Sander Architects, LLC | Selected Work ( 2017 VERSION )

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LLC, has been in existence since 1987 and is known for awardwinning modern design, innovative use of materials, and strong leadership in the green movement. The office has completed dozens of buildings from single-family residences to commercial projects, science facilities, office buildings and multi-family housing developments.

By melding art and architecture/interior design, the design approach of Sander Architects creates international award-winning buildings that have been published in books and major magazines around the world. At the same time, we are proud of our long track record of working successfully with conservative budgets.

As an example, in 2009, Sander Architects won an invited competition to design the Idyllwild Performing Arts Center. The projected budget was an extremely conservative $18MM for a 30,000 square foot complex with two theaters, lobby / performance space, gallery, café / bookstore, practice rooms, offices and classrooms.

Our design, priced by an independent, third party pricing firm, came in almost two million dollars under budget.

One of our secret weapons is Sander Architects’ brainchild, HYBRID HOUSE, part prefab, all custom™. This brings the efficiencies of established prefab manufacturers to our buildings, and blends that with standard construction so that while each project is unique, each is able to benefit from lower construction costs.

s a n d e r

a r c h i t e c t s

HYBRID CONSTRUCTION part prefab all custom

TM

Residence for a briard

HYBRID CONSTRUCTION, part prefab, all custom™, the invention of Sander Architects, LLC, uses light-gauge frames made from recycled steel normally used for warehouse construction. These are then applied in a residential or commercial context to create the bones and sometimes the roof and the skin of the building.

Use of the engineered prefab frames of the Hybrid House system allows the project to be completely custom in both design and construction unlike other modular prefab homes which require homeowner and architect to work with pre-sized modules.

This system also distinguishes itself with the potential for soaring ceilings and large open-span spaces. The warehouse frames allow the scale of the interior spaces to be magnificent: Residence for a Briard has 28’ ceilings in the great room.

The system is very simple to erect. The general contractor on the Briard project had never worked with it before and he became an enthusiastic convert.

The prefab frames of the Hybrid House provide a great jumping-off point for sustainable projects thanks to the fact that they use recycled steel, use far less steel than standard steel construction and, as they bolt together, can be unbolted and recycled at the end of the building’s life cycle.

IPAC

HC Idyllwild, CA

Idyllwild Performing Arts Center

Sander Architects recently completed a concert hall for Idyllwild Arts. With world-class acoustics and a budget far under the cost of comparable projects, the building counters the trend for institutional, cultural and museum projects that have ever-expanding budgets. this project shows clearly that design skills combined with technology can reverse the high cost trend.

IPAC’s structural system is composed of light-gauge metal building components and is an excellent example of Sander Architects’ Hybrid Construction system, part prefab, all custom TM. The hall had its official opening in September, 2016.

It has been published in Architectural RECORD, Archinect, Archdaily.com, etc.

Idyllwild Performing Arts Center

8,150 sf, $4.3 MM

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The Concert Hall is sheathed in rusted steel panels that have an irregular topography derived from an abstracted musical phrase. It both alludes to the music in the hall, and to the surrounding landscape of folded rock and granite.

The interior of the hall gets its nickname “Hall of Trees“ from the 4” x 8” ribs that arch up the sides and across the ceiling. They are slightly offset to evoke a forest of trees and to scatter the sound and create cleaner acoustics for the performers.

Desert Canopy House

HC Palms Springs, CA 6,200sf, $200/sf

This Hybrid House design developed in response to the extreme nature of its context. In spite of the great heat of the desert in Palm Springs, CA, the stunning view of the St Jacinto mountain range asked for large windows facing west. This prompted a design with a large overhang to block the sun. This is combined with R75 insulation to create the first zero-net house (new construction) in Palm Springs.

Desert Canopy House

Noci Sonoma Farm Healdsberg, CA

Our client owns 25 acres of prime agricultural land on Dry Creek in Healdsburg. He approached us to work with him on implementing a master plan for a sustainable farm and to design the barns, farmhouse and other agricultural buildings on the property.

The main building combines two barns, cold storage, a wood shop, a learning kitchen, entertainment spaces and residential space for the family. It is 300 feet long and is designed with a living “green� roof—so that from the road it will be almost invisible as the land rolls up and over the top.

