This is the second of a two-part interview series with the principals of Zack/de Vito Architecture. The first part, which you can read here, featured Jim Zack. Here, Rebecca Firestone (RF) of The Architect’s Take chats with Lise de Vito (LD) about her art and design approach.

RF: How did your fine-art background lead you to become an architect?

LD: My dad was both an industrial designer and a graphic designer. My mom was a fine artist, but she had also studied apparel design. From a young age I was exposed to a visual world wherein decisions were made on a visual and a cerebral basis. I would go to my dad’s office after school and there would be a full collection of markers and tools, letrasets, etc., that we could play with… my sisters and I had a heyday! 

Lise de Vito and Jim Zack built the Laidley Street spec house for themselves. Photos: Bruce Demonte

LD: Our parents took us to museums and would ask us questions: “Do you like this?” or otherwise try to get us to talk about what we saw. As a kid, I didn’t always like being forced into engaging.

In high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and ended up pursuing a strong liberal arts curriculum. Architecture was the culmination of everything I’d studied: fine art, color, a graphical way of presenting an aesthetic. 

RF: What do you get out of painting as opposed to architecture?

LD: There are similarities between the design/build process and the process of painting. Both start in a way with a blank canvas. With a building, certain parameters are laid on [spatial, programmatic, economic, regulatory]. With painting, all those parameters are self-imposed. But in both, there’s a process of layering, of making decisions based on earlier decisions, resulting in an outcome.

"Cross Current" by Lise de Vito (2008)

LD: It’s interesting that my painting and my architecture are so different. My paintings are rough, loose, layered, and abstract. But the architecture I do is crisp, graphic, and clean – but still a juxtaposition of materials that make up the whole. There’s still a roughness to each individual material. It’s the composition that defines it and cleans it up.

The construction process is quite messy. It doesn’t seem as if a project in the middle will ever get done. That’s interesting to me, too; from the chaos, to the recognition of the intent.

"Cross Current" detail

LD: Architecture is a crazy profession. The process is so lengthy. It is insane in terms of the time that it takes to design and build something. Painting is an outlet that offers a certain immediacy, to satisfy artistic yearning.

RF: But paintings can take a long time to finish, too.

LD: That’s true! And even though a painting is “done” it’s never really done. I’m always walking around my house and wanting to pull a painting off the wall and work on it some more. Or I look at something in the house and wonder “Why did I do that? What have I learned from that?” One needs to be continually asking that question.

The angst of an artist looking at his own work

RF: How do you and Jim work together on projects?

LD: Since I’m in the office part-time, the speculative projects work out well for me. I do the developer stuff [the houses Lise and Jim have built for themselves and then sold]. We’ve done three of these so far and are currently living in #3. The first was a remodel, and the second two are new construction.

"Been There Done That" artwork and detail, by Lise de Vito (2005); acrylic, wax, masking tape, paper, No. 2 pencil on canvas

LD: It’s a very different relationship to not have a client. It’s nice, but I also miss the interaction with a client. Now I have to make every single decision myself. The husband-wife partnership is a good foil, because I have someone to bounce ideas off of. Otherwise it feels like I’m designing in a vacuum.

RF: What’s it like, living in your own work?

LD: I’m very lucky to have such an incredible learning experience. When you become the client, you realize how hard it is to be a client. Especially a client who’s never worked with an architect or designed anything before. There are so many things most clients have never even thought about: what they like, or need, or want – and how they want to manage their own project.

Some clients that come to us are just overwhelmed. Working on our own homes has given me a lot more empathy for the role of the client.

Rendering and photo show the same project from Zack/deVito Architecture

LD: The process of drawing a plan in scale and being able to see it spatially is a skill that architects develop, but it becomes really honed when you live in your own projects. You get a heightened understanding of what that skill means, where things should go, and how to accommodate the human body.

RF: How do you consider the human body in design? Can you enumerate the factors?

LD: Well, a home is not supposed to feel uncomfortable. Many people have this view of modern architecture as uncomfortable, mean, cruel, and sharp. Bloggers have seen our work and asked questions like, “How could they raise children in there? Where are the chatchkes?”

