BEGINNINGS
It is fitting that I write this foreword as “Beginnings,” as it reflects on the time I was introduced to Maria’s architecture—while I was still in high school, when she remodeled my childhood home.
room. But Maria considered how our family wanted to live and made the house work for us. She separated a guest room into the new addition to provide a de facto visitors suite. She shaped a bay window and millwork into an octagonal room to accommodate a circular dining table more suited for how a Chinese family eats. While these approaches may seem obvious now, Maria’s different way of thinking helped me understand how architecture could reflect how people wanted to live.
Witnessing her ideas and work firsthand ignited my childhood dreams of being an architect and helped me find my passion for transforming lives and shaping environments through design. As I practice architecture today, I clearly see how the values Maria embedded in this early work— thinking differently, crafting light artistically, and celebrating the unexpected—inspire me and shape my own buildings.
I recall one initial conversation about the house in which Maria lamented that most suburban California homes celebrated the garage more than the living spaces. Garage doors were typically larger in scale than other house features, and the garage’s volume stood out prominently when viewed from the street.
As I spend my days with large-scale commercial projects and built-to-suit HQs, I find that my own design perspectives share an essence with Maria’s approach to my small, single-family house and her subsequent career. Maria’s lifetime body of work, shaped from small but profound beginnings, such as my family’s home, continues to reflect positive values and enduring principles—all the more prominent and necessary in these uncertain times with a health pandemic, economic upheaval, social tumult, and environmental crisis.
For our house, Maria proposed pulling our addition in front of the garage to announce the front door with a dignified gateway threshold. This idea seemed utterly radical at the time. But like so many of her subsequent interventions, this subtle rebuke of unquestioned practices sent a clear signal: this was a home for people, not automobiles.
Architecture can have a profound impact, even on our innermost lives. In my family’s case, our modest, single-story 1950s tract home fit neatly into the ethos of the mid-century California’s Central Valley. It was literally the same—both outside and in—as our neighbors’ houses. We didn’t realize we could change this. Instead, we conformed to what the house dictated—until Maria challenged these norms.
But Maria did not forget about where we were. She embraced the Central Valley and its possibilities in our home. Sunlight is of great abundance in the region. Coupled with long, flat horizons and vast sightlines, this natural light can be as harsh as it is remarkable. If there is a palette for Maria’s artistry, it is this play of light.
In our context of sameness, Maria’s transformation of my home taught me the greatest lesson an architect can learn— thinking differently through design is a superpower. It can change everything.
In my family’s home, Maria transformed previously dark areas into light-filled spaces, adding a pocket courtyard between the old and new parts of the house. Ceilings were vaulted into higher volumes to harness sunlight from ideal angles and open up views to the large canopy of the heritage trees surrounding the house. Toward the center of the house, shaped lightwells leading to skylights filtered
Built from cookie-cutter plans, our house featured singlefile bedrooms and a typical American rectangular dining IV
and softened the natural daylight. This interplay of light is a theme across Maria’s body of work—and it taught me the importance of crafting light as an essential ingredient in shaping inspiring spaces.
They are stories of people—of clients like my family— giving shape to their lives, through architecture. Hao Ko, AIA, LEED AP Principal and Managing Director, Gensler San Francisco 2021
Lastly, the unexpected—or humorous—aspects of a design leave the indelible signature of an artist. In my family home, my parents were unwilling to part with an existing doorway from the master bedroom to the living room. Unfazed, Maria simply designed a hidden doorway, disguising the door in bookshelf casework; a mystery novel element ingeniously inserted into our day-to-day life. My family’s house on Linden Lane does not show up in architectural publications, nor did it—or we—have such ambitions. But Maria’s principles in her subsequent seminal works are all embodied in this modest early-career renovation. Her Edge Loft (page 79) challenges the meaning of a home bordering a commercial district by hybridizing an urban industrial typology and fusing it to a classic suburban house. Her embrace of the Central Valley’s singular sunlight reflects in the exterior of Iridescent (page 149): light literally refracts off the surface like it would not anywhere else. And a subtle yet legible play on structural language—the reversal of the traditional post-and-beam expression—undergirds Flight House (page 1) to create the unexpected. Maria and her architecture are interwoven in my life. Over the past 40 years, she and my father were always collaborating on community design projects. As a college student studying architecture, I returned to the Central Valley for the summer to work and learn as her intern. And now, as I read this book, I delight in the incredible spaces Maria created over the course of her career. Homes which are more than beautiful pictures on a page. V
PREFACE
Architecture is transformation. Not just of materials and space, but also of people and place. The best architecture is inextricably woven with its landscape, its culture, and its inhabitants.
