San Diego County's long renovation of the Administration Center has received a Richard H. Driehaus Foundation National Preservation Award, placing the working seat of county government among this year's projects recognized by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The honor arrives near the end of a renovation that began in 2019 and is expected to finish this fall.
The waterfront building opened in 1938 as a New Deal civic project approved by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its red tile roof, pale walls and tower have remained a visual hinge between downtown and the bay even as the systems behind them aged. By 2015, the County says, the 315,000-square-foot structure was significantly outdated. Officials chose to repair the landmark rather than replace it.
That choice produced more than 20 phases of work inside a building that continued to serve the public. Crews replaced or upgraded lighting, fire alarms, sprinklers, heating and cooling equipment, security systems, elevators and an emergency generator. They added seismic reinforcement and accessibility improvements, restored historic windows and modernized the Board of Supervisors chamber. The project page says roof replacement was completed in April 2025 and the generator in September 2025.
Preservation here is not a still photograph. The building must hold public meetings, house employees and receive residents who arrive for records, taxes or government business. Keeping those functions in place while walls, windows and mechanical systems moved through separate construction phases made the project an exercise in sequencing as much as design. It also preserved the civic address rather than asking the institution to abandon it.
The Driehaus recognition is one of six awards the County lists for the project. Save Our Heritage Organisation honored the work and project manager Kathryn Moroz through its People in Preservation awards. The City of San Diego, AIA San Diego, Engineering News-Record's California region and the Society of American Registered Architects also recognized preservation, renovation or adaptive-reuse aspects of the job.
Awards do not answer every project question. The County's announcement does not give a final cost, summarize change orders or compare the completed schedule with the estimate approved in 2019. Its construction page still describes completion as expected in fall 2026. A national honor evaluates preservation work; it does not replace the accounting residents need for a multi-year public project.
What can be seen in the scope is a decision about continuity. Seismic work and fire-life-safety systems address risks that the 1938 structure was not built to modern standards to withstand. LED lighting, HVAC work and Title 24 energy improvements change how the building operates. Window restoration, exterior painting and protection of significant interior features keep those upgrades from flattening the place into an anonymous office block.
The Administration Center was built to contain both city and county government; the city moved elsewhere in 1964, while the County remained. Nearly nine decades after the opening, the building's meaning comes partly from that accumulation of public use. The renovation award recognizes the craft of carrying an old civic landmark forward. The closing task is more prosaic and just as important: finish the remaining phases, disclose the final numbers and keep the restored building useful.