FSB provides 75 years of `good work'

FSB's 75th-anniversary history is no mere coffee table book — one loaded with photos and just a little copy — thanks to the author, historian Bob Blackburn, Ph.D, the longtime executive director of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

No, “Define, Design, Deliver: FSB, Building on 75 Years of Experience” is loaded with both photos and history, the story of the Oklahoma City architecture and engineering firm — as well as the city the firm has called home even as its “good work” took it from coast to coast.

Blackburn used those words — FSB's “good work” — at least a half dozen times across the book's 235 pages. It's noticeable because the assessment stands up as the story unfolds over the decades, with all the big ups and downs, starting in 1945 with co-founders Truett Coston, an architect, and Wally Frankfurt, an electrical and structural engineer, and architect Harold Short.

Former Mayor Ron Norick, in the foreword, explains the firm's biggest legacy to Oklahoma City: the Metropolitan Area Projects, started in 1993 with a city vote to spend $350 million on a new downtown library, Bricktown canal and ballpark, low-water

dams on the Oklahoma River, and an NBA arena downtown. MAPS is in its fourth iteration.

“None of those achievements would have succeeded without MAPS, and without the efforts of one architectural and engineering firm, MAPS would not have succeeded. That firm is FSB. Let me repeat that for emphasis,” Norick wrote. “Without the creative talents of the people at FSB, there would be no MAPS” to revive downtown and grow the city out of the 1980s oil bust and real estate crash.

FSB volunteered more than its services. The firm helped forge a new vision for Oklahoma City.

“For more than nine months, without compensation, they helped us craft a plan that focused on nine high-profile projects. They gave our dreams form and function, with options and estimates. They served as our guides into the world of design, construction management, and projected cash flow. Perhaps most importantly, they gave us a plan that we could sell to the citizens of Oklahoma with the confidence that we could create value through their investment in the future. It worked,” Norick wrote.

That's reason enough to want to know more about the firm, which started as Coston-FrankfurtShort, and later was called Frankfurt-Short-Bruza for years until settling the name for good as FSB. But the firm's fast rise to national prominence from mostly local contracts for commercial redesign and renovation work in the 1940s, when who you knew could make or break, came on the reputation earned from that “good work.”

The firm's stature started, and still rests, on versatility.

Early on, FSB's church designs, starting with the Church of Christ out in Gould, led to 25 other church projects, mostly in the Tulsa and Oklahoma City metro areas, and St. Luke's Methodist Church downtown. Upgrading commercial buildings' mechanical and electrical systems — including design and installation of air-conditioning systems in pre-World War II structures — was dovetailed with architectural improvements to building appearance and aesthetics.

Longtime Oklahoma City residents know well these local business names, whether they know FSB was behind the designs: Chicken in the Rough restaurants, Kip's Big Boy Cafe, Cain's Coffee Co., Baptist Hospital, Mistletoe Express, among many others.

Federal and military

work — including two ICBM missile silos at Clinton-Sherman Air Force Base, in operation from 1954 to 1969 near Burns Flat — early on became an FSB mainstay, recently demonstrated by work on a new hangar at Joint-Base Andrews, the home base in Maryland for aircraft used by the president.

Work for Bethlehem Steel and an FSB office in Pennsylvania, decades of work for American Airlines from coast to coast, at one time requiring an office in New York with a workforce of 150, later work for Federal Express at its Memphis, Tennessee, headquarters and elsewhere — make that “good work” — are among FSB highlights that surely will surprise some people.

The Arab oil embargo in 1973-74 temporarily crippled FSB's airline business and led to a staff drawdown from more than 200 to just 22, but opened up vistas in oil and gas. Then came the oil bust in the mid-1980s, then the revival of the oil patch after the turn of the millennium (RIP, again). Blackburn ties it all together because FSB's fortunes were so tied to energy and commercial aviation — good work, versatile, but overreliant on two few sectors.

He also makes the positive connections between FSB's good work, conscious leadership development, and conscientious leadership, to MAPS and other civic projects; and education work; continued federal, military, and commercial aviation projects; to other sectors, including, most recently, Native American.

FSB is good people doing good work under the leadership now of firm owners Philip McNayr, Rick Johnson, John Semtner, Gene Brown, and Jason Holuby. Blackburn did good work telling their stories.

“Define, Design, Deliver: FSB, Building on 75 Years of Experience” can be purchased at the Oklahoma Historical Society.

[PHOTO PROVIDED BY FSB] Truett Coston, fourth from the right looking over the shoulders of his colleagues, joined Wally Frankfurt, third from the left, to found what is now FSB in 1945. They soon were joined by Harold Short, far left, as the firm expanded with a balance of both architects and engineers. The firm's first offices, shown here, were in APCO Tower, the skyscraper now known as City Place, 204 N Robinson Ave. downtown.

[PHOTOS PROVIDED BY FSB] KOMA-AM Radio, which began operating at 50,000 watts in late 1946, hired fledgling FSB to design its Prairie Style studio.

FSB's work in the mid-1950s on St. Luke's Methodist Church, 222 NW 15, including the 150-foot carillon bell tower, helped land the firm on Architecture Forum Magazine's list of the top 75 architecture firms in the United States in 1959.