Slim and Youthful Firm Aims at Quality : Design: Young management, leaner look helps once bloated architectural firm strive for creativity.

After getting paunchy during the building boom of the mid-’80s, several of the city’s largest architectural offices have scaled back, in keeping with today’s slower pace of construction.

Though smaller staffs were initially forced by economics, many offices have found that the streamlining seems to produce better architecture.

One such firm is BSHA, formerly Buss Silvers Hughes & Associates. By 1986, the office was bloated with 120 employees, with satellites in Colorado and Arizona. As the pace became hectic, design work grew inconsistent. Staff architects agree that the firm took on a work overload to feed the payroll and high overhead.

Now, with a staff of 75 and a significant shake-up in management, the company seems to have a new sensitivity to quality design.

At the top, architect Paul Buss, who helped start the company in 1977, now works as a developer, with only slight day-to-day involvement. His replacement as president, Gordon Carrier, 34, who formerly worked with nationally known architect Gunnar Birkerts, is symbolic of a youth movement. Original partners Bill Hughes and Tom Silvers are no longer involved, and the company is now run almost entirely by the under-40 set.

But the more significant changes have come in a design department, which weathered a few storms in the mid-’80s, when it was under the direction of Dale Jenkins, Ron Gross and Charles Slert, none of whom work there today.

In those years, BSHA became known as a specialist in glitzy, speculative glass office buildings, including several in the Golden Triangle by University Towne Center. Dating back to his days in the office of Los Angeles architect Anthony Lumsden, Slert has always been fascinated with bringing creativity to economic glass buildings.

This fascination didn’t always filter down through the ranks of the design staff at BSHA, who wanted to work on a greater variety of projects, on buildings that addressed a broader cross-section of urban problems. Sometimes, they felt as if projects like the La Jolla Bank & Trust offices in the Golden Triangle, or the 9444 Balboa building near Interstate 15, achieved their striking geometries at the expense of warmth and human concerns. The mid-’80s were sometimes fiery. A few designers were opinionated, and sparks flew when there were disagreements.

At the heart of the new atmosphere at BSHA is director of design Bob Davis, who joined the firm in 1988. A native of Colorado who worked in a nursery as a teen-ager, Davis uses an earthy, team approach to design, which gives his creative people the space they seem to crave.

“Over the years, there was lots of friction at various levels,” said Russ Stout, a senior designer who’s been with the company since 1983. “Bob doesn’t want to be someone who slams his fist down and says it’s going to be his way. He takes each project on its own merits and tries to work with the project designer, not look at the job as a certain style. He likes to look at the problem--the site, the client, the budget.”

As one who has set up shop in both large architectural offices and in his own den, Davis understands both the needs of creative people and the basics of running a successful business. He also has a respectable grasp of the principles of modern architecture, in which he is a firm believer.

After earning his bachelor’s of architecture from the University of Colorado, Davis went to graduate school at the Royal Danish Academy of Art in Copenhagen.

But he said his real education came when he read architect Robert Venturi’s 1966 “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” hailed by many as the starting gun for the postmodern movement of the ‘70s and early ‘80s. Davis didn’t just study the book; he used it as his bible for a four-month post-college tour of Europe in 1976, during which he examined the important buildings first-hand.

During his travels he spent three weeks in Finland seeing the work of Alvar Aalto, thought by many to be the underrated hero of the modern movement.

Between Venturi, who argued that pure modernism had produced abstract buildings with little consideration for how people really live and feel, and Aalto, who showed that modern ideas could be applied with warmth and wit, Davis formed his basic philosophies.

His career includes several years going the solo route, serving as a design consultant on large projects in many U.S. cities, and more years with the Denver and San Francisco offices of the large Gensler & Associates.

Under Davis and Carrier, BSHA’s list of works-in-progress includes a $25-million athletic complex for San Diego State University (with a 12,000-seat arena), a 12-story office/condominium tower at 6th Avenue and Laurel Street next to Balboa Park and a new facility for the Navy’s Top Gun fighter pilot program at Miramar Naval Air Station.

Davis first worked with BSHA in 1983, while still with Gensler. The two companies collaborated on the design of the Regents I and II office buildings at Genesee Avenue and La Jolla Village Drive in the Golden Triangle.

Evidence of Davis’ modern leanings is apparent. The buildings rest on columns that leave the ground floors open as pedestrian spaces, an idea developed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the ‘20s. The ground level also acknowledges cars as the dominant mode of transportation. Davis and his design collaborators channeled motorists past the open base before funneling them into the parking garage. It’s the idea of the entry and “front porch” as applied to the office complex.

Another of Davis’s babies is a residential/retail project the company has designed to fill in the barren, 4th Avenue side of Horton Plaza shopping center, between a parking garage and the sidewalk.

Scheduled to break ground next month, the six-story complex of apartments, shops and artists’ lofts is sensitive to its setting. By slanting three sections of the front facade’s top-half away from motorists traveling south on 4th Avenue, the architects have emphasized the lower floors. These will mesh smoothly with the surrounding period architecture and retail uses of the Gaslamp Quarter.