art live alongside 13th-century stone buildings. You always encouraged me to build, you fostered my painting, and you always believed in me and my potential. You encouraged me to go to MIT when only a handful of women attended. My father, a civil engineer who designed some of the world’s largest and most complex projects—bridges, dams, ice platforms, and more—and took his family along. You always explained what you were working on and why it made a difference. My mother, a lyrical pianist who played frequently when I was very young and supposedly asleep— the emotions in your music are a part of my soul.
For a long time, I have practiced architecture in California’s Central Valley—a region full of growth and vitality, entrepreneurial spirit, and grounded hard work. I have worked intimately with its sky: a blue that goes beyond blue. I have mirrored its shining sun and have played with its orderly crop rows. I have paid homage to its flocks of birds which hover and dive. My architecture and I have gone native. We’ve made this vibrant region of infinite possibility our home.
To Madame Tao, my Chinese brush painting teacher in Taiwan, who showed me how to build enchanting worlds out of brush strokes according to methods invented in China more than one thousand years ago.
This book is an ode to the Central Valley told through my architecture—a series of case studies, of jumping-off points for further exploration. But it is more than that.
To MIT: you shaped me into a true architect and showed me a path of leadership and experimentation. To my fellow undergraduates, you taught me that architecture can transform, letting me lead the way as elected student body president with the platform “Architecture Matters.” To my architect schoolmates, together we took part in the rebellious ’60s, reshaping our studios and learning environments (sometimes overnight).
It tells stories of real people, trailblazers who call the Central Valley home: remote workers, composers, artists, innovators, veterinarians, kayakers. It is about those who took a leap into the unknown with me to share their personal lives and future visions—to design and build their dreams. I selected projects in this book to inspire. Remodels, bespoke homes on tight budgets, bespoke homes with luxurious budgets—a wide range of paths to extraordinary lives through design.
To the MIT Department of Architecture: Dean and mentor Lawrence Anderson, you encouraged me to keep pushing my designs. Head Donlyn Lyndon, your Sea Ranch presentation was my first architecture lecture—it introduced me to the amazing California landscape and a “sense of place.” Professor Maurice Smith, you explained design thinking so clearly through sketches of possibilities of rhythms and patterns in students’ projects—each a masterpiece. To the department for inviting me to propose a course to create and teach: Built Form Observation (BFO).
I want you to read these stories, to get lost in the photos, and think: I can do that. I have many people to thank: To my parents, Hans and Livia Kivisild, Estonian émigrés who filled my childhood with captivating stories of the medieval city of Tallinn they had fled, where nature and
To Gordon Goff, who opened the door to my book dreams and accepted me into the world of ORO. VI
To the contributors in this book: Hao Ko, a kindred spirit in your love for architecture; Sam Lubell, who so eloquently wove my story together; and Stephan Jaklitsch, a fellow explorer at the time I became immersed in designing houses that were apart, different. To Renee Chow, who took my course, BFO, and extended the principles into your own work.
To my colleagues: Kim Anderson, executive director of the AIA Central Valley Chapter and my partner in creating the Central Valley Region Architecture Festival. To George Claflen, a friend and MIT schoolmate, for your support.
To Alice Eichold, my fellow intern architect and wonderful friend, who had the courage early on to build her own architecture projects.
To my amazing children and their families: You grew up inundated with architecture stories, you support me always, and you teach me new things every day. To Luke, who shares my passion for architecture, who worked with me and pushed me to elevate my practice. To Julia, who made this book happen, it would not have been possible without your brilliant vision. To Michael, who is always there with a gentle joke and tech support. You know me better than I know myself. And to your families: Zoe, Jeffrey, Saskia, Axel, Kyrian, and Ingrid.
To my first clients: Ken and Diane Wagstaff, who graciously let me remodel their house, where music and architecture met. To Winston and Katy Ko, who let me play with windows and light. To Grace, Edge Loft would not exist without you.
And thank you most of all to my husband, David, for 50 years of unwavering devotion. Always willing to visit another building or art museum, our story started as undergraduates at MIT—thank you for bringing me home to the Central Valley of California.
