 1475 Berenda Place and the Masonry Group Award in 1965 for his own home at 5950 Avenida Chamnez.

CHARACTER-DEFINING THEMES OF A LOCH CRANE DESIGN
Loch Crane’s catalog of works ranges widely in design, scale, building type, and location. Nevertheless, Crane’s work can be characterized by a handful of uniting elements and ideas that he developed during the course of his career. Not all of Crane’s notable works will contain all of these elements; however, any work of Crane’s that includes one or more of these elements may represent significant aspect of his work as a Master Architect.

Modernist Design
Crane’s work is undeniably Modern in nature. He was widely cited as an expert in Modern architecture in the 1960s and 1970s, and his known works show distinctive elements of numerous Modernist sub-styles as identified in the Modernism Context. Many of his works can be categorized as post-and-beam or Contemporary, but many do not fit neatly into any one category, since these styles were codified decades after his designs were constructed.
A visual survey of his known and surviving projects shows that many of the more abstract ideas and theories of Modern design can be clearly seen in his work. He preferred to work with new materials, such as concrete block, and vertical wood siding or screen walls. His projects frequently show expressed structure, have low-pitched roofs, and shield the building from the street for privacy while opening upper levels and/or the rear of the building to views or private yards. All these elements are key to the Modernist movement, especially in the sphere of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Japanese Influences
Crane’s time in Japan would be formative for his architecture career. Crane made connections between the traditional architecture of Japan and Frank Lloyd Wright’s philosophies about nature, materials, and design. He saw overlap between the worlds of traditional Japanese buildings and modern American design in elements such as protruding rafter tails, natural construction materials, and site-sensitive design.

The Expandable House
During his time at Taliesin, Crane had experimented with an idea for an “expandable house” that could be built in stages to adapt to a growing family. He successfully tested the idea at 3411 Udall Street in Point Loma, his and Clare’s private home, in 1948, at the very beginning of his professional career. He repeated the approach with his brother Russell’s house at 3344 Poe Street. Crane referred to Russell’s house as “the bachelor’s quarters.” When Russell married and started a family, Loch executed his expandable house model and transformed the bachelor’s quarters into a family home by adding square footage for bedrooms, bathrooms, and supplementary living space. His last known work, his family home at 5950 Avenida Chamnez, is perhaps the best example of this expandable model. He expanded the house regularly from the 1960s through the early 2000s.

The Hexagon
Frank Lloyd Wright was known to experiment with hexagonal shapes in some of his work. Therefore, Crane likely picked up on the idea during his time at Taliesin. The hexagonal module, essentially a grouping of six triangular modules, was also inherently expandable and therefore complimented Crane’s ideas for an Expandable House. This design language was used to the greatest effect at 5950 Avenida Chamnez, Crane’s personal home. The home was first designed in the shape of a full hexagon and underwent numerous expansions that followed the house’s original triangular module grid.