Arthur Love
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As an architect with Welton Becket Associates, Arthur Love worked on many office buildings and regional shopping centers built by Pankow. All of them were developed by Winmar, the real estate arm of Safeco Insurance. For, outside of the Pacific Northwest region, the Becket firm was, for all intents and purposes, Winmar’s architect.
A graduate of the University of Illinois’s School of Architecture, Love worked with Pankow project teams out of Welton Becket’s Chicago office, from its establishment in 1970 to 1981, when he returned to Southern California.
Love began his professional career in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he worked for four years before he landed a job in Welton Becket’s Los Angeles office, in 1960. By then, the firm was renowned for its commercial and institutional work. Its many signature projects included office buildings for Capitol Records, Ford Motor Company, General Petroleum, Gulf Oil, and National City Bank; hotels for Hilton and Sheraton; department stores for Broadway-Hale, Bullock’s, Gimbels, Macy’s, Meier & Frank, the May Company, and Saks Fifth Avenue; and regional shopping centers across the country.
Love’s professional relationship with Charlie Pankow began in the early 1960s, when Peter Kiewit Sons’ bid on the contract for the Los Angeles Music Center, the design with which Love was closely involved. Love did not meet Charlie Pankow at that time, but he did meet Russell J. Osterman, who became, in effect, the “number two” man at Charles Pankow, Inc., when Charlie Pankow formed the company in 1963.
Love was a keen supporter of design-build as a project delivery approach. Indeed, working with Pankow meant a return to his early days as a designer, when, as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois, he and several students in the architecture program “design-built” homes for professors.
In 1984, Love and George Hammond, who had been the managing principal of Becket’s Chicago office, joined Irvine, California-based Corbin/Yamafuji & Partners. They brought the Hotel Sofitel project in Redwood City, California, with them and called in Pankow as the contractor. After that project was completed in 1987, Hammond and Love worked with Pankow to complete an office building and warehouse for Clarion Corporation in Gardena, California.
Love and Hammond then worked with Thomas D. Verti on preconstruction activities associated with a $200 million Four Seasons Resort Aviara in Carlsbad, California. This project had prompted the Pankow firm to open an office in San Diego in the spring of 1990, with Verti at the helm. The deep recession of the early 1990s, however, prompted the developer to cancel the project halfway through construction. Soon thereafter, Pankow closed the San Diego office.
Love left professional practice in 1992. After spending several years in retirement, he returned to work to consult a professional services firm that succeeded Corbin/Yamafuji & Partners. As of 2009, he was fully retired and living with his wife in Surprise, Arizona.