To all the clients who shared their homes for this book: Jamie and Jan, Ana and Pablo, Ben and Cecile, Robert and Marina, Tyler and Joyce, and Carol and Blake. Thank you for trusting me to create the settings for your lives. Thank you for your insights, your wisdom, your ideas, and your equal partnership.
Maria Ogrydziak, AIA Davis, CA 2021
To my early professional cheerleaders, Richard and Betty Berteaux, who welcomed me into their world of architecture, color, and art.
To my structural engineer, Mark Pemberton, who introduced me to TridiPanel. To my contractors: Mark Nelson, who was always willing to take my crazy ideas and make them work, and to Theron Andersen, who built some of the most challenging elements detailed in this book. To Loni Smithson, the epitome of patience and a skilled craftsman. To George Guzman who said yes to stripes and always found a way.
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INTRODUCTION
We all have emotional reactions to unique stimuli. For some it’s music or art; for others it’s literature, athletics, math, or science. For architect Maria Ogrydziak it’s place—be it a room, building, landscape, or city. The idea of being immersed in, connected to an environment evokes an intense reaction that, more than anything, inspires and guides her architecture, which by extension is always rooted profoundly in its setting; connected to something bigger.
people. This book is the culmination of that work: a series of prototypes, experiments—starting points for further exploration in the region. Sometimes, like her Iridescent House (page 149), they mirror the flatness of the terrain, driven by long axes, like the region’s expanding vineyards and crop rows. Sometimes, like her Flow House (page 127), they meander from one space to the next, and, eventually, to the outdoors, like a valley stream. Sometimes, through concrete floors or stone or masonry walls, they embody the solid, heavy rocks that punctuate and harden the region’s softness—or through long steel or timber beams, the tall forests. Other spaces reach high, like the mountains, or that sky.
For the last 40 years, Ogrydziak’s setting has been California’s Great Central Valley, the 450-mile-long stretch of flat green that streaks through the heart of the state, bordered on all sides by rugged mountains. It’s an area often overlooked—it’s tough to compete with California’s majestic coastline and its storied cities—but the valley is a magical, powerfully tactile place that wraps its residents in strong lines, soft greenery, snaking rivers, and otherworldly blue skies. It’s also a fertile one, producing more than 250 different crops and about a quarter of our nation’s food1.
Ogrydziak’s work showcases the landscape she has grown to love so much, becoming not just outgrowths of this setting, but frames for it. Through large windows— sometimes clustered together, blurring the line between nature and art; sometimes set horizontally, revealing broad panoramas. Through canted roofs, bringing in light and breezes. Through sliding glass doors, blurring inside and out, or through clerestories and skylights which expand the view, and the spirit, upward to that sky.
The profundity of this place is especially acute for Ogrydziak who spent most of her childhood in Canada, far from the warm sun and verdant fields of the Central Valley. “The sky is incredible,” she wonders, still in awe of these surroundings. “The sunshine is incredible. The way that the fields move. You feel that people are connected to this place. They have created the rows of crops; the orchards. At the same time this is the place where the birds migrate. You often see huge flocks of them. It’s incredible. It’s connected to the big picture of life to me.”
“What matters a lot to me is that when you are inside you can experience those changes outside. How light moves in the day; feel part of the cycle of life.” She adds: “Sometimes I wonder if I was secretly a landscape architect. I love the idea of connecting architecture and the landscape.”
Ogrydziak thoroughly connects her houses and buildings to the rich, varied settings, cultures, and lifestyles of the valley. Throughout her career, she has worked to define a new vernacular, growing out of the valley and its
While place is the dominant factor in Ogrydziak’s work, it is not the only one. Her approach also accommodates bedrocks of her own life: culture, art, and experiment. Ogrydziak’s Estonian heritage influences her intense love of nature and place. It’s a culture with a distinct pagan past.
1. U.S. Geological Survey. “California’s Central Valley.” Accessed January 27, 2021. https://ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/central-valley/about-central-valley.html.
