Architects Jolted by Rising Convention Center Costs

When the top architects of Deems/Lewis & Partners sat down more than two years ago to decide whether to enter the design competition for San Diego’s waterfront convention center, Ward Wyatt Deems voted “no.”

It was an act of uncharacteristic restraint for a man invariably described by friends and peers as one of the city’s most aggressive salesmen and boosters of architecture--a man whose outsized ambition and self-acknowledged ego might have been expected to draw him inexorably to the challenge of the biggest and most important public works project in San Diego’s history.

But it was Bill Lewis--the more retiring, less visible name partner in the firm--who insisted an architectural combine of Deems/Lewis’ prominence simply had to vie for the assignment.

“Because we’re design-conscious, because we’re concerned about the environment, we felt we had to compete in that competition,” Lewis, 55, wistfully recalled last week.

Deems lost the vote, but won the competition. And that victory has thrust Deems/Lewis into an environment of finger-pointing, name-calling and blame-laying over a building project that has become a financial debacle--a project that threatens to erase the image of business-wise architectural artistry that Deems has crafted in 27 years as the firm’s spokesman and promoter.

“You feel like you’re hanging in the wind,” said Deems, 56, a white-haired, ruddy-faced man more accustomed to taking control of a situation than taking direction from people who know less about his business than he does. “The port and the city are sort of perfectly willing to let you hang up there like a pinata .”

Deems-bashing became a favorite political party game in San Diego almost as soon as Deems/Lewis, in tandem with internationally acclaimed architect Arthur Erickson and a Seattle firm of convention center and stadium designers, outpointed four competitors in April, 1984, to win the juried competition to build a convention center at Navy Field.

Through months of drumbeating for a non-binding referendum on the center, civic leaders had told voters that San Diego could build a “world-class” convention hall for $95 million. The source of the figure--architect Frank Hope Jr., who helped develop the estimate in connection with the promotion of developer Doug Manchester’s waterfront hotel projects--now acknowledges it had little relevance to the building the San Diego Unified Port District eventually decided to construct.

Deems, managing partner of the three-firm joint venture and its point man in public debate, told the port as much from the start of his association with the project.

Deems/Lewis entered the competition with a design whose estimated cost was $97.4 million. By August, 1984, Deems was telling the port the price would be closer to $101 million, because of unforeseen non-construction costs and port-approved design improvements needed to bring the building up to industry standards.

In October, 1984, exterior enhancements and further port-approved upgrades within the building boosted the price tag to $125 million--and Deems told an abashed Port Commission it had been unrealistic to ever believe the world-class convention center could be built for less.

Each price increase got a rise out of Deems’ critics. Architect Joseph Martinez, a runner-up in the design competition, called the escalating cost “a bait and switch.”

Maureen O’Connor--a port commissioner when the project got the go-ahead and now the odds-on favorite to be San Diego’s next mayor--repeatedly complained that voters had been misled.

The Deems pinata nonetheless remained intact until this March, when the port opened contractors’ bids on the massive construction job.

The lowest bid was $22 million over both the port’s and the architects’ estimates. At $123.9 million, the low bid for construction alone would have nearly consumed the Port District’s budget for the entire project, which also includes excavation, furnishings, insurance and other so-called “soft” items. The total cost of the convention center, Port Commission Chairman William Rick estimated, was closing in on $160 million--68% more than the old, much-touted, $95 million price tag.

The critics went to town on Mr. Deems.

“Experts throughout the country said it couldn’t be done at the cost the architect told the commission,” candidate O’Connor told a reporter. “The mistake was in the beginning when the architect was not held accountable for the price.”

Gadfly attorney Michael Aguirre filed a lawsuit accusing the port of failing to protect taxpayers’ interests by not taking legal action against the architects to rein in the project’s costs. Acting Mayor Ed Struiksma and the port each formed a task force to determine what had gone wrong.

Placed on the defensive--a career that has gone from success to success had left him unprepared for the position--Deems is both retreating and lashing back.

Never one to shy from publicity, Deems has begun insisting that his name has been tied too closely to this particular project. “To single out one firm or one individual simply because he’s local or accessible in my view is unfair,” he said.

But as the designated mouthpiece for the job, Deems remains deeply engaged in the rhetorical battle over the center’s future.

Remarkably, he insists that each whack at his firm’s reputation and integrity, each raised eyebrow, each insult or accusation, has done more to harm the city of San Diego and his critics than to tarnish Deems/Lewis’ record.

“They’ve got to get their pounds of flesh and wallow in self-pity and self-flagellation,” he said last week, a day after the Port Commission voted to rebid the project, delaying the start of construction at least six months and the projected opening of the center until 1989. “I find great concern for the future of this city if those kind of people end up in power. That’s not what San Diego needs.”

Ward Deems and Bill Lewis thought they knew what San Diego needed in 1959, when they drove down from Los Angeles to open the architectural office that soon came to bear their names: It needed architecture of ambition and imagination.

“We didn’t see a lot of great architecture being produced here,” recalled Deems, who like Lewis was six years out of architecture school at the University of Southern California. “There weren’t very many large firms, and we wanted a practice in major work.”

