Ehrlich Architects Receives 2015 AIA Architecture Firm Award

Miranda Brackett

The work of Ehrlich Architects includes residential, commercial, institutional, and educational projects. The firm is renowned for melding classic California Modernist style with multicultural and vernacular design elements and for using a rich palette of materials and textures.

Steven Ehrlich, FAIA, founded the firm in 1979 after spending time working with the Peace Corps in Africa. Through these experiences, he gained an appreciation for simple, natural materials and vernacular solutions to energy, sustainability, and building performance challenges. In his practice, Ehrlich had the opportunity to renovate properties designed by well-known California Modernists, such as Richard Neutra.

Today Ehrlich Architects is led by four diverse partners: Steven Ehrlich, FAIA; Takashi Yanai, AIA; Patricia Rhee, AIA; and Mathew Chaney, AIA. They see themselves as architectural anthropologists exploring ancient, developing-world building traditions and featuressuch as Japanese-style courtyards, Middle Eastern lattice screens, and vernacular mud constructionand implementing them in contemporary buildings.

Partners (LR): Mathew Chaney, AIA; Takashi Yanai, AIA; Steven Ehrlich, FAIA; and Patricia Rhee, AIA. Photo credit: Miranda Brackett.

The marriage of the particular with the universal is one of the great virtues of the firms design approach, where connections between culture, climate, people, and place are woven together in a distinct humanistic architecture shaped by circumstance, wrote Steve Dumez, FAIA in a letter of recommendation.

The Federal National Council Parliament Building Complex in Abu Dhabi, UAE, is a symbol for a burgeoning democracy in the Middle East. Photo credit: bioLINIA.

Read the original post:
Ehrlich Architects Receives 2015 AIA Architecture Firm Award