Noci Sonoma Farm

25,500 sf, $196/sf (Projected)

St. Kitts

HC St. Kitts, West Indies

Biomedical Research Foundation

12,000 sf, $80/sf

A prefabricated light-gauge roof frame sits atop the 3-foot thick volcanic rock walls of a 200-year-old cotton storage warehouse. This modernist insertion into an historic building allows research scientists to conduct delicate investigations in new labs under a roof structure that can withstand 150-mph hurricane winds.

St. Kitts Biomedical Research Foundation

Beach House

Beach House

Hermosa Beach, CA

This project is driven by the homeowners’ desire to create a beachside retreat with all the amenities needed by a family that loves to entertain. Take into consideration that this is a place where a daytime trip to the beach is just as likely as sunset cocktails and the mix desired is a relaxed sophistication.

We have loved imagining all the places that might be perfect for a nap, or a party, for that matter. It all begins with the entrance across a Zen meditation garden that will capture the onshore breezes and wrap around the side of the house. At the rear of the lot, a swimming pool stretches from side-to-side and opens to the main level. A wall of sliding doors opens most of this level and creates a flow from the front living room, through the kitchen and eating areas, out to the side yard and rear pool for seamless indoor/outdoor living.

Beach House

Play House Malibu, CA

This project is a dream for an architect: create a guest house in Malibu designed purely for recreation and relaxation. In order accommodate the entire desired program on the site, the roof of the residence is a tennis court.

Play House

Glass Houses Venice, CA

6300 sf, $240/sf

This project is a pair of three-story townhouses, divided vertically with no common walls. The exterior skin of the building is a double-layer of translucent materials: multi-cell acrylic panels provide the waterproofing inside lapped scales of glass. The extensive glazing maximizes natural daylighting and the acrylic panels (with high R-value) also function to reduce heat loss and gain. From the interior, this creates a dramatic double-height wall that fills the rooms with light.

Glass Houses

Green Houses

HC Venice, CA

2300 and 1800 sf, $250/sf

A pair of townhouses facing one another over a drivable courtyard are like siblings—related but not identical. They both have three floors with generous double-height living spaces. Much of the glazing is a translucent material often used in greenhouses. Images of the Chinese Pistache tree planted between the houses are printed on “bus graphics,” which allow you to look out of but not into the windows.

Green Houses

Arconic Office Torrance, CA

Arconic has offices around the globe and executives from all over the world keep offices at this campus in Torrance, California. After more than a decade, the building needed a design update to reflect both international scope and the caliber of the executives employed by the firm.

Arconic Office

The curved glass walls are designed to provide privacy for the conference rooms centered in the building as well as to suggest air current— this arm of the company sells fastener products to the aeronautics industry, among others.

Pelican Office

Pelican Office

Torrance, CA

A well-established product company already, Pelican wanted office space that would attract world-class designers to become part of a team working on a burgeoning line of protective cases for telephones, tablets and related larger protective container products. With a strict budget of paramount importance, we proposed an open plan with private spaces for conferences, large and small, formal and informal.

A “ribbon� that runs the length of the floor plan encloses those spaces. This creates an upper level mezzanine for open brainstorming and leaves plenty of open space for the company to configure with systems furniture as they expand the team.

Orange Office Venice, CA

7200 sf, $150/sf ()

A guerilla response to an urban context of used car lots on the most heavily trafficked surface street in Los Angeles. An off-kilter volume, sitting on concrete tines, is shaded by an exterior layer of fiberglass screens normally used to protect chemical factory workers from chemical effluent. The building’s skin is entirely composed of translucent acrylic panels, providing a warm, shoji-screen type of interior light.

Residence for a Sculpto r

HC Santa Rosa, CA 4500 sf, $190/sf

This is an example of how the Hybrid House system is successful on hillside lots. Prefab light-gauge steel frames lift the house above the site on the downhill side while the mass of the building anchors into the hill. Enormous windows capture the panoramic views. The galvalume skin is a product that is normally used on roofs, and will never need maintenance.

Residence for a Sculptor

Campus Arts Center San Francisco, CA

An Arts Center designed for a campus in Northern California, this project is designed to encompass both indoor and outdoor spaces as fully functional options for students and/ or the public to gather. Programming for the building includes classrooms for lectures and practicums with faculty and visiting professors. There is a hall for all-school meetings, performances and large lectures for both students and the general public. A cafe and store are open to the public.

Campus Arts Center

25,679 sf

The layout of the Arts Center is deliberately porous, connecting the various functions with private, public and interstitial spaces that cater to the campus and surrounding communities.

