The woman who designed many of Balboa Park’s gardens was nine or 10 years old when the head of Bay Park Elementary decided the trajectory of her life. “I would draw little downtowns, and one day the principal came by and said, ‘Let me see that,’” recalls Vicki Estrada, founder of Estrada Land Planning. “I thought I was in trouble. But she said, ‘You’re going to be an architect.’”
A decade or so later, Estrada was at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo studying architecture. During a weekend trip to Cal Poly Pomona, she attended a lecture on landscape design. “‘Imagine the earth as a canvas,” she remembers the lecturer saying. “Architects put dots on the canvas. Engineers connect the dots. But you are the only ones who can paint the entire canvas.’”
Estrada continues, “Something clicked. I realized what makes a city great—it’s not that building or that building. It’s what happens in between: the public realm, parks, streetscapes.”
She graduated in 1975 and worked at various firms for a decade before founding her own. Eventually growing to a 25-employee company, Estrada Land Planning was tapped to handle the Balboa Park Master Plan and map out the 20,000 acres that would become Otay Ranch. She designed dozens of city parks and began volunteering for myriad arts and charitable committees.
She was one of San Diego’s most active and engaged civic leaders—but much of the city didn’t fully know her story. After decades of being publicly perceived as a man, Estrada came out as a trans woman during a 2005 interview with KPBS. No doubt, she’s visible now: Last month, she was named Woman of the Year by State Assemblymember Chris Ward’s office for her contributions to San Diego’s landscape.
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Now 74, she continues to shape the look of the city, completing work on the Balboa Park Botanical Building’s $28 million renovation in 2024.
“I have shifted lately toward more of a nature-based design,” she adds. “If you look at an aerial photograph of San Diego, you see all this green; we have canyons. We have opportunity to really interface with nature. It’s my top priority—that, and the community, how people live, what their needs are. I think my job as a landscape architect to make San Diego as good as it can be.”
