Leading Firm Moving in a New Direction

SAN DIEGO —  Last May, there was a changing of the guard at one of San Diego’s largest architectural offices. Architect Frank Hope Jr. and his brother, Charles, an engineer, handed over day-to-day control of the company, started by their father, Frank Sr., in 1928, to a four-man team headed by the new company president, Robert Bell.

In the 18 months since he left Chicago to become director of design at Hope Architects & Engineers, Bell has given the firm a bold new direction by hiring a crew of designers away from some of the nation’s top architectural offices.

Bell has put his eager young architects to work on a variety of projects, including an addition to Seaport Village and a 47-story high-rise in downtown San Diego, a 7-acre Camp Snoopy theme park in the middle of a giant shopping mall in Minneapolis, the $100-million Riverside County Hospital and additions to the UC Riverside campus.

“I won’t set a direction on every project,” Bell said. “I’ll comment, but I’ve gathered very talented young people with diverse approaches, and I’ll turn them loose.”

But that’s not to say Bell doesn’t have a grand scheme.

“Regional modernism comes close to describing what I’m after,” he said. “It’s one thing with post-modernism to pick out Ionic or Corinthian columns and incorporate them into designs which could be placed in almost any U.S. city. It’s another thing to pick up on specific regional elements. I’m after Southern California architecture, something that in today’s terms respects what’s gone on in this part of the country.”

Bell studied at the University of Pennsylvania under Louis Kahn, who designed the Salk Institute in La Jolla and several critically acclaimed buildings throughout the country.

Bell’s impressions of downtown San Diego architecture are telling.

He likes the new Symphony Towers on B Street, designed by Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM), a large company with offices in several U.S. cities. He sees the project as a step up in the quality of downtown high-rises.

He is much less impressed by Great American Plaza, a 40-story high-rise under construction on Broadway, bearing the glitzy signature of Chicago architect Helmut Jahn. Bell considers it “a building he could have done for any city in the U.S.”

With 70 employees and an increasing workload, the firm’s prosperity curve is on an upswing. The firm went through a low in the early ‘80s, after peaking with 110 employees.

Bell’s recruiting strategy has been to lure new people from what he calls the “name brand” architecture companies, ones like SOM, I.M. Pei and Cesar Pelli. He said they seem best able to handle the pressure and complications that come with large corporate projects.

“I guess the building of a new design team is what’s exciting,” said Daniel Marks, 24, a designer recruited by Bell from the Chicago office of SOM. Among other recent hires are three architects from SOM offices and one from Harry Weese & Associates.

In 1981, the Hope company had offices in San Diego, San Francisco and Saudi Arabia. Restrictive zoning hit the City by the Bay, the Saudi government started using architects with majority Saudi ownership and the Hope company found itself scaled down to a staff of 50 in San Diego.

Hope’s image suffered, too. In the past eight years, the firm received only one award from the local American Institute of Architects chapter during its annual awards program: a special 15-Year Award of Honor given for the design of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, completed in 1967.

For a time, Frank Hope Jr. refused to enter the awards program because he felt the juries were biased in favor of small, radically designed projects by young architects.

Among Hope’s other significant pre-Bell projects are the federal courts and office complex at Broadway and 1st Avenue in downtown San Diego, the first tower of the Inter-Continental Hotel (now Marriott) and the Columbia Centre high-rise (now First National Bank). The last two were both designed by C.W. Kim, who left Hope to open his own office in 1984.

Bell’s design credits include the 28-story Time-Life building in downtown Chicago, which received a national honor award from the American Institute of Architects in 1974, a 60-story office tower in Kansas City, high-rise condominiums in Austin, Tex., and an unbuilt proposal for a 210-story Chicago World Trade Center, which would have been the world’s tallest building.

Bell seems to have stepped into the picture at just the right time. While Frank Hope Jr. and Chuck Hope were formulating plans to retire by 1992, Bell and his wife, Judith, had decided to move from Chicago to Southern California. He contacted several San Diego companies and felt the opportunity looked best at Hope.

His resume includes experience at some of the nation’s top firms, including Harry Weese and Associates in Chicago and Ellerbe Architects in Minneapolis. He has been a principal in companies in Minneapolis and Dallas.

At 53, Bell is the oldest member of the new management team, which also includes director of architecture Bruce Oveson, 36; director of marketing Allan Flanders, 44, and director of engineering Don Allison, 47.

“I plan to get involved with the community, but my responsibility, and I enjoy it most of all, is designing,” the soft-spoken Bell said.

Some of the company’s big jobs were started before Bell’s arrival, but he quickly became involved. The design of Roger Morris Plaza, on two downtown San Diego blocks between Harbor Drive and Market Street, across from the Marriott Hotel, had been in progress for months before the Centre City Development Corp., the city of San Diego’s redevelopment arm, announced plans for a “linear park” along Harbor Drive.

A scheme proposed by landscape architects Peter Walker and Martha Schwartz was selected in a competition. The park will cut across the back of the Roger Morris project, which will be anchored by a 47-story hotel/apartment tower.

Some architects and developers would have seen the new park as an annoying imposition, but Hope made the most of it and hired Walker and Schwartz to landscape their project in keeping with the park. Walker suggested moving the 500-foot tower closer to Harbor Drive, and the architects agreed.

In keeping with the idea of “regional” architecture, the tower is topped with a dome that relates to domes on several other San Diego towers.

The design process for Roger Morris Plaza typifies differences Bell sees between San Diego and large cities like Chicago.

“Chicago is more of a developers’ city,” he said. “They can do more of what they want. In California, there are more community boards.” A downtown Residents Advisory Board and CCDC Marina Subcommittee both reviewed the Roger Morris project.

“You run the danger of design by committee, but I’m old enough and scarred enough to know it’s not just the architect who has a say as to what a building looks like.”

The new phase of Seaport Village will preserve the 1939 police station on Market Street designed by brothers Charles and Edward Quayle with Adam Treganza, a Spanish Colonial revival building.

Although the developers have been taken to task by politicians and critics for the bulk of the proposed parking garage, the complex itself, still in design, appears to be a tasteful blend of old and new elements.

Among the more unusual projects in the works at Hope are a film and video production complex designed for the Scientology motivational movement. The project, modeled after a Scottish village, is being built in Hemet, just west of Idyllwild.

Hope is also designing a new Southwest Justice Center in Riverside County and a Heritage of the Americas museum to be built on the campus of Cuyamaca College in East County.