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Where trees and plants dominate folklore and where most embroideries contain flowers. Where exploring nature is the national pastime. Those landscapes are far different from the majesty of the Central Valley, but they informed her understanding of it. As have the many places she has lived—Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver, Boston, Taipei, Paris—each helping her learn to analyze and immerse oneself in a place. To soak up its essence.
are hybrids of technical and figurative, whimsical and precise. Strict order and wonderful disorder. This passion comes through in the clarity of her architectural vision. In the curated palette of materials, the assured lines, the balanced forms and volumes, the painterly views inside and out. As with her art, this sense of order is balanced with a distinct sense of boldness and bravery. Designs that are not afraid to be refreshingly different: Finlike rooflines emulate airplane wings; interiors split apart and lunge forward to direct views in varying directions; abstract wood and cement board surfaces playfully alternate, supplemented by bold pops of citrus-inspired orange (Cubist, page 113).
She soaks up the spirit of the valley in the same way, investigating a culture that combines California’s openness and experiment with the hardworking, getthings-done spirit of the heartland. “It’s a hands-on, immersed life,” says Ogrydziak. Her fascination with this active, pioneer spirit drives structures like Art Barn (page 59), an art gallery built inside a metal-roofed barn that still houses animals and farm equipment. And Flight House (page 1), with its large, rust-colored sliding wood doors. Or Kayak House (page 31), with its heavy masonry and timber walls. They resemble the agrarian structures of the valley: the strong, steel-framed Butler buildings, the metallic sheds and silos, the timber barns and mills. The practical armature that still drives this place. She loves working with her builders, getting her hands dirty with them, learning their lessons.
Ogrydziak’s complex, free-flowing creativity blends seamlessly with her fascination with innovation. She studied and taught at MIT, and constantly draws from the experiments—structural, agrarian, academic—prevalent in the Central Valley. It shows in buildings that push the limits of structure, material, and tradition. She is not afraid to employ—as she did with Flight House— TridiPanels, rigid insulated wall segments that become their own structure. The home’s exposed steel beams and trusses support loads while celebrating structure—not hiding it. For Iridescent, glass mosaic squares, heat-fused with silver nitrite, create a shimmering, multi-color façade.
Since she was little Maria also loved to draw and paint— a passion that crystallized in her teen years when she studied Chinese landscape painting in Taiwan. She followed the discipline’s strict rules, creating places (always places) out of rocks, trees, fog, and pathways. It was about immersion—about putting a human into an environment. Her family lived in a Chinese house in a Chinese neighborhood, not separated in an expat community.
And her work incorporates a keen human intuition. Her understanding of, and empathy for, her clients—generally like-minded people willing to take risks, to not build the same house everyone else is building. Just as her houses grow out of the earth, they grow out of their clients—no two alike. Or even close to alike.
Her passion for art is still a seminal part of her life and work. Ogrydziak creates paintings and watercolors that
“What I love to do is try to figure out how to create architecture that affects people in a positive way and IX
helps people do things or think about things positively, with joy,” she says.
her own art, where she can do everything—just the way she likes it—from painting to relaxing to hosting.
“It’s really a team effort,” she adds, alluding to the creative collaborations that take place every time. “Each project is as much the owner’s as it is mine.”
“It’s where my family comes. My grandchildren come. If I have architects over we meet at the big table.” This kind of central, multifunctional space is embedded into many of Ogrydziak’s houses, which blur the line between her designs for workplaces, markets, and community spaces.
Often Ogrydziak will propose multiple solutions, and she and the client will brainstorm, constantly bouncing new ideas off one another.
“Our lives are much more connected and complex than just living or working,” she says. “I’m interested in the way playing or art or thinking or reading or writing or working on a computer can happen in the same space. In creating a space that allows these things to happen together, rather than segregating them.”
For a passionate kayaker, Ogrydziak designed Kayak House, intimately connected to one of the best rapid runs in California. Its living space is dominated by an 18-foottall wall of windows, oriented to the water. A private courtyard extends into a grove of trees, lending privacy and different vistas. Full-sized kayaks hang from sturdy concrete masonry walls.
These multifunctional spaces, like her homes in general, all have their own characters, tailored to their places and their owners. They channel the complexities of our lives, and our age, in which programs blend and transition; variety and flexibility are treasured; new perspectives are vital.
For clients with fond memories of playing in remote fields as children, she created Flight House, which is an interconnected complex of one-story buildings, each stepping out onto a four-and-a-half-acre site surrounded by planted fields, a private meadow, and a small farm. She created Iridescent for a tech lover and tinkerer and his wife. In many ways the project is itself a piece of technology: showcasing its steel frame and joints, carving out space for the owner’s workshop, featuring lights and vents (designed together with the owner) that resemble airplane parts, and employing custom fish tanks and a massive television as walls.
