San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Designer Profile
Architect Mark English has been creating stylish homes, retail spaces for more than 30 years.
Savvy and sophisticated, architect Mark English has been creating stylish homes and commercial spaces from his San Francisco office for nearly 30 years. A native of the Bay Area, English’s love for building and design dates back to his youth, when he constructed planter boxes and retaining walls in his family’s backyard.
Having a father who was an aerospace engineer further fueled his ambition. English, now 60, recalls seeing rocket components in his house growing up and learning about how they worked.
An innovator, English served as a beta tester for Houzz, helping the website acquire content and information before it blossomed into the online Goliath it is today.
In 2010 he started an online magazine called “The Architects’ Take” a website that features commentary, profiles and original interviews with designers and architects.
In this interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, English talks about what spurred him to start his online publication, his favorite projects and the professional challenges he enjoys the most.
Q: What made you start “The Architects’ Take”?
A: I started that in 2010, while still in the midst of recession. It was an early tool to educate architects about the power and influence of social media. I saw blogging and social media as the future. The Architects’ Take
was part of a bigger strategy. Most architects don’t necessarily have a place to express themselves. It was a great way to meet other architects and designers. Almost nobody said no to an interview. Designers were early adopters, while architects aren’t generally used to selfpromoting.
Architects tend to have a point of view that you don’t need to talk about yourself if you’re good. That is easily pushed aside when you think of how Frank Lloyd Wright engaged in selfpromotion. Some architects had longstanding connections with editors and gatekeepers and didn’t want to see that process democratized. But I found it super exciting. Architects at the time seemed generally content to be profiled in a magazine or a book. But the staying power in those can be fleeting. There may be only a couple thousand of those books printed, with half of them ending up in bargain bins and the others collecting dust in a library. Having an online platform allows someone to reach a much larger audience, and it has staying power. I could show architects data about how many people saw a blog post, where they came from and where they went after. That fascinated them.
Social media is something all professions have to embrace. People google everything. And with architecture, everyone has an opinion and ideas about what looks good. You have to embrace that. My profession has done a good job in the last five years of embracing the realities and opportunities that are there for them online.
Q: What’s a piece of technology you can’t imagine doing business without?
A: Without a doubt, it’s the smartphone. It’s so incredibly important. It provides the ability to take photographs wherever we are and access the office’s servers to pull up documents. The mobile nature of the smartphone and its access to everything you might need for your practice is what makes it so valuable.
Q: How did you find your way into architecture?
A: My dad was on aerospace engineer, and my siblings and I became graphically oriented as kids. But I was more interested in building things. It started with gardening projects, building planters and retaining walls. But my love for architecture blossomed when we would travel across the country every summer. We spent a lot of time in the Southwest. The extraordinary landscape and modern and ancient pueblo buildings in
Arizona left a huge impression on me. You’d see these places stripped down, without ornament, and realize how they were laying rooms out. I loved those buildings in the context of sloping topography, and to this day I prefer to do homes on hillsides and challenging landscapes.
Q: What’s your favorite city, town or neighborhood to build in?
A: The most exciting projects for me are singlefamily homes in the countryside. Landscape is an incredibly large part of design. It’s a sculptural collaborator. Each house is different and interesting, especially when the form isn’t dependent on something artificial, like where the sidewalk is.
The other work I really love is within constraints of San Francisco, where you have neighbors who are interested and/or concerned about what you are going to do. There you look at context and neighboring buildings to fit your concepts into an interpretation of what would be appropriate. That’s a challenge. Because the needs of family might be different than the perceived needs of neighborhood. On the other hand, it’s more political. You won’t make everyone happy, but you do the best job you can to make people mostly happy.
Q: What are some upcoming projects you have?
A: I’m excited about one I just started in Brisbane, just north of SFO. It’s a new house on the edge of an old quarry site. The home is perched above a 100foot cliff. It’s exciting because it’s difficult. Fortunately, we’re working with a good planning department, but it’s geologically difficult, because you need to know about what the subsurface geology is doing. All that is part of just getting going. I believe the most challenging sites can produce the most successful outcomes.
Q: What are some lessons you’ve learned during your career?
A: That you’re always learning. I like to say that I’m now 60, and I’m starting to get good at this. Architecture is a profession where it takes a long time to develop ability and confidence. And that only comes with experience. And architecture touches on so many things. There are so many factors at play. There’s structural engineering, finance, beauty and design to consider. You also have to consider longevity. You want to design a building that will last. So it needs to be sensible, rather than topical. Something topical will be torn down in 30 to 40 years.