Spiegel Aihara Workshop

Firm name: Spiegel Aihara Workshop
Location: San Francisco
Year founded: 2014
Firm leadership: Dan Spiegel, AIA, and Megumi Aihara
Education:
Spiegel: B.A., Stanford University; M.Arch., Harvard University Graduate School of Design (Harvard GSD); Aihara: B.A., Brown University; M.L.A. Harvard GSD
Experience: Spiegel: Architecture Research Office, Peter Rose + Partners; Aihara: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Surface Design, Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture

How founders met: In graduate school

Firm size: Sixish

Bruce Damonte
Created in collaboration with Dustin Stephens of Mobile Office Architects, the 24-foot-long True & Co. retail vehicle comprises four fitting rooms, origami doors that unfold to provide seating and a checkout counter, and plywood-and-cedar millwork display areas.

Mission:
Our practice is rooted in a hybrid of architecture and landscape architecture, allowing us to work across scales—from the tactile object to the city—and across timelines—from the immediate to the ecological—at the onset of a project.

Origin of firm name:
We usually go by our acronym, SAW. It is easier to spell than our names, is only shared with one horror film franchise, invokes a tool used for construction, and alludes to our collaborative, iterative design process.

First commission:
Low/Rise House in Menlo Park, Calif.

Courtesy Spiegel Aihara Workshop
For its Harvey Milk Plaza competition entry for the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, SAW designed an angular elevated platform for community gathering and a street-level tribute wall to the politician and activist.

Favorite project:
Low/Rise House was our first built work—completed before our office was officially founded—and became the basis for much of our understanding about design and construction. Our focus was simultaneously very narrow—on family, details, context—and broad—the trajectory of suburban housing in the United States. While the project is a specific response to a number of unique conditions, our intention was always to create a new residential prototype based on variable densities of inhabitation.

Second favorite project:
Our 2017 competition entry for Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco. It’s a loaded site, full of pragmatic complexities, diverse constituencies, and symbolic content. Our proposal has no clear delineation between landscape and architecture, allowing for a particular condition of continuity that we used to test some of our ideas about ritual, movement, and memory.

Courtesy Spiegel Aihara Workshop
The Lockwood BnBnB vacation residence proposes positioning three distinct volumes for private living quarters—for owners, guests, and workforce—around shared common spaces.

Architecture hero:
We would probably have a different answer on any given day, but right now we are on a real Carlo Scarpa kick. The details of his work are unconventional and ornate, but manage to feel easy, clear, and obvious. The layers of material synopate across divergent timelines and the juxtaposition of landscape and primal forms seemingly freeze moments of time.

Special item in your studio space:
A few dozen handblown goblets from Megumi’s previous life as a glass artist

Design tool of choice:
The old-school, three-button scroll-wheel mouse, corded

Bruce Damonte
The torqued Z-shaped second story addition to this San Francisco residence capitalizes on the project’s hilly site and views.

Bruce Damonte
A San Francisco residence by Spiegel Aihara Workshop.

Favorite place to get inspired:
Honolulu: It’s such an improbable city, equal parts tropical Brutalism and rugged landscape, totally isolated and somehow at ease.

The best advice you have ever gotten:
When starting out, say yes to everything.

Biggest challenge in running a successful practice:
Learning when to say no.