Stanley Saitowitz/Natoma Architects: Seventy-five Works

These seventy-five works are the harvest of seventeen years of exploration from our office in San Francisco. With this admired city as backdrop, we search for ways to produce fitting contemporary architecture in its highly conservative terrain. These local efforts have provided opportunities to also work nationally.The projects describe allied explorations of Outsides and Insides, Places and Programs, Contexts and Contents.Outsides are about building the evolving city with continuity. More than 80% of the fabric of cities is housing, so urban grain is predominantly composed of dwellings, and multifamily housing has become a focus of our work where we have explored ways to be both contextual and contemporary simultaneously.Insides are about blankness, emptiness to provide indeterminate shelter which frees occupants to inhabit space at their will. We aim to make architecture as apparatus rather than object, instrument rather than monument. We think of buildings as support for human events, more like a camera than a photograph, more like a telephone than a conversation.