John Shearer: Bob Franklin Has Enjoyed Rewarding Career In Architecture

When Chattanoogan Bob Franklin finished at McCallie School in 1978, he received a prestigious appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy.

After two years there, though, he did some difficult soul searching and with the guidance of his father, Ted Franklin, realized he wanted to try and make a positive impact not on sea, but on land.

As a result, he enrolled at Auburn University and began studying architecture – a career he had envisioned since he was a teenager helping with his father’s firm. And now countless buildings across the Chattanooga landscape and beyond have been designed by his Franklin Architects firm.

It is a career that he has found quite rewarding and one in which he and his colleagues have literally helped shape how area citizens look at their surrounding world, at least the physical one.

“Architects leave a lasting fingerprint on society,” he said with pride. “Sometimes the fingerprint is good and sometimes it is not so good. But it is significant, and I find that meaningful. I am in a profession that impacts the world we are in.”

Among the numerous projects the firm has done in recent years or is doing include buildings at Baylor, McCallie and GPS schools and UTC, the new Harrison Elementary, the Lookout Mountain, Ga., Town Commons, the EPB Building, a new interior for the Creative Discovery Museum, and a new urban block connected to the planned downtown Food City on Broad Street.

And one unusual one is the Patterson Farms planned community with a town center in Dalton, Ga.

Such commissions as the latter and the Lookout Mountain project are the especially fun ones for him, as they draw eyes not only to a structure, but also the area around it.

“I like ones that are like transformational projects to a city or school campus,” he said. “They are the projects that create a sense of place.”

As Mr. Franklin recently looked back on his career from the family firm’s one-story North Market Street office built in 1963 long before North Chattanooga was such a hot area for homes or businesses, he said he has seen his and his firm’s work grow as well.

While it took him a short period to find architecture as a vocation, architecture certainly ran in the family. His grandfather, Selmon T. Franklin, had started the firm in 1933 after earlier working for noted architect R.H. Hunt and briefly having to find work as a bus mechanic when the Great Depression hit.

An uncle, Jim Franklin, was also involved with the group along with his father, Ted, until forming his own large practice for a period and later coming back to Bob’s firm late in his career.

“Uncle Jim was stiff competition,” Bob recalled. “He was very good at marketing and sales.”

Bob Franklin’s firm still has many of Mr. Hunt’s old plans of the larger commercial and other major buildings he designed in Chattanooga, and they are kept in a vaulted brick room along with the firm’s other plans that were drawn before they could be saved on computers. The thinking, Mr. Franklin said, was that a fire might destroy the older plans or the valuable drawings the firm was working on while a structure was being planned or built, and that would greatly derail their work.

Nice examples of some of Mr. Hunt’s drawings – such as the Hamilton County Courthouse and the Federal Building – also hang in various rooms in the firm’s offices.

Mr. Franklin said he has a personal interest in the classic design of older architecture like Mr. Hunt did, saying he would have loved to practice during that era.

However, his firm is not known for any style, he said. Of course, that is due to everything from the fact that his firm employs about eight different architects and several interior designers and other staff, to the varying interests, desires and needs of the clients.

This man who thought he might follow a career of listening to his superior officers in the Navy knows it is important to listen to his firm’s clients as well.

“Every project has its own context,” he said. “We listen to what the client desires and wants and look at the context of the site.”

One unique example of this is Wade Hall for the Sciences at St. Andrews Sewanee School, which was built to study science and is not the typical stone building found at that campus. “All the structure is exposed,” he said. “Everything about the building is meant to be about science.”

While Mr. Franklin was more involved in the intricate design of projects in his early years after graduating from Auburn in 1984, he has been president since 1991 and now plays more of the role of administrator and focuses on working with clients and others.

“My role as president and CEO is seeing that our staff serves our customers well,” he said.

He does occasionally still get involved in a more hands-on way with the design, he said, adding that the McCallie Dining Hall and Baylor entrance gates were two such projects of recent years.

Mr. Franklin said that architecture these days is 20 percent initial artistic design, and the rest involves the technical aspects of detailing the plans and carrying a building through construction and completion. He said some architects, such as his late uncle Jim, had a natural bent to the design side, while others, such as his late father, an alumnus of Georgia Tech like the other older family members, leaned more toward the technical aspect of architecture.

“I’m somewhere in between,” the younger Mr. Franklin said.

Mr. Franklin added that architecture has changed greatly in the nearly 40 years he has been involved. He jokingly added that the stereotypical days of most architects being older white men have disappeared.

The design phase has also evolved from initially using pencil on paper, to ink on mylar, to evolving kinds of computer-assisted programming.

“You now build the design on the computer in 3-D, and when you want floor plans, you just cut the model in half,” he said, jokingly adding that he still prefers drawing by hand, unlike his other staff.

Despite all the technology changes, doing business and serving customers have still not changed a whole lot, and that is what he says he is most proud of with his firm.

