Berliner Architects was established in 1996 and currently employs 10 professionals who have worked together over many years on a wide range of commercial, educational, and residential projects. Over 80% of our projects are education-related, including K-12, Community Colleges, and Universities. Our focus on educational work has allowed us to develop expertise in master planning, programming, design, construction documents, permitting with DSA, and construction administration. The majority of our educational experience is master planning and designing modernizations of existing facilities.

The design of educational facilities has been the primary focus of our firm for the last ten years.  Some of our first projects were for LAUSD beginning in 1999 with the repurposing of unused shop and warehouse spaces for use as New Media Academies. The tasks involved in designing these spaces included surveying existing buildings, programming, and design of new facilities through construction.

Berliner Architects has an abiding interest in designing schools that enrich and support the curriculum and pedagogy of the school. By designing classrooms that take careful consideration of how they will be used by teacher and students, we believe that the space enhances the learning experience.

In addition to the functional planning of the learning spaces, sustainable design elements are integrated into all of our projects. In classrooms daylight and well-designed artificial light are critical to creating a good learning environment. We also strive to equip all our schools with an acoustic environment that is conducive to learning.

Our design philosophy is based on careful listening to the users of the spaces we are designing and bringing our expertise and understanding of schools to achieve the goals of the teachers and staff. As curriculum and technology evolve, it is important to constantly reevaluate the design of schools to assure the building supports the mission. It is our goal to seamlessly integrate technology into the school building creating a simple interface between user and machines so it seamlessly supports the educational mission. The technology should function with no effort or special education of the users.

Over the last sixteen years our practice has grown allowing us to take on larger and more complicated assignments, including High Tech - Los Angeles on the Birmingham High School campus and our current project at the Firestone Campus at East Los Angeles College for the master planning of the adaptive reuse of an existing 800,000-SF campus of buildings. Although our projects are larger, we still focus on the same goals: creating new collaborative learning environments on existing campuses, optimizing sustainability, optimizing the learning environment, and designing projects that make the best use of client dollars for improved facilities.