"Untitled" by Lise de Vito (2006); acrylic, sand, wax, paper on canvas

RF: Well I wonder that too sometimes. I mean, people go crazy child-proofing their homes. How safe are these minimalist contemporary homes with all those hard edges?

LD: Kids adjust… just let the child learn about their own bodies by maneuvering through the world. They can learn their way around even a modern home just fine. Once they get used to the home, they can find their way around even in the dark because they know the space. My kids have never had trouble in any of the homes we have designed and lived in. 

A versatile space can accommodate work and play, as seen in these two projects from Zack/deVito Architecture.

RF: Do you have any human-sizing guidelines?

LD: Designing with kids in mind is different from just designing for adults. They’re more tactile. In places like a kitchen, for example, children need different features than adults in order to be comfortable. 

"Fragment" by Lise de Vito (2008)

LD: Scale is different for children, obviously. Cabinets that are low enough to see over and through to the space beyond, windows at their height – kids appreciate when they’ve been thought of. They learn to use the home in a playful way. They learn to negotiate through their world on every level starting with the home.

View from a child's closet in the Chattanooga Street home by Zack/de Vito Architecture

LD: Some aspects of design you can play around with, and some you can’t. You can vary window heights and ceiling heights, but not the height for handrails or countertops.

I remember in school the first time I was exposed to Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language It was profound to me, as someone always thinking in that context and scale, even in school, to be exposed to that seminal work.

A Pattern Language, written in 1977, is still one of the best-selling books on architecture.

RF: Getting used to a new type of space is hard, too. Even if it’s better, it’s not what we’re used to. It’s like driving an old VW Beetle for years and then going to the latest in high-tech gadgetry.

LD: My first car had a sun roof, and I learned how much I need light. My designs now have as much light as possible, even using the trickiest ways to get light in. A windowless room with even a sliver of light is so much better than one with nothing. Tadao Ando’s churches are great examples of how little light you need to heighten emotion. It’s part of our human instinct.

Architect Tadao Ando's minimalist designs act to draw in natural light. Shown here are the Koshino House and in the center, the Church of Light.

RF: Do you ever get a design that didn’t turn out the way you thought it would?

LD: More with little things – details and materials, not having a simple enough palette. I’m happy with the big picture. There were things I had wanted to change, but that Jim felt strongly about. So we still put our fingers on each others’ stuff [design].

Zack/de Vito Architecture's use of materials to transfer light and create layered spaces in the Laidley Street project - the blue square is the view out through the rear side of the house of the Bay Bridge, viewed through the top of the 13-foot-high master bathroom.

RF: Do you have formal critiques?

LD: Not any more, now it’s daily banter. We are open to each other, and we highly respect each other, but we just don’t have much time to sit down and go over things in detail.

Lines of sight penetrate throughout Zack/de Vito Architecture's Laidley Street house. Photo: Bruce Demonte

RF: How did you and Jim meet, anyway? Was it at an office?

LD: Actually, no. Jim was organizing a show called “Overtime”, the first of three such shows, representing the work done by students and young architects in their off time. Jim showed some of his furniture, and we met at the opening. 

It’s interesting to look at the work and then look at the person who produced it.

The kitchen of Zack/de Vito Architecture's Laidley Street house is bright and serene. Photo: Bruce Demonte

RF: Were there any surprises at that show? Someone whose off-hours work was totally different from their day job?

LD: One guy showed robotics, back before robotics was so cool. They were incredibly detailed and aesthetically spooky. It was a contrast because he was such a buttoned-down sort of person. 

A cozy window seat in the corner of the kitchen at Zack/de Vito Architecture's Laidley Street house. Photo: Bruce Demonte

RF: What’s your feeling about green design?

LD: Jim and I have talked a lot about the current “green” movement. Over the years people have struggled to define what is green, and how to build a green home. The crunchy granola, wood-everywhere look is no longer mandatory. All that wood comes from forests, right? Shouldn’t we be using LESS wood?

