Archinect - Features

Walker Warner Architects on Creating 'Enduring Architecture for Inspired Living'

2020-11-09T09:00:00-05:00

Operating from a studio in bustling downtown San Francisco, Walker Warner Architects has maintained a unique ability to capture the essence of their clients' sites whether rural or urban, across the Western United States and Hawaii and create calming blends of space, context, materiality, light, and craft.

For our latest Studio Snapshot, Archinect connected with the firm's four Principals Brooks Walker, Greg Warner, Kathy Scott, and Mike McCabe to learn more about how the practice managed to grow into a 65-person team and if managing construction sites in two states divided by an ocean ever proved challenging.

A Conversation with Audrey Sato on Fostering Hard and Soft Skills in Architecture

2020-01-07T12:27:00-05:00

For architect Audrey Sato, studying architecture may not have seemed like an obvious choice at first, but she eventually realized that her passion for sustainability and a desire to build in parallel with nature made her a natural fit for the job. Sato grew up in Hawaii, and after graduating with a double concentration in Visual Arts and Architecture Studies from Brown University, interned at architecture firms to start off her career.

The experience inspired her to pursue a Master's of Architecture degree at California Polytechnic State University Pomona. After her studies, Sato chose to start an independent practice, Sato Architects, not out of necessity, but because it was "a natural and practical thing" for her to pursue. If you ask Sato now, her plan at the time was to get going and find a way to "do it right later," a vision that, over nearly a decade of practice, Sato admits, "just kept working." Today, aside from running her own firm, Sato is a LEED-Accredited Professional ...

San Francisco-based Design Firm SAW Tackles Architecture's Design Blindspots by Challenging Possible Outcomes

2019-06-13T13:34:00-04:00

Within architectural practice, navigating through blind spots in the design process is something many studios work through. In Dan Spiegel and Megumi Aihara's case, SAW's mission is to approach these moments of design obscurity by focusing on their passions for architecture, landscape architecture, and design. With their goal of designing both for the inside and outside, Spiegel and Aihara use object materiality and scale to produce potential outcomes in spatial design.

From their stunning residences to the integrative urban-scaled projects they design, SAW uses their interdisciplinary approach to develop highly technical yet subtlety beautiful landscape and architectural works. For this week's Studio Snapshot, Archinect chats with Spiegel and Aihara about their experience in running a practice and the strategic risks they take when designing for the ever-changing environment.