Mark Cavagnero established his eponymous San Francisco firm on New Year’s Day in 1993. Since then, it has garnered more than 250 design awards from the likes of the American Institute of Architects and the Chicago Athenaeum. Though its work stretches around the globe, notable civic and cultural projects in the Bay Area include the SFJAZZ Center, Oakland Museum of California, Moscone Convention Center expansion, California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum, and San Francisco Civic Center Courthouse. Cavagnero describes its SFJazz Center, San Francisco Symphony renovation and addition, and Bowes Center at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music as “a way to guide the heart of the city into the 21st century.”
Currently in construction, Cavagnero’s Artists Hub on Market Street will eventually provide 94 affordable housing units dedicated to local creatives. In the planning and design phases are a new campus for the San Francisco Unified School District’s Ruth Asawa School of the Arts and a project for the San Francisco Symphony.
The publication of Cavagnero’s first book last fall by ORO Editions offers new perspectives on fifteen projects across twenty years of practice, demonstrating how his designs serve as urban building blocks. We spoke with the architect about the importance of context and community to architectural design, how layering voices and histories makes for better buildings, and the poetic quality of California light.
William Stout Architectural Books: What can your monograph, Mark Cavagnero Architect, tell us about your practice?
Mark Cavagnero: My monograph presents over twenty years of buildings that steadfastly retain the core values of Mark Cavagnero Associates: volume and light, site and community, place and time. We apply these values across sites with different programs, budgets, clients, uses, and neighborhoods, as they provide a foundation that gives our work its consistency and intellectual cohesion. We understand these pressures of community, budget, construction, and aesthetic resolution as active—and often opposing—forces and we embrace the struggle.
WSAB: What are the most important elements to consider when creating cultural and civic architecture, especially in California?
MC: Architecture utilizes various means of connection and context to reinforce a fundamental sense of community, especially in an urban setting. Architecture reflects a community and its ambitions, whether by intention or default.
Building in the larger community of California is a complex matter. Its history is rich, and its racial composition is highly varied. Many subcultures form this place, from the original Native peoples to the Mexican and Spanish settlers to the Gold Rush European immigrants searching for fortune. Each group brought its own culture, language, and expectations about building community. Over time, California developed its own important sense of place and character, proud to be different, proud to be on the extreme coastal setting facing the Pacific Ocean, and separated from the rest of the continent by the rugged Sierra Nevada mountains. It is important to understand the aspirations of the community, what people want your building to enhance, not degrade. Reflecting the human aspirations that make a community is an architect’s dream.
WSAB: What makes San Francisco distinct from other cities architecturally?
MC: San Francisco, where much of our work is located, is a peninsula surrounded by water on three sides. Daylight and the reflected deep blue sky are the dominant aspects of our natural world. The coastal California sky presents a powerful light, reflecting the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and the immediacy of the San Francisco Bay, that defines our city and affects all our work.
We try to expose interior spaces to daylight from two or more directions, offering a sense of balance and a sense of dynamic change as a day progresses. The result can be simultaneously calming and stimulating. Balanced daylight produces a sense of respite, of being engulfed in light and feeling attached to nature despite having walked inside a man-made environment.
Connecting daylight to the human experience of nature drives our architectural minimalism as well. Unnecessary materials and forms can diminish the fundamental relationship between physical shelter and intellectual calm. Our architecture, therefore, is directly related to this need and uses light as its cue. In responding to all aspects of light—its angle, intensity, variation, and direction—our buildings become living things.
Light is poetic for us. It is not simply a rational measure.
WSAB: Is there any relationship between your projects in the culturally rich hub of the city center: the Civic Center Courthouse, SFJAZZ Center, SF Artist Housing, the Conservatory of Music, and the Wilsey Center for Opera?
MC: Site and context are critical values for us in practicing community responsibility. We develop buildings that sensitively respond to their location rather than aim for a purely monumental stature. We strive to create designs that are both beautiful forms and studied responses to their sites. This makes each building feel timeless and unique, as it would not make sense in any other place. Great works of architecture are interlocked with their immediate site and the larger community. We analyze the adjacent buildings, the larger block, and the fuller neighborhood around our building site as part of its essential community. Our goal is to connect.
For me, the Civic Center is the cultural heart of the city. It needs to project permanence, life, and respect. We want the program of each building to be readily apparent, for pedestrians moving through the neighborhood to immediately understand the role and character of each building. Older Civic Center buildings were Beaux Arts in design, reflecting little of their use or time. We want the opposite—to bring the city a force of life and relevance.
WSAB: In the Bay Area, you’ve done a number of projects, from the Legion of Honor to the Rafael Theater and the Headlands Center for the Arts, for which you distinguished explicitly between the preservation of the outer historical shell and the insertion of a wholly modern interior. Why is adaptive reuse important in architecture today?
MC: [Whether] inserting a new building form into an existing neighborhood [or] new elements of architectural form and materials within the shell of an historic structure, both building types require the same sense of balance and care. How does each generation speak so its voice is heard but prior voices are not dominated? Finding this sense of unity takes time and exploration. It is gratifying when we find a design where each generation is at its best and clearly expressive. The richness of the city is highlighted, and the past is not forgotten.
WSAB: What does sustainability look like in your practice?
MC: Our efforts begin with minimizing heat gain in the warm California climate. We carefully site each building to limit sun exposure on western façades, balancing the desire for daylight with the need to control glare and heat. Sustainability's role in materials, resources, energy, and off-gassing is obvious. It's more subtle—but equally important—at the scale of the block, the neighborhood, and the city district. How can character and culture be sustained and brought forward in their best form, while shedding what no longer works?
Our frequent use of cast-in-place concrete reflects an attitude toward permanence and relevance as the ultimate gauge of sustainable architecture. Roman aqueducts, still in use 2,000 years later, are amazingly sustainable structures by today’s standards. Each brick has "worked" and "produced" for millennia.
WSAB: Do books play a role in your practice?
MC: Books were always and are still of great importance to me. I have always loved architecture more for ideas rather than brick and mortar. Books convey intent, aspiration, and tell why an architect pursued a certain overall strategy. It is in this lucidity that architecture can move forward from generation to generation; because it is in the conveyance of these ideas that the succeeding generation can build on great work and make communities better served.
Perhaps my love of books is why I set out to write one.