A green home doesn't have to look a certain way; it can be organic in shape or it can blend in to any ordinary neighborhood. Right photo shows one of the first Net Zero Energy homes to be commissioned.

LD: Aesthetically you don’t have to scream out how green you are. The aesthetics don’t have to be pre-determined by your ecological sensitivity level. We know someone who’s very active in the green movement, very public about it, and then I went to his home and I was shocked! A house that did not have many green features other than maybe a composter. It just proves to me that we are all growing into this.

We all try to be 100% green, or the public expectation is that anyone pushing it has to be 100% green themselves. But we should not be chiding one another. We’re all learning how to be green, and some people don’t know much. I’ve had clients who said, “I’m green – I turn the water off when I brush my teeth.” Maybe it’s a generational thing, too. 

We’ve got PVs on our current home. It was a substantial investment at the time, but we felt that we needed to do it and as architects we have to be an example. And it does feel good. I’m proud when I get my electricity bill and it’s zero except for the hookup charge. Making and implementing those green decisions really did feel good!

RF: What constitutes good design? If you were teaching a class, what would you ask your students to look for?

LD: It’s in the scale. How do you feel in a space and why? The primary thing in judging design is how the space makes you feel. Do you feel big or small? Even the floor you’re standing on is going to feel a certain way, or make you feel some way. 

Techniques like juxtaposing levels from one room to another, or dark and light areas in the home, creates a response when you transition from one space to the next. It’s not manipulative, but it is.

We led an after-school field trip for my kids’ class, second to fourth grade. We took them to City Hall, the Federal Building, and a few small restaurant spaces. As we walked through each place, we asked them questions about what they saw.

Living area in a recent San Francisco project from Zack/de Vito Architecture

RF: What did they notice? Was it different from what an adult might notice?

At City Hall, they noticed the marble, and also the light. They liked the cool materials in the Federal building, because it was different from anything they had at home. Both places gave them a sense of scale: “I feel so small.”

Entry gate designed and fabricated by Zack/de Vito Architecture

LD: In my own designs, I emphasize views and vistas, both of other parts of the house and of the outside. Each view is constantly referring to something else, but it’s also telling you where you are. If you’re designing a passage into a room, even without a door, you need to create a threshold somehow. A cabinet, or other symbolic indication that tells your brain and body that you’re entering another space.

RF: Some spaces just make me angry.

LD: Me, too! Elevator lobbies especially. There’s something about the typical quality of light, all that fluorescent. Hospitals make me very upset – and it’s not because I’ve had bad experiences in them. Hospital design has really changed over the generations, so maybe it’s just the decisions they’ve been forced to make.

Sensitive artists may find typical office-building aesthetics too stressful.

RF: How do you see design and architecture evolving in the future?

LD: We as human beings need to understand where we fit in the world, and how we are moved by our built environment and how we impact it by our decisions. Light and air are basic needs, and they are qualities we try to capture as architects. The human body was not meant to be locked up in a building, working in a cubicle. 

Bath detail from Zack/de Vito Architecture's Laidley Street project

LD: A good space should have a sense of unity. It does something to you, moves you. There should be a reaction. The worst reaction an architect can get is “Oh, big deal” or “Next!”

“I can’t draw.” Jim Zack, a San Francisco architect whose firm, Zack/de Vito Architecture, has just won an AIA Merit Award, admitted this without a blink. “I develop the concepts, exploring them through computer drawing tools, and then have the details worked out by my designers on staff, based on my ideas.” 

What’s this? An architect who can’t draw? What about all those lovingly crafted pen-and-ink portfolio pieces? Everyone knows that a master’s hand can only be discerned through revisions on trace paper, taped over the computer-generated drawing sheets. Isn’t that what being an architect is all about? It’s all about the design – as judged by images, not by walkthroughs – and a designer can be more famous for unbuilt projects than for built ones. It’s almost as if a building doesn’t really exist unless it comes with an architectural rendering, and a theory, even if it’s already built and in use.

Well… apparently the creative process is as unique as each creator, and conceptions of space can be communicated and developed in multiple ways: the traditional hand sketch, an AutoCAD file, a computer rendering, a physical model. So, how did Zack make such a success of himself, as an architect and as a design-builder?

