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Onomatopoetic Space: I Make My Own Name
Emeryville Center for the Arts Emeryville, CA - Invited Competition Some words take shape directly from the expressiveness of the sounds they name…. SPLAT! WHAAM! POW! Poets often use these onomatopoetic words to engage us more viscerally with the pictures they hope to paint in our mind's eye. We imagine a new home for ECA that is as directly formed by the artistic impulses it houses– a space in which art, artist, community, and environment are intimately enmeshed: Onomatopoetic Space. ECA's mission nurtures cultural literacy through community engagement with art. Taking this charge to heart, we explore ways to design this "engaged space" by blurring the lines between artistic production and community participation. Rather than a traditional white box with art installed within it, the spirit of ECA is more like that of an Open Studio –the artistic process inhabits and creates the world around it, and the visitors, through their interaction, complete the space. Within Onomatopoetic Space each expressive element of the architecture is cultivated directly from inspiration from the artist or community. SaA was one of six firms selected to participate in this exploratory design process with the project sponsor.

Lightbox | Darkbox
RayKo Photography Community Center San Francisco, CA For this project in a 12,000 square foot converted industrial building, we detailed and managed the highly technical requirements of the photo studios and labs, designing the gallery, its furniture, signage, and pivoting wall. The "lightbox" in the center of the gallery space actually contains darkrooms, with a back-lit scrim above providing the source of illumination for the public spaces. We worked closely with a French manufacturer of PVC fabrics to develop this continuous illuminated parapet. The project team included Kogod Smiley Architects through schematic design.

Natural Capital
Senior Housing Competition Novato, CA - In collaboration with Mona El Khafif Any site's conditions, however difficult, represent types of "capital" that we can harness to foster complex and sustainable communities. With this as a guiding principle, new investments can then be strategically designed that work in harmony with a site's existing assets and potentials. The project seamlessly integrates economic, social and environmental strategies, re-imagining the conventional model of senior housing and offering a sustainable approach to residential development. The design maintains and strengthens vital connections to ecological systems and access to adjacent communities, fostering a mutual exchange of natural and communal resources across generations.

Lamella
Off Grid 2.0 Ideas Competition: Healing the Damaged Edge Sausalito, CA The Lamella project imagines a continually shifting land- and water-scape at Horseshoe Cove that fosters public consciousness of the dynamic nature of our environment and our responsibilities to sustain it. The project deploys an expandable net of recycled plastic components, which create a new civic-terrain dedicated to environmental education and demonstration projects.

Alluvial Net
Bay Conservation & Development Commission Rising Tides Competition Bay Area The Alluvial Net embraces the stark realities of rising water levels and increasingly erratic storm events as a springboard to imagine a poetic new form of civic infrastructure at the water's edge. The "net" is an alluvial sediment and water catchment system, which evolves from a prefabricated set of prototypical building-components. As these units accrete, they form a porous tidal habitat, bio-remediation filter, and public landscape amidst the inundated low-lying industrial and commercial zones that ring much of the San Francisco Bay.

Napa City-County Library Teen Center & Masterplan Napa Through participation with Public Architecture's 1% pro-bono program, this project offered schematic design services to the Napa City-County Library. The project initiated a grant-funded design for a designated Teen Center in the library, reinforcing the library's traditional role as a welcoming resource for diverse communities. Central to the re-organization plan is the creation of an active browsing "marketplace." Anchored by a bold mural wall, this area consolidates the various programs into a vibrant new community home.

Workshare Technologies Offices San Francisco, CA This project inserts a new 80-foot long translucent screen wall, reception area, and conference room into an existing converted warehouse space to organize the public and private zones within the corporate offices. The challenge of the project was to create a visual screen without sacrificing natural light or the existing openness of the space. The slat-wall of the freestanding conference room is formed by a sandwich of medium density fiberboard, Plexiglas, and metal studs, each layer contributing to the play of light in the room.

Sounding Board Museum of Contemporary Art Invited Competition
San Rosa, CA - In collaboration with Simonen Design This proposal for the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Rosa, California used an innovative thick outer wall to shield the gallery from adjacent highway noise and to act as a billboard for the museum. The name of the project, Sounding Board, became a literal reference to the specific acoustic functions of this wall as well as a more conceptual reference to the role of this contemporary art institution in the community. We were one of twenty Bay Area firms invited to enter the competition.

San Francisco State University Plaza Renovations and Food Kiosks
San Francisco, CA This project for five new food kiosks and adjacent public space upgrades takes its cues from the existing dynamic 1970's student center architecture without attempting to compete with it. The two free-standing south plaza kiosks draw formally on the original building while synthesizing these elements into a more subtle and human-scaled composition.

PUSH: GBLT Community Center Competition San Francisco, CA - In collaboration with Diane Davis This competition to design a center for San Francisco's Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, and Transgendered community forcefully pushes the most critical elements of the program towards the front of the building, turning the project out to the street to express the diverse functions, activities, and cultures it houses. Our design received a second place finish in this national competition.