Return to design |E-Mail This Article

previous image | next image Fog House Marin County, Calif. IS.Ar Iwamoto Scott Architecture Perched on a hilltop outside San Francisco, the planned house would incorporate not only its surrounding landscape, but the weather, too. Flemington Jewish Community Center Competition Flemington, N.J. L/IS Levit Iwamoto Scott With a colleague, Robert Levit, the architects addressed the dual nature (secular and religious) of a traditional synagogue by separating the functions but drawing them together with repeated patterns. Faculty Resource Room Ann Arbor, Mich., 1999 IS.Ar Iwamoto Scott Architecture The architects, who were both teaching at the University of Michigan, converted a little-used, windowless concrete-block room into an inviting and crowded faculty room, with space for computers and slide making. They raised the money themselves. Ver Plank Residence Clear Lake, Mich. IS.Ar Iwamoto Scott Architecture This lakeside cabin investigates the idea of "floating," since it was designed for a retired Navy pilot and sailor. Spiral Chair & Tube Chair IS.Ar Iwamoto Scott Architecture Designed for a furniture company that a friend of theirs owns, both of these chairs may see production some day. Though both are undergoing refinement to make them more comfortable. The prototype Tube Chair is made from styrofoam swimming pool "noodles."

For Craig Scott and Lisa Iwamoto, professional
collaboration came second, but their careers still come first. A couple for almost 15 years, the pair have only been working together for five or six years, traveling independently back and forth across the continent for primarily professional reasons. They met in Berkeley, and both worked with RoTo Architects there. Then they each ended up at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, but in different years. After graduation, both landed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they taught—and Scott still teaches—at the University of Michigan. Now, they are halfway through one last move, back to California (Iwamoto has already gone and is teaching at the University of California at Berkeley), which they both consider home. In fact, one of their current projects is their own house. Somehow, they have still found time in all of this moving to design buildings as well as innovative and original furniture.

IS.Ar Iwamoto Scott Architecture’s commissions come from all over—friends of friends, competitions. One even came from a someone who posted a note on a bulletin board.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people come to the school, thinking they can get architecture for cheap or free,” Scott said. “But some of them pan out. We have a church client right now, a pretty sizable addition, who approached the school.”
Iwamoto and Scott not only designed and built one of their early projects, a faculty resource room at the University of Michigan, but they raised the money for the project themselves. The low budget required the pair to use
particleboard and medium-density board for the walls, but they spent more money on the surfaces that people would actually touch, which is a testament to the thought that this young firm puts into the details of their projects.

Typical of their more recent work is the Fog House, a private residence designed to make the most of a Marin County, California, hilltop location. Unlike the existing house on the lot, which is half-buried into the hill, this project is perched on a ridge to take better advantage of 270-degree views sweeping out toward San Francisco Bay and the surrounding hills. Iwamoto and Scott want to use the project to combine earth-shaping landscape architecture with a glass box. The house even provides a path for the fog that sweeps in from the bay to float under and through the building itself. In an early concept meeting, the client asked for a design that was “like living on a single floor of a high-rise.”

“That obviously piqued our interest,” Scott said.

The project has been on hold for a time, while the client has concentrated on other projects, but Scott and Iwamoto hope to use their impending move to California to rekindle his interest in the house.

“Part of the idea of moving out to California is to be able to pursue practice even more actively,” Iwamoto said. “Because at Michigan, we were both teaching every day. It’s quite difficult for both of us to be full-time teachers and to have a practice.” One suspects, given their output in the past, that they would have found a way to sustain that practice anyway.

by Kevin Lerner