Stanley Saitowitz: Buildings and Projects - Tapa dura

Architect Stanley Saitowitz, based in San Francisco, is known for a practice that unites the qualities of early modern architecture with the construction techniques, materials, and urban and social attributes of the twenty-first century. Recurring themes in his work include the careful connection to time and place; the construction of spaces that allow fields of opportunity; the use of generative systems; the role of architecture as a support for human activity; and the visible trace of building techniques. This monograph, the first on Stanley Saitowitz Office, presents fifty projects from more than thirty years of practice.

The projects, divided by building type, are accompanied by a personal text in which Saitowitz plainly discusses his influences and interests. Landscape houses, often built on spectacular sites in Marin, Napa, and Sonoma, have evolved to include the noted "bar houses." Urban houses, while compact and dense, incorporate a sense of volume; similarly, multifamily housing provides indeterminate space to allow for personalization. Buildings for schools range from the riverside campus of the Oxbow School in Napa to the structurally innovative Building 23B at UCSF Mission Bay. Among the public landscapes is Mill Race Park in Columbus, Indiana, an assemblage of constructions specific to both place and function. Finally, Saitowitz has developed a series of designs that explore the formation of a Jewish architecture, notably synagogues in San Francisco and La Jolla and the Holocaust Memorial in Boston.

Stanley Saitowitz studied architecture at the University of Witwatersrand and the University of California, Berkeley. He is professor of architecture at UC Berkeley and has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, UCLA, Rice University, SCI-Arc, the University of Texas in Austin, and the University of Norman, Oklahoma.

Pilar Viladas is the design editor of the New York Times Magazine.