Jim Zack and Lise de Vito of Zack/de Vito Architecture live in this award-winning home which they designed and built themselves.

Turns out Jim came to architecture in the old-school way – through field experience as a builder, only afterwards getting his architectural Bachelors and Masters degrees at UC-Berkeley. His wife and business partner Lise de Vito has a fine-art background and grew up in a household where both her parents were designers. The two met at an art opening. Later, Jim and Lise designed and built a series of homes for themselves and their growing family. The old-fashioned notion of architect as master builder suddenly takes on a new life and credibility. 

Several voices are represented in the following discussions that took place at the offices of Zack/DeVito Architecture: An initial conversation with Jim Zack (JZ), Mark English (ME), and Rebecca Firestone (RF). A subsequent interview between Rebecca and Lise de Vito (LD) follows.

RF: Jim, could you tell us about your background?

JZ: In junior high I was “the shop guy” and it just never stopped. I liked working with metal and wood; I enjoyed tinkering and making things. Later on, UC-Berkeley had this amazing shop, and I was good at it – so I was still “the shop guy”. 

Onsite stair fabrication and a typical stair detail from Zack/de Vito Architecture.

I learned how to build long before I learned how to design. I was a carpenter for 6 or 7 years after high school. By age 23 I had already designed and built two homes with my dad, but I’ll never, ever tell anyone where they are. I had only taken some junior-college drafting classes.

Jim Zack on his bike in 1980 and again in 2002.

JZ: The other thing that ties into this is motorcycle racing. I was very enthusiastic about motorcycle racing when I was a kid. Finally at around age 23 I realized that I was never going to be the national champion of motorcycle racing. Professional motorcycle racing ties back into making things. Those early racing bikes were all hand-crafted, hand-machined, and had to be tinkered with constantly. I can’t seem to get away from making things, although I’ve tried many times.

RF: Why would you want to stop making things?

JZ: I wanted to be a groovy, cool, designey architect, and not get my hands dirty.

RF: But now design-build is cool.

JZ: After school, I wanted to be self-employed. Then in the dot-com era, we stopped building but then we worked on a spec project which got us back into design-build.

ME: How did your project with Gordon’s House of Fine Eats fit in?

JZ: It started when Gordon saw our Globe restaurant project. At the time, the Globe a tiny, unknown little place. Now they’re well-known. Gordon saw it and engaged with us right away, and we had a great relationship. Our firm built the cool fixtures and the pieces – so we got back into design-build through that.

Zack/de Vito Architecture's design for Gordon's House of Fine Eats won an SF-AIA Honor Award in 2001.

JZ: We like both, but I prefer residential design/build over restaurants. The pace is different. A house might take 14 months from start to finish, but restaurants are more temporal. They want it next week, because every day they’re not open, they’re losing money.

Zack/de Vito Architecture projects: Bacar restaurant and Orson

ME: Tell us about your materials. Why do you like steel and metal?

JZ: I like to make things. You can do things structurally with metal. Steel is strong, so you need less of it, less bulk, to create a structure. It’s about tinkering, and paring down… how slender can I make this piece of steel and still have it work? Working with stairs, the question is, can I make it any smaller?

A high level of craftsmanship characterizes both wood and metal work in Zack/deVito's Bacar project.

JZ: After all those years in the shop, and then working as a builder, I have an intuitive sense of how much steel to use and what it can do. Architects with only theoretical training just don’t have as much of a sense of the material. They don’t know enough about how to detail it. Most architects would have those details done by their contractors as shop drawings.

This C channel drawing from Zack/de Vito Architecture is carefully detailed.

JZ: One reason for my attraction to metal is its mechanical precision. You’re thinking in thousandths of an inch. I loved the exploded drawings in the mechanics’ magazines, the ones that show a motor blown up to show each individual part.

These aren't exactly of the same bike, but the point is that the cutaway drawings depict every component, and a detail drawing would show labels and measurements as well.