Architects in San Diego did not bid for jobs or try to grab each others’ customers with fancy presentations, said Hope, whose family firm was and is San Diego’s preeminent architecture office.

“We were basically a bunch of local yokels,” Hope acknowledged.

Deems was among a handful of businessmen-architects who began to change all that. “We tried to bring San Diego from the early 20th Century into, let’s say, at least the mid-part,” Deems said.

He had been an extrovert among the aesthetes in architecture school, recalls classmate Clinton Marr, now an architect in Riverside. And in San Diego, Deems used that outgoing manner to woo clients and build an aggressive image for his little firm, housed in a basement office in the Travolator Motor Hotel.

The competition was floored.

“We weren’t ready for it,” Hope said. “We didn’t understand that level of competitiveness and that level of sophistication. Not everybody admired it, because he stepped on a lot of toes. He took clients away from us that we felt were improperly taken away.”

Deems/Lewis wrenched clients from other firms, too. Within a year, it had won its first award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for the El Cortez Convention Center, behind the El Cortez hotel. It was owned by Deems’ brash landlord, Harry Handlery, who took the young designers under his wing. Commissions followed for downtown office buildings and Navy projects.

Deems, meantime, was cementing his ties to the civic and industry establishments that the firm would be dependent upon for references and jobs. He joined the board of San Diegans Inc., the downtown booster group whose membership includes the city’s leading bankers and developers. He took charge of the local AIA chapter, serving as president in 1963 and ascending to the presidency of the state AIA council in 1975.

The firm weathered a lean construction period in the early 1970s, getting its first taste of controversy with its design of the main post office on Midway Drive. Built in an old river bed, the huge concrete structure was designed to settle gradually but caused great anxiety when it did. A black subcontractor, an early benefactor of minority set-aside programs, was fired part way through the project and waged a long, public battle to be compensated.

Still, Deems/Lewis emerged with its reputation intact, winning an AIA award of merit for the building in 1972.

Major commissions stacked up 10 or 15 deep in the firm’s new, larger offices at 4th Avenue and Laurel Street, a nondescript, white cinder-block bank building that, Deems is careful to note, the firm did not design.

With Deems as chief salesman, Lewis as chief designer and a third partner, John McKinley, running the business, Deems/Lewis emerged in the ‘70s as one of San Diego’s biggest architectural firms.

It built a skyscraper downtown for San Diego Federal Savings, now Great American First Savings Bank, at 6th Avenue and B Street. For Industrial Indemnity Co., Deems/Lewis wedged a concrete office building into a Mission Valley hillside, let the surrounding landscape overgrow it and ended up with the structure both Deems and Lewis consider their finest piece of work.

In Del Mar, the firm completed one of several major school projects, the award-winning Torrey Pines High School--a job the partners took personally, because both Lewis’ and McKinley’s children attended the school.

Deems/Lewis undertook urban design studies, too--including the feasibility study for a San Diego convention center, a project the city had flirted with but done nothing to bring to fruition since the late 1940s.

Along the way, Deems left a clear, consistent impression on the people he encountered.

“Ward has a very strong personality,” said Jim Still, president of Nielsen Construction Co., using a phrase that figures in virtually every description of Deems. “In my mind, he’s one of the premiere architectural salespeople in his profession.”

“He sells the idea of good architecture--and that he’s the one to do it,” architect Robert Mosher said.

“He can be criticized as silver-tongued, but it’s with good reason he has a silver tongue,” added architect Neil Larson, one of three Deems/Lewis principals who quit the firm in early 1984 to start their own practice.

“He expresses himself as he sees it,” said former City Councilman Tom Hom, who serves with Deems on the board of directors of the Bank of San Diego. “Sometimes it may be a little too forward to some people. He drives to the heart of an issue rather than dance around it.”

But the line between self-assurance and arrogance, between aggressiveness and pushiness, is a thin one--and Deems has rubbed some San Diego influentials the wrong way.

“Ward could come across to architects and other people not up to his energy level as domineering and not particularly likeable,” Hope said.

There is no doubt, Hope adds, that the residue of that ill-feeling has been amply stirred up by the convention center crisis.

“There probably are people out there saying, ‘Thank God they finally nailed (him).’ ”

All things considered, 1986 has not been a very good year for Deems and his firm.

In February, Deems/Lewis was hit with a lawsuit alleging fraud and misrepresentation in its dealings with Charles Del Valle, a developer who had plans to renovate the 50-year-old building at 5th Avenue and Broadway that formerly housed Walker Scott’s downtown department store.

In the suit, filed in San Diego County Superior Court, Del Valle said he paid the firm more than $74,000 to estimate the cost of converting the structure into an office building. But Deems/Lewis’ estimate of $2.84 million, the suit alleges, was $1.4 million less than the lower of two prices Del Valle was able to obtain from contractors, and Del Valle was forced to abandon the project.

Lewis counters that Del Valle upgraded the project between the time the architects made their cost estimate and contractors were asked to specify their maximum, guaranteed price for the job.

