San Diego can step inside the Middle Ages this fall, one careful line at a time. The Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park is showing Abbeys, Barns, and Churches: Drawings of Medieval Architecture by Ernest Born, an intimate exhibition of more than 20 meticulous studies in ink, chalk, pastel and pencil, on view from October 7, 2026 through February 2027.
California architect Ernest A. Born (1898-1992) spent decades traveling through Western Europe to document stone barns, sprawling abbeys and small parish churches built between the 10th and 15th centuries – structures raised with ingenuity and remarkable handcraft long before modern technology. The drawings offer a warmer Middle Ages than the crumbling castles of movies: buildings made to endure, and built to last for centuries.
Born is a fascinating guide. Trained at UC Berkeley, he contributed to the construction of the Empire State Building in New York before returning to California, and with medieval historian Walter Horn he published the celebrated multi-volume study The Plan of Saint Gall in 1979. Many drawings in this show come from that project and from his earlier study of the barns of Beaulieu Abbey. All the works on view are lent by the University of San Diego, and Born spent his final years with family in San Diego – so the exhibition also celebrates a quietly overlooked figure in this region’s own architectural story.
Set among the Timken’s medieval and early Renaissance paintings, the drawings invite the slow, close looking the museum does best. Happy City News recommends pairing them with a stroll through Balboa Park afterward.
Photo: Timken Museum of Art
