The Architects Behind the Vision: A Look at Optima's Design Legacy

Every building tells a story about the people who designed it, their values, their obsessions, their vision for what a place could be. At Optima McDowell Mountain, that story begins with Optima itself, founded in 1978 on the belief that architecture should lead, and that the only way to hold that vision without compromise was to own the entire process from the very beginning. Every decision made here flows from that founding principle.

David Hovey Sr., FAIA grew up architecturally at the Illinois Institute of Technology, studying under a program built by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and later returning for his Master's degree under Arthur Takeuchi, who planted the seed that the best outcome for an architect was to be not only the designer, but also the developer and the client. Frustrated by the separation between owner, architect, and developer in the traditional model, Hovey Sr. and his wife Eileen founded Optima as a vertically integrated firm that controlled the entire process in-house. Design was not a service rendered to a client. It was the driving force.

What emerged from that founding belief is an architectural language that is unmistakably Optima, and at Optima McDowell Mountain, it finds its most ambitious desert expression yet. Six eight-story towers with stepped and undulating landscaped facades that echo the shapes of the McDowell Mountains themselves. Rooftop running tracks with 360-degree views of Camelback Mountain, Pinnacle Peak, and the McDowell range. Olympic-length pools on every rooftop. Fitness centers and yoga studios looking out onto lushly landscaped courtyards. The buildings are designed, as David Hovey Sr. FAIA has always designed, to work with their environment rather than impose themselves upon it, and at Optima McDowell Mountain, that environment is among the most extraordinary in the Sonoran Desert.

The expansion into Arizona beginning in 2000 was as much a design opportunity as a market decision. David Hovey Jr. describes the desert as a laboratory, a place to test modernist principles against an extreme climate. Optima McDowell Mountain is the culmination of that decades-long learning: the first development in Arizona built under both the new International Energy Conservation Code and International Green Construction Code, featuring the largest private rainwater harvesting system in the country and 75% open space at grade level. As Hovey Jr. has said, it represents the culmination of everything Optima has worked toward over four decades regarding sustainability, architecture, and community integration. The influence of Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West, the conviction that architecture must understand and respond to its specific landscape, is visible in every tower, every terrace, every trail connection to the McDowell Sonoran Preserve beyond.

The Optima design legacy is also a living one. At Optima McDowell Mountain, David Hovey Jr. has pushed that legacy further than any previous project, in sustainability, in scale, in the ambition of the community vision. Tara Hovey has ensured the strength of the long-term partnerships, including with Mitsui Fudosan America, that make a project of this magnitude possible. Together, the Hovey family has built something rare: a design firm whose founding principles, integration, quality, nature, and the belief that architecture is one of the most powerful forces for human good, grow stronger with each generation.

You don't need to know architectural history to feel the difference when you stand on a rooftop at Optima McDowell Mountain with the desert mountains at eye level. You feel it in the light, in the proportions, in the sense that the building and its landscape were designed by the same intelligence. That is the Optima design legacy, and it lives in every room, and every view beyond them.

Experience a design legacy in person. Schedule a tour at Optima McDowell Mountain today.