Yet David Herring, Del Valle’s attorney, hopes to show that his client’s project and the convention center cost overruns may be indicative of a pattern in the architects’ work.

Other critics also have suggested the firm has a tendency to be loose with cost estimates.

“Mr. Deems has a history of going over the budget,” mayoral hopeful O’Connor told a reporter in March. “He did the same thing when he was involved with the trolley.”

She was referring to Deems/Lewis’ $10,700 bill for some hurry-up graphics work for the Metropolitan Transit Development Board in 1979, when O’Connor was serving on the board.

Deems had estimated that the work would cost about $3,000, and MTDB’s general manager had hand-written a notation on the agency’s contract with Deems/Lewis that payment under no circumstances would exceed $5,000. Later, MTDB staff recommended a compromise price of about $6,900, but at O’Connor’s urging, Deems/Lewis was paid only $5,000, according to board records.

Deems and Lewis are outraged by insinuations that the firm’s construction projects are prone to cost overruns.

O’Connor’s comment is “as close to slander as anything I can think of,” Deems said last week. “Anybody reading that, having had the convention center bids come in, would have assumed automatically that (she was) talking about building budgets, construction budgets”--not the cost of a minor graphic design job.

Rather, the architects insist the firm’s 400 projects before the convention center were unblemished by significant cost overruns--a claim borne out by a spot survey of Deems/Lewis’ generally satisfied clients.

Still, Deems and Lewis did confirm reports that another recent client has engaged them in a dispute over fees and construction costs.

According to the architects, the San Diego Symphony is refusing to pay $179,000 of their bill of about $500,000 for designing the renovation of the Fox Theatre at 7th Avenue and B Street in downtown San Diego. The old structure was reopened Nov. 2 as the new Symphony Hall.

“They stopped paying when they reached the number we had in our first proposal to them, prior to the time they totally changed the scope of the work and increased the budget for construction,” Deems said. Sources involved in the renovation confirmed that midway through the planning stages, the symphony increased its budget for the project from $2.8 million to $4.75 million.

Deems said the symphony has accused the firm of charging it for overtime from other Deems/Lewis projects; he contends that project architects donated unpaid Sundays to the acclaimed renovation job.

Symphony President M.B. (Det) Merryman declined last week to answer detailed questions about the dispute.

“To the best of my knowledge, Ward Deems has been paid the entire amount of the called-for contract fees,” he said. “There is an outstanding balance which is not included in the contract fees which, it is my understanding, is currently under discussion.”

The architects, who take pride in their infrequent visits to court, nonetheless vowed to sue the symphony if that is what is needed to collect the full fee.

“It has not been resolved, and it’s going to be--whatever it takes, legally or otherwise,” Deems said.

It is imperative that all of the parties concerned with this project deal in absolute reality, utilizing all of the expertise and comparative knowledge available within our team to validate and assure that the optimum project is created. This effort must be conducted early on in the process in order to assure that there are “no surprises” of any significant magnitude when the project is well advanced.

Deems/Lewis and its associates issued that caution in early 1984 in the text of their application to the Port District for the convention center job.

While the architects insist they have kept faith with their pledge to deal in “absolute reality,” they acknowledge their team made a major error by missing the construction cost estimate by $22 million and dealt a major psychological blow to the project by letting the cost drift upward.

“Somewhere, somehow, people more knowledgeable about this than I came up with a number,” Lewis said with a touch of sarcasm--a reference to the early cost estimate of $95 million. “And one of the most horrible things that can be done is to take people’s expectation level and then drop it somewhere.”

The shock waves of those dashed expectations are washing over the Deems/Lewis firm. So far, one potential client has dropped Deems/Lewis from contention for a commission, apparently because of the controversy, Lewis said.

Other clients “are beginning to wonder, because they sometimes believe what’s in the paper entirely,” Deems added. “So we’re concerned about our professional reputation.”

Deems and Lewis concur in other architects’ estimation that a total redesign of the convention center, without an increase in the three-firm design team’s $7 million fee, would shut down not only their firm, but probably Erickson’s and the Seattle partnership as well. The limited redesign that the Port District apparently will require will squeeze almost all profit for the architects out of the project, Deems said.

The highly charged public scrutiny of the project, meantime, has begun taking a personal toll on Deems/Lewis’ staff and their families. Lewis said his wife, Joanne, refused to attend a dinner party a few days ago, after reading a news article containing remarks critical of the firm.

Admittedly, the partners knew a massive public building project like the convention center would expose them to criticism when it hit the inevitable bumps on the path to completion.

But Deems is emphatic in saying he never anticipated the depth of deprecation he has faced as an architect--not when he voted against pursuing the convention center job, and certainly not when, as a 10th-grader at Eliot Jr. High School in Altadena, he had to declare an academic major.

“In thumbing through books, I looked at forestry and architecture,” Deems recalled. “I picked architecture because Mother, I think, said forest rangers don’t make a lot of money. They’re out in the woods, they get to fish, but they don’t make much money.

“I’d rather be fishing.”