“I think there was a lot of trust in us—the project [AIA San Francisco’s Center for Architecture + Design] was in a lot of ways a reflection of our practice and how it’s set up. We're a pretty small firm and we very much rely on what I call an extended family of craftspeople and collaborators. We have this sort of go-to group of collaborators that really feel like part of our firm—even though our firm is only a couple dozen people—with some of them in different parts of the country. This project almost became like a reflection of that … that apparatus.

My point being is that if we’re too comfortable, then we know we’re doing something wrong. We like to veer outside of our lane and our collaborators enable us to do that in profound ways.”