Hope Sons Build on Legacy : Firm: A recommitment to San Diego and a touch of flamboyance mark the company’s ‘90s attitude.

When Frank Hope Sr. looks at downtown San Diego from the patio of his Point Loma home, he sees a skyline that has shot up from scratch since he moved here from San Bernardino as a teen-ager.

A forest of modern high-rises has come to symbolize San Diego’s emergence as an urban center. And the architecture company Hope founded in 1928, today the oldest in San Diego, has helped shape the city through its designs of dozens of important buildings.

Hope, who is 90, retired in 1966. These days he spends his time relaxing, visiting with members of his large, well-known San Diego family and gathering with old friends aboard his boat, High Hopes, for afternoons of fishing, old stories and card games.

After retiring, he watched sons Frank Hope Jr., an architect, and Chuck Hope, a structural engineer, take over his company and expand it from a mid-sized local firm into a large international operation with offices in San Francisco, San Diego and Saudi Arabia.

Now, Frank Hope Sr. is waiting to see whether a third generation of Hopes can lift the recession-battered company--down to 44 employees from its early-1980s peak of 150--back to its former glory.

F. Lee Hope, 30, Frank Hope Jr.’s son, and Chuck Hope Jr., 33, Chuck Hope’s son, along with other key management people, including new company President Allen Flanders, are rebuilding the business in an image they see as much different from what it was under Frank Jr.

In many ways, they want to regain the strong local identity the company enjoyed under Frank Sr.

They also hope to launch a new era of creative and intelligent design. During the past 10 years, while Hope was among the most productive architecture companies in San Diego, many of its projects have produced bland institutional and office buildings. None won awards from the local American Institute of Architects chapter in its annual program. In fact, Hope’s last recognition for the local AIA chapter came in 1982, a special Award of Honor given for its design of San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, which most experts consider to be the company’s only bona fide masterpiece. F. Lee Hope thinks a new mode of designing at the company could lead to more inventive architecture in the years ahead.

“Instead of having an old-school design director, we are putting the creativity in the hands of younger, well-educated designers under the auspices of the principal architects,” F. Lee Hope said.

“What was lacking before was flamboyance. Our head of design (Robert Bell, let go earlier this year as part of a reorganization) was more interested in mainstream ideas. Now, we feel we’ll be more responsive to the client as well as getting more creative in our look.”

Known today as Hope Design Group, the company Frank Hope Sr. started has designed houses, churches, schools, hospitals and such familiar local icons as the stadium, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s headquarters in Mission Valley and three downtown high-rises: the Home Tower (now known as the Great Western building) at 7th Avenue and Broadway, the east tower of the downtown Marriott (formerly Inter-Continental) Hotel, and the First National Bank Building (formerly Columbia Centre) on Columbia Street.

“I think Hope really needs to re-establish its commitment to San Diego,” said F. Lee Hope, the company’s director of business development, who inherited a broad smile and suntanned good looks from his father and grandfather.

“I think that was one problem in the past. We concentrated on overseas work, and we lost out in San Diego.

“We want to recommit to San Diego and downtown and focus on recession-proof clients such as government and bio-med. We’re a favorite for the county’s new downtown courts project (the Board of Supervisors will choose a development team in June).

“We’re on a team that’s doing a study for TwinPorts (a proposed but controversial binational airport on Otay Mesa).

“We’re also looking into medical facilities. We used to be the architects for every single hospital in this town, but for the past 15 or 20 years our competitors have slowly taken away a lot of the market. It’s about time for us to get a little aggressive and take some of the work back.”

As F. Lee Hope, an architect, and his cousin Chuck Hope Jr., a civil engineer and the company’s head of operations, gradually assume ownership and control of the company during the decade ahead, they will have a longstanding reputation as community leaders to sustain.

Frank Hope Jr., 62, and Chuck Hope, 59, now own the company 50-50. But they have been retired from day-to-day business since 1990, although they still sit on the company’s board.

Like their predecessors, the younger Hopes do not consider themselves primarily designers. They oversee the day-to-day business of running the company, finding business and serving as intermediaries between clients and the company’s design architects.

“The boys,” as Frank Jr. affectionately refers to the next generation of Hopes, are trying to build their own burgeoning reputations during what may be the worst economy San Diego architects have ever faced.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s unbelievable,” said Frank Hope Jr. by phone from Hawaii, where he was vacationing this week. “You talk about a recession. In the architecture and construction business, this is not a recession, this is a flat out, 100% depression.”

With 44 employees, Hope Design Group is smaller than it has been in more than 20 years. By the early 1980s, its peak under Frank Hope Jr., Hope Architects had 150 employees. But, during the past year, key projects such as the Roger Morris Plaza high-rise downtown and a huge new production facility for the Union-Tribune have stalled. Without financing, the downtown project may die. Following the merger of its afternoon and morning papers earlier this year, the newspaper may decide it doesn’t need a new plant.

Facing harsh economic reality, Hope Design Group laid off 45 people just during the past year, including Bell, director of design, and Bruce Oveson, president. The company also moved its offices from downtown, where it had been since its inception, to less expensive quarters near University Towne Center.

“The move was difficult for me,” F. Lee Hope said. “Hope had the prestige of being downtown for more than 60 years.”