This level of accessibility is designed to foster a closer relationship between the Center and the community it serves, offering free and programmed events designed to stimulate curiosity about the arts and their vital function in creating community.

Floating House

Floating House

Venice, CA

The client for this project walked into the first meeting with a small model he created with paper index cards.

The idea he presented, however, was brilliant. he proposed that we float a 3rd story addition over the top of his one-story beach bungalow, leaving the middle space open to classic indoor/outdoor California year-round living.

The ocean is visible from the open middle deck level, as well as from the upper floors on both ends of the addition. ​ The client loves steel and this translated into leaving the steel structure, the “bones� of the building, clearly visible both inside and outside.

Cladding the residence with rusted steel panels also minimize upkeep and prevent corrosive salt air from breaching into the house.

Tree House Wilmington, DE 2,500 sf, $200/sf

Tree House sits on a wooded site surrounded by century-old trees and a seasonal stream. The potential for flooding decided the small footprint and the vertical form. This allows the house to nestle in the trees with marvelous views from the large window in the second–story living room. Horizontal windows encircle the rest of the house, providing select views into the landscape.

Tree House

Residence for a Briard

HC Culver City, CA 4300 sf, $160/sf

Residence for a Briard incorporates a simple prefab shed structure with a façade that references Braque’s Cubist painting of 1912, Aria of Bach. In the interior, this musical theme translates into a gallery/staircase that can accommodate an audience, and into hard and soft materials calibrated to maximize the acoustics of string quartets.

Residence for a Briard

Residence at the Butte

HC Terrebonne, OR 4500 sf, $130/sf

Residence at the Butte sits on a retention pond facing a wide rock outcrop. One side of the 150foot-long house is composed of translucent and transparent panels facing the view. The other long side is covered with overlapping steel panels that reflect the fractured geometries of the butte.

Canal House

HC Venice, CA

2100 sf, $175/sf

Canal House was designed to bring light and spaciousness to a house and studio on a very tight lot. This is achieved through a large skylight above a central atrium wrapped with translucent acrylic, a wall of glass to capture canal views, and floor-to-ceiling translucent walls in the studio. Green strategies include passive heating and cooling, natural daylight, and earth-friendly materials and fixtures.

Canal House

Stairs

As designers we love the opportunity to turn a basic detail in a building into a feature of the design. Well-designed stairs feel almost like sculpture. We approach every aspect of a building this way.

Design Philosophy

Sander Architects seeks to find an architectural 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, compression, torsion, sinew. The entry for a sculptor’s house is a ‘vessel’ whose proportions 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.

Recognition

Sander Architects has been awarded the 2007 American Architecture Award by the Chicago Athenaeum and 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, The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as the Los Angeles Times Magazine. The studio’s work has been widely published in over two dozen books including Another 100 of the World’s Best Houses, noted architecture critic Michael Webb’s Brave New Houses, Adventures in Southern California Living, Ecological Houses from TeNeues, Prefab Houses from Taschen, as well as 1000x Architecture of the Americas, and Ecological Architecture from Braun. As mentioned previously, the firm recently won an invitation-only competition to design the Idyllwild Performing Arts Center in Idyllwild, California. Sander Architects was a finalist in the 2006 Living Steel Competition as well as a semi-finalist in the 2006 Global Green Sustainable Housing Competition, sponsored by Brad Pitt, to design low-income housing for post-Katrina New Orleans.

The work of Sander Architects is widely featured on many architecture blogs including ArchDaily, Architecture News Plus, ArchInnovations, Archinect, and Arkinetia.

Whitney Sander Before founding Sander Architects, LLC, in 1987, Whitney received his Masters in Architecture from Yale University, and was in the Peace Corps in West Africa from 1981-1983. Since 1991, he has taught Architecture and Art classes at Yale, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts (San Francisco), and Woodbury University. As an architect, Whitney is the recipient of numerous awards and honors and is considered a leader in green architecture.

Catherine Holliss Director of Interior Design for Sander Architects, Catherine received an MFA in Screenwriting from UCLA and is an award-winning writer and web designer.

After extensive coursework in the UCLA Extension Interior Design Certificate Program, she joined Sander Architects, LLC, in 2003. As a designer, Catherine is recognized as a leader in green materials and design and has been invited to sit on several green design panels.

She regularly guest lectures at UCLA and other universities.

sander architects 13274 Fiji Way, Marina Del Rey, CA 90291 T 310.822.0300 F 310.822.0900 info@sander-architects.com