JZ: This goes back to my motorcycle racing days too. The old Motocross bikes were all hand-made – by someone with $1M to spend. Like a Ferrari. The professional riders all had custom factory models. Nowadays I think they require them to ride on the same bikes that are sold commercially.

An exploded color rendering of the Kohler Residence project from Zack/de Vito Architecture.

JZ: This has parallels in architecture. Commercial buildings are assembled from pre-fabricated parts, whereas each residential design is unique, and the builder has to work it out as the work progresses.

RF: Tell us about your furniture. How do you come up with things like the steel chair or the I-beam table?

JZ: A lot of the time it’s just what I happen to have around, and thinking, “What can I make out of this stuff, given the machines available to me, and my own level of skill?”

Jim Zack made the Spring Chair and the aluminum, glass, and cast concrete I-Beam Table just for fun.

JZ: The furniture I’ve done for restaurants is fairly standard, mostly utilitarian. Things like that aluminum chair were made from scraps I had around. Actually that chair is pretty comfortable. This I-beam table [at which we were sitting]… I was inspired by how some of our Bay Area bridges are put together. And maybe I just liked working with the aluminum, too. 

The Hoop Chair and the Cubes rolling shelf are more examples of resourceful invention from Jim Zack.

ME: Well, you’re your own client for the stairs in your office.

JZ: In a more traditional client-architect relationship, there’s a leap of faith. The client has to pay, and hope that the end result is worth it. No one knows how it’ll come out because they’ve never done it before. Each new residential project is kind of its own proof of concept.

ME: Stairs are such a central component of a home.To me, they are the erogenous zone of the house, a place where it all comes together in a movement choreography.

JZ: Things happen on stairs, people meet and pass one another. It’s the interaction and flow of a home. A spare, minimalist design can create a feeling of openness. You can’t get such an open feeling from an all-wood stair, because you need to use more material. A metal stair can be part of the structural system of the home.

Elegantly made stairs, with a minimum of material, are a formal sculptural element fostering interaction between levels in these two projects from Zack/deVito Architecture.

ME: What’s your design-build method?

JZ: Well they’re two distinct businesses, really. On the architectural side, most of the designers stay in the office, and on the build side, most of the crew stays in the field. But, there’s a small overlap – that’s where I am, or possibly someone like a construction project manager. Someone who’s equally steeped in both worlds.

Zack's design/build business model keeps a distinct separation, but with a key person bridging the gap.

JZ: Actually the person in my office who’s the best at this is an intern! He just got out of school, so he’s a whiz at computer 3d modeling. 

RF: How much overlap in skills is needed for the teams to function well together?

JZ: It doesn’t need to be 100%. Architects need to think more about building during design. It’s harder to train architects how to build than it is to teach construction crews how to deal with architects.

ME: The way things go together has to be internalized.

JZ: It also helps to have a good building crew. I pick smart guys – everyone on my construction crew is college-educated.  One’s actually an architect, another’s a landscape architect. The architect came looking for a job, and we didn’t have any, but we needed a carpenter, and he had experience. So now he’s working as a carpenter and prefers that to working in an office.

Zack/deVito Architecture worked with several restauranteurs to create Tres Agaves, a modern Mexican restaurant.

ME: Do your architects know how to hand-draw? I’ve noticed that many architects coming out of school can’t even think in 3-D anymore.

JZ: That’s one reason I love the precision of the computer. Many of my designers make small 3-D sketches to investigate how things go together.

Computer-aided visualizations can show not just the facade, but the interior as it appears from outside, as shown in this project from Zack/deVito Architecture.

ME: Do you design through physical models?

JZ: I should… I used to. Sometimes it’s a question of which comes first, the model or the drawing. Do we make a model to represent our drawings, or do we create drawings to represent the model? During school, I would design in model form, and create supporting drawings after the fact.

Models or drawings: which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

ME: How would you start, say you have a typical San Francisco lot of 25 x 93 feet?

JZ: It really starts with the client, of course. My very first concepts are a visceral response, in sketches and diagrams, to the client’s programmatic requirements and to the site itself.