Hope Design Group’s largest current project is a 7-acre Knott’s Berry Farm theme park, designed in conjunction with staff designers at Knott’s, at the center of the gigantic Mall of America, a 4.2-million square-foot shopping mall scheduled to open in Minneapolis this summer. Former company president Oveson, who was let go in February as part of the Hope company’s reorganization, had supervised the project.

“I think the theme-park industry is tailing off,” F. Lee Hope said. “We’ll look for whatever (theme park) work we can, but I don’t know how much it can grow. How many Mickey Mouses can you have?”

A theme park with 26 rides is a far cry from the company’s more modest beginnings.

When Frank Sr. opened his business in 1928, San Diego was still small (the 1930 census counted a population of 148,000), and the scale of development was modest compared to today’s blockbuster projects. He built his business mostly by designing houses and churches in traditional styles, including a Mediterranean mode he learned during his 1920s years in the office of San Diego architects Requa & Jackson.

Frank Hope Sr. studied architecture at UC Berkeley and the Carnegie Institute of Architecture but never earned a degree. Instead, his true education came under Requa and Jackson, with whom he began his career as an architect after working in the design department of a shipbuilding company during World War I.

Among Frank Hope Sr.’s best 1930s Mediterranean-flavored projects: Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church on Kearney Avenue south of downtown and the sprawling Carmelite Monastery in Normal Heights, both still standing.

But Frank Hope Sr. also had a modern side. By the late 1930s, he began designing houses on Point Loma in the sleek, curvy style known as Streamline Moderne. His company also designed other types of buildings in this vein, including a Ford-Lincoln automobile agency that once stood at 12th Avenue and Broadway downtown, and Grossmont Union High School’s auditorium-gymnasium, built of reinforced concrete, subsequently altered by a remodeling but still standing.

The Home Tower, the company’s last big design project under Frank Hope Sr., was completed in 1962 and remodeled during the 1980s with a glitzy, contemporary base.

While Hope Sr. only caught the beginning of San Diego’s modern building boom, Frank Jr. headed the company during the city’s 1970s and 1980s explosion.

The Hope legacy from those years includes the east tower of the waterfront Marriott Hotel next to the San Diego Convention Center. It is a curving, reflective glass building that plies the skyline like a yacht slicing through the nearby bay, and the First National Bank, whose clipped-corner top is a fixture on postcards of San Diego’s skylines. Both buildings were designed by San Diego architect C. W. Kim, who has since formed his own company.

These towers are prominent on the skyline, and Frank Jr. considers them among the company’s finest efforts under his leadership. But his son is not impressed. He thinks they could be much better.

“I think they’re beautiful geometric shapes, statue-like skyline buildings,” F. Lee Hope said. “But I have a little bit of a problem with them in addressing the street and the waterfront, in the lack of a human scale.

“But I don’t fault the company for that. Back then, during the early and mid-1980s, there was an emphasis on maximum square footage, and no concept of addressing your neighbors.”

Frank Hope Sr., too, criticized downtown San Diego for its lack of comprehensive planning.

“At least they have people checking (the design of) buildings now,” he said. “In the old days there was no planning at all.”

Frank Hope Sr. is one of the few surviving direct links to a great era of modern architecture. He knew Irving Gill, San Diego’s most influential architect, who died in 1936.

“I was just a kid (when I met Gill),” he said. “I remember him coming in and standing by my drafting board one time. I think he was trying to show me something about a house I was working on. He kept putting landscaping around it, and I don’t know if he was trying to hide it or just show me how it could look better.”

And once he showed Frank Lloyd Wright around town when the famous architect visited San Diego.

“I had him in my car,” Frank Hope Sr. recalled, “and at one point, we went by some building, and he said, ‘When I die, I’ll probably go down to the deepest part of hell. I invented this modern architecture, and look what they’ve done to it!”

Frank Hope Sr. never considered himself a gifted designer. Frank Hope Jr., who graduated with an architecture degree from UC Berkeley, was “far ahead of me,” according to the Hope patriarch.

But, in their humble way, the modest homes and churches Frank Hope Sr. worked on have more humanity and charm than the big corporate edifices designed by the company under Frank Hope Jr.

Nonetheless, the company has also produced excellent large-scale designs. San Diego Jack Murphy Stadium, completed in 1967 under the direction of Hope project designer Gary Allen, is considered by experts to be one of the finest baseball parks in the country. But such large commissions are harder to come by these days.

During Frank Hope Jr. and Chuck Hope’s last years heading the company, a tendency began that continues today: Big developers, often from out of town, began turning to celebrity architects from outside San Diego.

“Even some of our local developers were on ego trips and felt they could hire the name guys from Philadelphia, New York and Chicago,” Frank Hope Jr. said. “And they could. But the question is whether they got the value they should have gotten, or whether all they did was pull the plug on local architects.”

But the new generation of Hopes want to reclaim their legacy. It won’t be easy, and they feel the heat, but it seems to stir their ambitions, not paralyze them.

“Yeah, there’s pressure, definitely,” F. Lee Hope acknowledged. “I don’t really let it get to me, but there’s a sense of big shoes to fill. In a way, though, it’s about as good a time as any to come in, when the firm is not at its best. Maybe we can bring it back to a high level.”