When the Energy Foundation, a partnership of philan-thropic investors that promotes clean-energy technolo-gies, outgrew its offices in a former military hospital on San Francisco's Presidio, it saw an opportunity to recreate its headquarters not only to accommodate its rapidly growing staff, but also to better reflect its mission.

As you enter the lobby of the California Institute of Tech-nology’s Graduate Aerospace Laboratories (GALCIT), your eye is drawn upward, where an amoebalike entity clings to the ceiling.

Those of us from Northern California can attest to the fact that one of the most beautiful beaches in the world is located about 20 miles north of San Francisco—Stinson Beach. It’s a little wilder than most—windy and often foggy.

Last November in Montecito, California, wildfire consumed almost 2,000 acres, destroying over 100 homes.

During its 20 years of designing, renovating, and building houses mostly in Southern California, Marmol Radziner + Associates has soaked up a rich tradition of Modernism and interpreted it in a series of projects that engage nature as an instrument of architecture.

It comes as a shock to discover one of the Bay Area’s most riveting examples of recent architecture is not the work of international highfliers imported to San Francisco and its environs to rev up the local landscape.

For decades, the University of California, Berkeley had a well-deserved reputation as a place for radical ideas and progressive culture.