San Diego Skyline

San Diego's downtown sits on a narrow shelf between the bay and the Interstate, which is why the skyline reads as a single dense wall when you see it from across the harbor instead of the sprawling cluster most American downtowns form. There is almost no depth to it — the towers stand shoulder to shoulder along the waterfront, and the ones set back even a block or two already look smaller than they are.

That compression is the thing a model has to preserve. Spread the buildings out evenly and the silhouette stops looking like San Diego and starts looking like a generic waterfront skyline. The real city is a tight line of towers with the bay flat in front of it.

One America Plaza is the tower most people picture when they think of downtown San Diego — a 500-foot shaft that steps back in stages to a pointed glass crown, designed by the same firm behind some of Dallas's best-known towers. It was built directly above the Santa Fe Depot, the city's working train and trolley station, so the base of the tower and the base of the model both sit at street level where the transit actually runs.

The stepped crown is the detail that gets lost first when a skyline is simplified. Flatten it to a plain box and the tower stops being identifiable; keep the setbacks and the taper and it is unmistakably the building locals use to find downtown from the freeway.

The Manchester Grand Hyatt's two harborside towers — one noticeably taller than the other, both finishing in a stepped, tiered top — anchor the skyline's southern end and are the pair most visible from the water, where the city is most often photographed. Set back from the waterfront cluster, St. Joseph's Cathedral's twin Gothic spires break the glass-and-steel pattern with stone, the one pre-modern silhouette in an otherwise contemporary downtown.

Getting the relationship right — hard glass towers at the harbor, a stone cathedral a block behind them — is what separates a San Diego model from any other West Coast waterfront skyline. The cathedral is small next to the towers, but it is the landmark that tells a local they're looking at their own city.