Sander Architects

The studio

Profile:

Sander Architects is the international award-winning firm whose approach to contemporary residential design has been making waves in the architecture world. Their Hybrid House uses components of prefab technology to create homes that are custom designed for each client. Homes that are not only green but also very high design. This is a time of extraordinary change for practitioners in the design fields and Sander Architects is a young exciting firm determined to be at the forefront of green architecture.

Recognition:

Sander Architects has been awarded the Dedalo Minosse International Award for Architecture in 2002 and 2004, along with Pritzker Prize winners Richard Meier and Hans Hollein. Numerous other national awards include AIA awards in 1996 and 2003, Architecture Magazine's Home of the Year, and Architectural Record's House of the Month. Publications include magazines such as Dwell, GA: Global Architecture, New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Their work has been widely published in books such as Another 100 of the World's Best Houses, noted architecture critic Michael Webb's Brave New Houses, Adventures in Southern California Living, and various titles by author James Grayson Truelove. Recently the firm was a semi-finalist in the 2006 Living Steel Competition — which highlights the firm in their "Featured Architects" section (visit the site) — as well as semi-finalists in the 2006 Global Green Sustainable Housing Competition, sponsored by Brad Pitt, to design low-income housing for post-Katrina New Orleans.

Philosophy:

Sander Architects seeks to find a balance between poetry and pragmatics. Starting with essential elements: environment, program, site restrictions, we encourage forms to develop which satisfy these basic needs while embracing the possibility of the poetic. In this way, a house for an Orthopedic Surgeon becomes a covert study in anatomy: metaphorical skin and bones. The elements that make up an aerobics studio, its interior architecture and furniture, take on physical tendencies: tension, compresion, torsion, sinew. The entry for a sculptor's house is a 'vessel' whose propotions are based on a large-scale clay jar produced by the owner. These strategies are covert, not obvious, and allow the built environment to resonate thematically with the program and the people who use it. It is a strategy of innuendo, not declaration, a struggle with nuance, an attempt at quiet fertility. If the work celebrates what it means to inhabit, in grander terms, the work is a celebration of man's rhythms and rituals.