AIA San Francisco announced the 2004 AIA San Francisco Design Awards winners April 9. This year, Bay Area firms were recognized for their outstanding contributions to the built environment in the categories of excellence in design (architecture and interiors), green design, unbuilt design, and urban design. A multidisciplinary jury also selected three special-achievement winners.

Excellence in Design, Architecture and Interiors

Jensen & Macy Architects,
for CCA Graduate Center, San Francisco
The architects creatively and economically transformed a dilapidated 10,000-square-foot, wood-framed warehouse into new facilities for the graduate studies program at the California College of the Arts. A new skin of translucent polycarbonate wraps the entire building, filling the studios with natural light. They incorporated new prefab restrooms in mobile shipping containers dropped into the exterior courtyard. The jury particularly admired the design’s “celebration of prosaic low-cost materials—all richly sublimated by careful juxtapositioning and detailing.”
Photo © Richard Barnes

Mark Cavagnero Associates,
for Community School of Music and Arts, Mountainview, Calif.
The 25,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art Center for Music and Arts Education is the first permanent home of the Community School of Music and Arts, a 35-year-old nonprofit organization. In addition to housing music classrooms and private music studios, the building provides visual arts studios, administrative space, a recital hall, and an outdoor performance area. The building’s “austerity and Louis Kahnesque architectural rigor,” as well as its canted, sculptural rooflines, caught the jury’s fancy.
Photo © Tim Griffith

NBBJ, with Preservation Architect Page & Turnbull,
for the Hearst Memorial Mining Building, Berkeley, Calif.
Originally built in 1907, this nationally registered historic project restores the building’s original beauty and still provides a technological and seismic facelift. Details include delicate columns, restored Guastavino tiles, lattice girders, and skylighted domes on pendentives. To inspire the students, the architects left 80 percent of the engineering systems exposed. The building also houses state-of-the-art research laboratories, offices, teaching laboratories, administrative and support spaces, and classrooms. The jury admired “the seamless integration of seismic bracing and exposed engineering (for students viewing) of the ornamental detail, which works to heighten the spatial grandeur of the structure.”
Photo © Tim Griffith

Pfau Architecture,
for 251 South Van Ness, San Francisco
251 South Van Ness now serves as home of Damore Johann, a branding and graphic design business, and Mark Johann Photography. The 6,000-square-foot, three-story building was designed from the inside out as an integrated workplace environment, the architects say. In contrast to the monochromatic, galvalume™-clad exterior, the interior offers a rich experience of material and color. Expansive north-facing glass optimizes city views and provides balanced daylight on all levels of the building. “The design’s sense of play, its precision craftsmanship, and its use of a traditional pitched roof form—tweaked here to be elegantly modern,” topped the jury’s list for this project.
Photo © Tim Griffith

SMWM, with Retail Architect BCV, Preservation Architect Page & Turnbull, and Port Commission Hearing Room Architect Tom Eliot Fisch,
for the San Francisco Ferry Building
The reinvention of San Francisco’s iconic Ferry Building combines restoration, rehabilitation, and reuse—a publicly oriented reinterpretation of historical elements rather than a mere facsimile of its past. The jury commended the reuse of this historic icon—transformed from a beloved relic into a thriving city center.
Photo © Tom Paiva

Stanley Saitowitz Office/Natoma Architects Inc.,
for the Lieff Residence, Rutherford, Calif.
Located on a wooded hill overlooking Napa Valley and opposite the Silverado Trail, this 1,000-square-foot guesthouse comprises a living/dining room, kitchen, main bedroom suite, and second bedroom. Interior stucco fin walls shade interior spaces and form an arcade that extends the inside to the outdoors. The house’s rust-colored scheme relates to the surrounding landscape and evokes the rhythm of the changing seasons. The jury admired this home’s “sculptural restraint, perfectly suited to the beautiful landscape.”
Photo © Tim Griffith

Turnbull Griffin Haesloop,
for the Stinson Beach Residence, Stinson Beach, Calif.
William Wurster originally designed this beach house, and Turnbull Griffin Haesloop resurrected it after it succumbed to fire. The client requested that the firm recapture the spirit of the original house while meeting all the current seismic and FEMA requirements for houses in high-risk coastal zones. The architects configured the volumes of the new house to create a variety of wind-sheltered outdoor spaces that take full advantage of the views to the Pacific Ocean and Marin hills. The jury said the forms and materials are particularly well-suited to the site, and complemented its quiet homage to Wurster and California architecture.
Photo © Matthew Millman

Green Design

EHDD Architecture,
for The Audubon Center at Debs Park, Los Angeles
An urban environmental education center that brings nature to East Los Angeles children, the Audubon Center at Debs Park is the first U.S. project to achieve a Green Building Council LEED 2.0™ Platinum rating. Its level of sustainability shines in nearly every aspect of design, including restoration of the native landscape, passive energy-conservation strategies, materials selection, 100 percent off-the-grid solar power, onsite stormwater detention, and onsite wastewater treatment and dispersal systems. The jury declared this “the greenest project in California” and commended its well-scaled, understated building forms.
Photo © Cesar Rubio Photography

Gelfand RNP Architects Inc.,
for the Los Altos (Calif.) School District Masterplan
Thanks to the architects, the Los Altos School District has implemented a program of school reuse and green design. The program saves energy and restores aspects of the water cycle. Daylight, fresh air, and improved connections to site and community characterize each school and will serve changing instructional uses at least until the next bond. The jury viewed this masterplan as a prototype for other California schools.
Photo © Mark Luthringer Photography

SMWM, with Preservation Architect Page & Turnbull, and Port of SF Office and Pier 1 Deli Architect, Port of SF Office Architect Tom Bloszies Aguila,
for Pier 1, San Francisco
Pier 1 offers a model for adaptive reuse of a waterfront warehouse structure, capitalizing on the building’s clear-span construction and durable building materials and incorporating state-of-the-art sustainable design and materials, including a first-of-its-kind baywater heat rejection system. The project reflects an innovative seismic upgrade created over an acre of new public open space. The jury commended the adept expansion of public space and saluted the architects and developers for creating a design that satisfied 18 public agencies and boards.
Photo ©Tim Hursley, Ethan Kaplan, Richard Barnes

Other Award Winners

Excellence in Design (Architecture and Interiors) Merit Winners

• Cee Architects/Pfau Architecture (The Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Community Center)
• David Baker + Partners, Architects (Magnolia Row)
• Fougeron Architecture (Planned Parenthood MacArthur Clinic)
• Gensler (Allsteel Headquarters)
• Pfau Architecture (Lick-Wilmerding High School)
• Richard Pollack + Associates (The North Face)
• Sand Studios (Design); Michelle Jones, RIM Architects (Architect of Record) (Cou Paris), and Walker Warner Architects (Quintessa Family Winery).

Unbuilt Design

• eight inc (Nam June Paik Museum)
• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Jinling Hotel Phase II).

Urban Design

• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (Transbay Terminal Area Design).

Special Achievement

• Phil Angelides, California state treasurer
• John King, San Francisco Chronicle urban design writer
• U.S. Green Building Council

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