Frank L. Hope III, who headed what was San Diego’s largest architectural firm from 1966 to 1993, died last month. He was 93.
In its prime, Hope Design Group had 150 employees and offices in Southern California, San Francisco and Saudi Arabia. They designed hundreds of buildings here and abroad including military projects in the Philippines.
Hope’s most visible San Diego structures included San Diego Stadium (aka Jack Murphy, Qualcomm, SDCCU), the former San Diego Union-Tribune headquarters in Mission Valley, the Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park and buildings at UC San Diego, and San Diego City College.
Hope advocated for good planning and architecture in a rapidly growing city. He served as president of the American Institute of Architects, San Diego, and was an AIA Fellow. He was also a San Diego planning commissioner and a Port of San Diego commissioner.
Meanwhile, through seven decades, the Hope firm, founded by his father, Frank L. Hope Jr., in 1928, designed buildings for colleges, the United States Navy, churches, school districts, banks and hospitals.
Hope III was a community leader and company CEO (his brother Charles was an engineer and president of Hope) with a knack for business and hiring talented architects.
Exhibit A was Gary Allen, who studied with Isamu Noguchi and had worked in the offices of famed East Coast architects including Philip Johnson. In San Diego with Hope, Allen designed the stadium (1967) and 1960s San Diego City College buildings including the sleek concrete library and creative arts center.
Another gifted Hope architect, C.W. Kim, designed a pair of striking downtown high-rises during the 1980s construction boom. Completed in 1982, Columbia Centre (now One Columbia Place), on West A Street, added a distinctive clipped corner to the skyline. Kim also designed the first of two waterfront Inter-Continental Hotel towers (1984, now Marriott) near Seaport Village, its shape inspired by billowing sails.
Drawing on his experience at Hope, Kim opened his own office and went on to dream up the coolest San Diego high-rise of its era: the Oz-ish Emerald Shapery Center (1990, now Emerald Plaza) on West Broadway, featuring eight hexagonal spires covered in white stone panels and emerald green glass.
As downtown matured into a forest of high-rises and major mixed-use projects by international developers with overseas financing, blue chip architects with extensive national and international experience were sometimes favored over local competitors such as Hope.
For instance, Hope’s proposal for the early-1980s Horton Plaza shopping center in downtown San Diego was an enclosed suburban-style mall. That plan lost out to Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde’s colorful open-air destination inspired by Italian villages.
From UCSD’s founding in 1960, competition was also stiff between local architects and out-of-towners, but San Diegans took the lead in designing the earliest buildings.
Hope was responsible for McGill and Mandler halls (1969), modernist structures of concrete and fluted precast panels. These first-class buildings became assets in the recruitment of prominent faculty such as brain scientist George Mandler.
But outsiders won some of the most prestigious UCSD commissions. William Pereira, a Los Angeles architect featured on the cover of Time magazine, designed the central library (1970) that became the university’s logo.
Meanwhile, between 1928 and 1966, under Hope III’s father, Frank Jr., the company designed buildings in both revivalist and modernist styles.
In his time, Hope Jr. was among a generation of San Diego architects directly linked to visionary predecessors such as Irving Gill, whose sleek white buildings stood in stark contrast to historical styles popular in San Diego in the early 1900s. Hope Jr. knew Gill, and he once chauffeured Frank Lloyd Wright on a tour of San Diego architecture.
During the Frank Jr. era, the company designed several Catholic churches including The Immaculata (1959) at the University of San Diego, with its blue domes visible from I-5.
The company also designed one of San Diego’s first modern high-rises: Home Tower (1963, since remodeled, now Chase Bank) at 7th Avenue and Broadway.
Three generations of Hopes, including Frank III’s son F. Leland Hope, earned architecture degrees at the University of California, Berkeley, and brought to San Diego ideas gleaned from Bay Area modernists such as Bernard Maybeck (Gill’s peer), William Wurster and Joseph Esherick.
Lee Hope chose a different path than his predecessors. After his father retired to travel, ski and live with his wife on his yacht, and amid an early-1990s recession, Lee became CEO of the family business but soon shut it down and opened his own office.
Today, from his one-man shop in a two-story building on the Pt. Loma waterfront, where military ships and sailboats glide by in the distance, he is content designing modest residential and commercial projects. He is remodeling his grandfather’s former Mediterranean-style house nearby for its current owners.
In his office, the only remnants of his father’s legacy are a large mid-century print by Alexander Calder, a big marble conference table where he spread out a few files of his father’s work –a nd a desktop souvenir model of the stadium given to fans who attended the final San Diego Padres game before the structure was demolished in 2021.
Dirk Sutro has written extensively about architecture and design in Southern California. His column appears monthly in Times of San Diego.
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