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Scholars

Here are some of the architecture and design scholars whose work I particularly enjoy and admire—with emphasis, as throughout this website, on the Bay Area.

Steven I. Doctors holds licenses as an architect and general contractor in the State of California. He received a Bachelor of Architecture at Cornell University and a Master of Science in Architecture at UC Berkeley. He is a PhD candidate in Architecture at UC Berkeley and an adjunct professor in the Architecture program at the University of San Francisco. His research interests include the history of architectural practice, design theory and methods, project management methodologies, project delivery strategies, early 20th century Italian architecture, and sacred spaces. He is a member of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Project Management Institute.

Since 1984, his firm, CM+ Group, has offered a wide range of project management services to building owners, tenants, financial institutions, educational groups, and non-profit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area.

An expert in cross-cultural design, Lisa Findley is a distinguished international educator; advisor to the Province of Yunnan, China, on the intersection between historic preservation and tourism; and architect with a background in environmental policy and political science. Her work connects cultural geography, anthropology, postcolonial studies, landscape architecture, natural history, and cartography. Author of Building Change: Architecture, Politics and Cultural Agency and Contributing Editor, Architectural Record, she is a professor of architecture at California College of the Arts.

Professor and Chair of Visual Studies at California College of the Arts, Mitchell Schwarzer is a noted historian and scholar and author of over fifty articles in journals ranging from Harvard Design Magazine to Dwell; and of three books: Zoomscape: Architecture in Motion and Media; Architecture of the San Francisco Bay Area: History and Guide; and German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity.

As Kenneth Caldwell has written, “Pierluigi Serraino is more than an architectural historian and cultural critic—he’s a treasure hunter. He uncovers 20th-century architectural gems for the rest of us, and the resurgence of interest in mid-century modernism, in part, can be linked to his book, Modernism Rediscovered, which brought unknown images from photographer Julius Shulman’s incredible archive into the light. His new book, NorCalMod, does something similar, but also argues that modernism was alive and well in Northern California when everybody thought that only shingles were in vogue.

“In NorCalMod, Serraino uses the 20th century situation in Northern California to explore larger themes about modern architecture, including the impact of media, the power of the available photographic image, and the influence of a dominant architectural elite in the public’s understanding of architectural culture.”

Other books by Pierluigi Serraino include Eero Saarinen and History of Form*Z.

Adi Shamir is the Executive Director of the Van Alen Institute: Projects in Public Architecture and the author of Open House: Unbound Space and the Modern Dwelling (New York: Rizzoli, 2002).

Susan Ubbelohde is an internationally recognized expert on energy use, daylighting, and climate response. She has directed nearly $1 million in funded research for the U.S. Dept. of Energy, the State of Minnesota, the National Science Foundation, the UC Energy Institute, and the California Institute for Energy Efficiency. She is a professor at UC Berkeley and has taught formerly at UC San Diego, Univ. of Minnesota, Florida A & M, Tulane and the Center for Environmental Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, India. She offers consulting services through her Oakland-based firm, LOISOS + UBBELOHDE ASSOCIATES.