When Thomas Robinson ’91 and his firm, LEVER, won the $1.5 million U.S. Tall Wood Building Prize in 2015 for demonstrating the viability of high-rises built out of timber, it changed the trajectory of the Oregon-based architectural firm. Since then, LEVER has been racking up accolades: as one of the most innovative architectural firms, as a research hub to test emerging tools and practices, and as a pioneer of sustainable mass timber. The latter will feature heavily in their design for the expansion of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, along with other natural materials including granite and terracotta. A recent visiting professor of practice at Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, Robinson identifies a quote from Archimedes as LEVER’s namesake: “Give me a lever large enough, and a place to stand, and I can move the world.”
To Walter Hood, MLA and M.Arch. ’89, landscape design is a “palimpsest” that addresses both past and future. For the memorial garden at the International African American Museum in Charleston, located at a site where tens of thousands of enslaved people first arrived in North America, he allowed the adjacent tide to cover and reveal symbols of that history. As founder of Oakland-based Hood Design Studio, his work has also kept him close to home, from revitalizing the de Young Museum gardens to reimagining Lafayette Square Park as a more inclusive space. The MacArthur Fellow and two-time chair of Berkeley’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning will next commemorate the history of People’s Park in a revitalized green space outside the new Judith Heumann student housing complex, opening in 2027.
After meeting as undergrads at Berkeley, husband-and-wife team Rossana Hu ’90 and Lyndon Neri ’87 founded Neri&Hu in 2006. It wasn’t happenstance that led Hu, born in Taiwan, and Neri, a second-generation Chinese Filipino, to base their practice in Shanghai. Today, the city is a global frontier, and Neri&Hu leading figures in its contemporary design scene. With a multicultural staff, Neri and Hu keep up an impressive output including refined furniture for their own Stellar Works brand; product design for the likes of Cassina and Artemide; interiors for clients in China and abroad; and, of course, architecture. Of the latter’s continuing evolution in the country, Neri told Sight Unseen in 2020, “I find this to be the most exhilarating time. I’m curious to discover what’s going to happen in the next decade.”
Ever since Stanley Saitowitz, M.Arch. ’77, completed his first home in 1975, he has built a reputation as a pioneer of contemporary design, but nowhere is the world-renowned architect more appreciated than in Berkeley, where the emeritus professor mentored generations of students, including some featured on this page. The founder and principal of Natoma Architects, located on Natoma Street in San Francisco, Saitowitz has a portfolio that includes site-specific residences like the Transvaal House, built near Johannesburg and deeply rooted in the landscape of his native South Africa, as well as cultural monoliths like the Beth Sholom synagogue, a modern-meets-ancient place of worship in Inner Richmond. As he told California, “I don’t want to program people’s experience. I’m interested in buildings that set their occupant free.”
Hao Ko ’94 makes big office buildings beautiful. For NVIDIA’s futuristic headquarters in Santa Clara, Ko and his team at Gensler landed on triangles as “the optimal geometry” for the chipmaker’s vast network of employees. Large-scale commercial projects were not in vogue when he was studying at Cal, but as Ko told Berkeley CED, “It was a way to directly impact people’s lives, since a lot of us spend most of our time at work.” Gensler’s global director of design recently returned to campus to help unveil his firm’s work as executive architect on The Gateway, home to Berkeley’s first new college in 50 years. Last year, Ko and his wife endowed a visiting professor position at CED, shortly before he broke ground on one of the campus’s new Bakar Labs buildings. More optimal geometry to come.
