Katherine Lambert, AIA, IIDA, is a founding principal of MAP, Metropolitan Architectural Practice + MAP Studio, of the San Francisco Bay Area.
MAP has realized numerous commercial and private projects throughout the USA based on a long-standing commitment to progressive architectural aesthetics, sustainable construction, social equity, and research in a array of new technologies, materialities and digital methodologies. All have ensured a practice grounded in design innovation, research + conceptualization and principles of sustainability.
Lambert has lead several large scale key projects in the residential, commercial and public sectors. Her projects range from large scale commercial projects such as the historical landmark building, One Grant Ave., to the hybrid renovation and new construction of 525 Brannan St., to numerous technology start-ups throughout the Bay Area, to the design and development of the 300 acre sustainable agricultural Thornton Ranch in Sonoma, CA, to numerous contemporary and modernist residences throughout California, to a number of pro-bono projects such as the nascent and internationally acclaimed Tenderloin Aids Resource Center (TARC ), San Francisco, CA. MAP has recently completed renovation and earned cultural landmark status for the first post- WW II modernist residence in Napa, CA, the Telesis House.
Her collaborative installation, “This Future has a Past” was exhibited at the Time, Space, and Existence Exhibition as part of the Venice Architecture Biennale, 2016. An expanded version of “This Future Has a Past” then became the inaugural solo exhibition of Anyspace, NYC, curated by Cynthia Davidson and sponsored by the Center for Architecture in New York in the Fall of 2017.
In 1997 she authored “Dirt Manifesto” published initially online and then in Architecture Magazine. This was a daring, yet prescient vision of a young architect - to confront the conventions of the architectural profession - that being to meld and prioritize progressive design principles with a forecasting and implementation of sustainable practices. Mirroring her bell weather call, her firm materialized a working ranch project which included a 12,000 sq. ft. residence and numerous outbuildings - all of which required innovative pioneering construction methodologies to be adapted in rammed earth, straw bale construction and reclaimed materials. This project was regarded as so innovative by the county’s building department at the time, that her firm literally contributed to the creation of reconfigured building codes in Sonoma County for the structural components of rammed-earth processes.
Since that point, her projects have been widely published in journals and periodicals such as Architecture, Progressive Architecture, Architectural Record, DWELL, ID, Metropolis, and Interior Design. She has been an invited speaker and presenter at international conferences and her writing is found in such wide ranging publications such as the AIA's FORWARD Journal to the Leonardo Journal of Electronic Arts. Her work has been exhibited and found in permanent public collections such as the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Dia Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Lambert is Professor of Architecture at California College of the Arts and chaired the Interior Architecture program from 2005-2012. Her graduate studies in Architecture were at UCLA, and she has been a visiting critic and design fellow at such institutions as UC- Berkeley, INCITE Research Institute, the Royal College of Art and Goldsmith College, University of London. She has served on the Board of Trustees for the San Francisco Art Institute and Theatre Artaud, both in San Francisco and served on the Board of Directors of IIDA as a co-Vice President for Professional Development.
Today, she continues to advance innovative responses to new projects through an ever-evolving and wide-angle lens of research coupled with promising approaches to progressive design principles.