"I’m very proud of the work we are doing,” he said. “We have an excellent staff that is much more diverse than it used to be.”

While Mr. Franklin’s work usually involves the built and urban environment, he enjoys the opposite setting when it comes to relaxing and heads out to see nature.

“I like to hike and camp and flyfish and hunt,” he said. “I like being outdoors.”

He is married to Lisa Fritschen, and he has two sons, Bo, who is a doctor in Cincinnati, and Jonathan, who went to architecture school and practices urban landscape architecture and urban planning in the Los Angeles area.

While he initially thought he might follow a military route, this architect is instead pleased with the design he made for his own life.

“It’s extremely rewarding,” he said of his work.

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Additional notes from Bob Franklin:

After Bob Franklin was interviewed in person, he also typed out some additional details about his work.

Regarding what all else he has enjoyed about architecture and the evolution of his job, he wrote, “I was very fortunate to graduate from Auburn in 1984 in architecture when Chattanooga’s Vision 2000 was taking place and which created a downtown renaissance in Chattanooga. I have vivid memories of attending the listening sessions that summer with my mother and father, and we would eat at the Vine Street Market most nights before or after the sessions.

“From the Vision 2000 sessions, the renovation of the Tivoli Theater became a viable project, and Franklin Architects was fortunate to be selected as the architect. My father and I worked closely together on the renovation and restoration of the Tivoli Theater (before it was reopened in 1989).

“We were working with Ruth Holmberg and Whitney Durand as the owner's representatives. Ruth, Whitney, my father and I would stand on the scaffolding and plywood flooring at the very top of the theater, 50 feet up from the floor at the proscenium arch, and we would look at in place paint mockups for approval. I was personally crawling around inside the mechanical ductwork to determine what ducts led where behind the decorative plaster ceilings. That whole process remains some of my favorite memories as an architect.

"Several years later, my father and I worked together on the renovation of the Memorial Auditorium with Robert Kirk Walker (before it reopened in 1991) and after that the Chattanooga Theatre Centre. One of our last major civic projects together was Coolidge Park, and we were working with fun people like Jim Bowen, Jeannine Alday, Allen McCallie and Mai Belle Hurley. If you asked me the same question in the middle of my career, I would have given a quick answer that those four civic projects which we worked on together were my favorites, and I still get a huge sense of satisfaction from watching large numbers of people use and enjoy those facilities.”

Regarding what kinds of projects he enjoys, he added, “People often ask me what types of projects I enjoy the most, and my opinions have changed a bit as I get older. Throughout my career, I regularly got to work with and learn from Stroud Watson, who was the director of the Downtown Planning and Design Studio. He taught me that the street, the sidewalk, the pedestrian space are every bit as important as the building itself.

"Now, at this point in my career, my favorite projects are those that create a strong sense of public place. As one of my clients once said, he wanted the project to be "transformational." It is always fun and rewarding to design an attractive and beautiful building but creating a sense of place in the public realm goes beyond that. The public realm puts more emphasis on how buildings relate to each other, to a city street or an academic quad or how a building ends a strong visual axis. The new Probasco Academic Building at Baylor is a good example of a state-of-the-art building that defines the edge of the school's quad, which was designed by Matt Whitaker, the landscape architect.

“We are currently working on Patterson Farms in Dalton, which will be a residential community with a central urban core. Our goal there is to create a strong sense of community and place. McCallie School's dining hall serves as a strong focal point at the end of that axis and defines the edge of a pedestrian quad. GPS's Davenport Middle School creates and defines the GPS Lawn. The EPB corporate office building serves as an iconic building at the intersection of MLK Boulevard, Broad Street and Market Street and an edge to Miller Park.

“The John Ross Building will serve a similar role on the North end of Broad and Market Street. We just recently completed the first phase of the Lookout Mountain, Ga., town center, which I believe will be a “transformational” project for that community. Those projects that create a sense of place in the public realm are what I believe makes life more rich and meaningful.”

Concerning the other rewards of an architecture career, he added, “All architects leave a lasting impression, a fingerprint, on the built environment and society. Sometimes that fingerprint is wonderful and sometimes it is not good at all, but whatever impression it leaves, it is there for all to experience, and I personally find that extremely meaningful.

“Working with my father, Ted Franklin, throughout my career until his retirement and also working with my uncle, Jim Franklin, at the end of his career was also personally rewarding to me. As many people know, working in the family business is often tough and challenging, but it can be fun and immensely satisfying.  When Uncle Jim came to work with us, I told him that ‘I didn’t need another father,’ to which he replied, ‘I have no intention of being your father.’  It took about a week for him after he started to start acting like a father. 

“As soon as I decided that I wanted to be an architect, my father set out to teach me many lessons about what it means to be an architect and what our responsibilities are. The one lesson that he repeated often and that I particularly remember is that it is our responsibility, as the owner’s architect, to ‘look out for the owner’s best interest.’  That lesson is one of (our) foundational principles.”

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Jcshearer2@comcast.net