After designing 44 affordable-housing projects over the last 30 years, San Francisco architect David Baker has developed a formula for making them look like their market-rate cousins: “You build 20 percent with high-end materials, and the other 80 percent with less expensive ones.

The beachfront city of Santa Monica, California, with its stylishly laid-back restaurants and hotels, plus freeway access to downtown Los Angeles, may not seem the obvious place for affordable housing.

On a sunny afternoon in Pasadena, California, an energetic sixth grader runs between the ginkgo trees in the large circular courtyard of Blair International Baccalaureate Middle School.

Situated on a skinny lot at the edge of downtown Santa Barbara, California, architect James Gauer’s 1,500-square-foot Brous-Scherer house is an anomaly in a town known for its code-enforced adherence to the Spanish Colonial style.

Berkeley-based Terry & Terry Architecture designed a single-story addition and renovation to an existing mid-century ranch house owned by a retired couple in Menlo Park, California.

Completed in November 2009, the pool house is the first phase of a larger single-family residential building project on a large flag-shaped lot in South Pasadena, just northeast of Los Angeles.

The architects Grygoriy Ladigin, Casper Mork-Ulnes, and Andreas Tingulstad at SFOSL were commissioned to build a cabin for two couples to share in a remote town in Mendocino County, which is located along the Pacific Coast two hours north of San Francisco.

Michael Folonis reacted with baffled delight when he was chosen to design the 50,000-square-foot, three-story UCLA Outpatient Surgery and Medical Building in Santa Monica.