The Music Box’s great room (page 97), which combines cooking, dining, and entertaining, was created specifically to highlight its beautiful concert piano, transported from Argentina—the prized possession of her musician client. Here Ogrydziak raised an existing home’s walls and ceiling and added windows, significantly increasing square footage and flooding the central space with light all day long. Walls are all white, focusing attention on performance, the piano, and a lovely double bass belonging to the client’s daughter.
Ogrydziak created Edge Loft (page 79) for herself and her husband. Its black-and-white exterior striping, created from roofing tiles, recalls the valley’s crop rows, the town’s crosswalks, and the striated black-and-white walls of some of the European churches she has admired. It’s a one-of-akind space, topped with expansive trusses, and filled with
“Architecture seeps into our lives, into our souls,” adds Ogrydziak. And it’s clear that her soul, and those of her clients, seep back into her architecture. Each home is beautiful and unique, but also practical, livable, and flexible. Materials are handsome, tactile, but not frivolous or overly luxurious. The luxury, if that’s the right word, X
comes in having a complex, nuanced, intuitive space that people want to be in, both by themselves and with others. Her homes don’t dominate their surroundings. Trees and landscapes are part of the palette: trees serve as shading curtains; a plot of land can be an outdoor room; the view of a river can become a sort of artwork. Here you feel elevated. But also connected to yourself, to others, and to the world around you. Rooted to a place, and to what it’s all about. Ogrydziak’s efforts to define a new local vernacular ripple beyond her own work, extending out to the region via active engagement with groups like the Central Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She served as its president and in 2012 founded the Central Valley Region Architecture Festival, promoting discussion, analysis, and immersion in local work. The event continues to this day. Ogrydziak has brought her passion for connection and experiment to the place and its people, supporting and absorbing its best architecture. Work that reflects the valley’s landscape, culture, tradition, technology, and people, but brings something truly unique and personal. Work filled with respect, understanding, and innovation. Connected to its users and its context, but also connected to something bigger. To the sky, the sun, and the spirit. To the big picture of life. Sam Lubell
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SKY & EARTH MEET LIVE & WORK
FLIGHT HOUSE For the digital homesteaders Y O L O C O U N T Y, C A L I F O R N I A , 2 0 1 5
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Bedrooms, bathrooms, laundry
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Great Room: living, dining, kitchen
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Office
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Guest Suite
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FLOOR PLAN
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FLIGHT HOUSE
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ere is the promise of Central Valley architecture made real. Modern, light-filled, and connected to the earth and the sky, Flight House is warm, welcoming, and practical—just like its owners, Ben and Cecile. A custom home in the truest sense, it’s about putting down roots for family and creating spaces to cultivate the life you are meant to live. The innovative TridiPanel building system allowed me to place structural elements on top of the roof (rather than under), signature wings in homage to the Pacific Flyway’s shifting flocks of birds. These wings represent flight in its purest form—that moment of lift when anything is possible, soaring into a pure blue sky, like my favorite moment in architecture when the design process begins.
“We are like children who receive a new toy and spend more time playing with the box the toy came in. This house has that kind of versatility and inspires creative use.”—Ben and Cecile
MATERIALS
4.56 acres Large meadow or field TridiPanel building system Views of crop rows Pacific Flyway
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While this custom homestead just a 10-minute drive from town may seem timely now, the owners were years ahead of the curve in their desire to work from home as they raised their child.In the design process, the owners drew inspiration from their own childhood memories—of winter sunlight and of playing in far-flung meadows in their native South Africa.
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Four simple boxes—bedroom, living-dining-kitchen, work, and guest pods—form two structures, all arranged on an eight-foot grid. Separate live and work structures connect through a breezeway. With a nod to LA modernism, room walls open through large glass doors, creating a free flow of space in and out.
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In the great room, extra-large folding glass doors open the corner completely to the outside—providing abundant light and dramatically expanding the space as it connects to a private meadow.
Flight House is attainable. It is smart but not extravagant. The owners were willing to cut costs in some areas—like using a flatpack kitchen—to focus on space, light, and design.
The wings visually extend the neighboring crop rows—an element based on a hunch, as I had no access to plantings during design. It was a great day when I saw those green shoots come in perfectly aligned.
2 , 7 9 5 S Q. F T. ON 4 .56 ACRE S
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