I rely a lot on other people, and yet somehow, we’ve ended up with a consistent portfolio.  I’ll go to my staff and say, “Here are some ideas and a general sense of the project. Now go draw this. Then I review them, and take out what doesn’t belong. 

ME: The drawings are artifacts of a process.

JZ: For me, drawing and the design process are painful and hard. It might be hard even for people who are good at it, though.

These renderings of Zack/deVito Architecture's spec project on Chattanooga St are developed enough to give a clear visualization of the completed project.

I’ll share an anecdote attributed to Greg Lemond [a cycling champion about 10 years prior to Lance Armstrong]. A fellow cyclist thought he looked effortless. He said to the fellow, “It hurts me as much as it hurts you to go up a hill. I just get there faster.” What I mean to say is, design is hard for everybody, even if you’re good at it.

RF: What sorts of skills would someone need to run a design/build firm successfully?

JZ: Hands-on building experience and a strong understanding of materials. They have to be able to make the leap from a drawing to the built thing, and they need to have good management skills, too – above and beyond what  might be needed for most architects.

A good computer rendering can give a sense of the interior space, as shown in this project from Zack/deVito Architecture.

ME: How do you handle situations where you’re telling a client to use a particular builder – especially when that builder is a wing of your own business?

JZ: On one project, we got to price our own stuff against another contractor. Our two bids came in incredibly close to one another – $2.84M vs. $2.85M. It was a good validation for us. 

We’re still in the infancy of presenting ourselves as a design/build firm. Most of our projects are still architectural design. We need to convince the Marks [Mark English] of the world [his own colleagues, who are other architects] to put us on their list of builders.

Zack/deVito Architecture's use of steel means using just enough, but not more than what is needed.

ME: Why do you want to do this as a business?

JZ: I can’t not do it! I love the building process, and the potential financial rewards are there. I like the ability to fine-tune without endless Change Orders.

ME: As the builder of another architect’s project, what do you do about the “gray zone of poor detailing? Especially with steel?

JZ: No architect should ever ask me to look at their drawings with steel work! [laughs]

It’s attractive to other architects to have someone who can collaborate on the final details. I’ve actually told people, “Just stop detailing that steel and glass stair. Let us do the fine-tuning to get the details the way YOU want them.” When we build someone else’s project, our aim is to help them achieve their goals.

Detail drawing for the stairs from Zack/de Vito Architecture's award-winning Laidley Street project.

JZ: With most architects, if you put down two parallel lines like this, they’ll say “That’s a wall.” But for a builder, that’s useless. How thick is the wall? What is inside, and how should it be assembled?

The things I’m most proud of at the end of the day are my ability to make a nice space, an efficient space, that is well-composed and well-organized. But it always falls short at the end of the day… I always feel we could have done better. I’m never satisfied.

RF: What other architects do you admire? Do you think they are always satisfied with the results of their efforts?

JZ: I think so. There’s a feeling that they would have worked everything out to the point where there could be no further possible improvement.

I really like Tom Kundig, of the firm Olson Sundberg Kundig Allen http://www.oskaarchitects.com/ in Seattle, for his handmade steel gizmos.

Delta Shelter by Tom Kundig. Large, 10’ x 18’ steel shutters are opened and closed with a hand crank.

Rolling Huts by Tom Kundig are moveable within a former RV campground.

Chicken Point Cabin by Tom Kundig showing custom steel detail.

Aidlin Darling is great, from both a design and a business perspective and Olle Lundberg is another one.

RF: Do you have any pet peeves about architecture, or building?

JZ: Architects who don’t understand their materials. For example, a note that just says “metal handrail”. That’s nonsense. Which metal? Is it nickel, copper, steel, aluminum? How’s it going to be made?

Another example is not drawing things that are real. Everything’s an abstraction. I can only draw it if it’s real. Not putting down two lines for a wall and saying “That’s the wall.” 

Or putting in a placeholder early on for things like “bathtub”. Although you may not know exactly which model right at first, most standard bathtubs are 60″ long. So if you never check, you might design a bathroom that’s only 57″ long and then whatever bathtub you end up choosing won’t even fit. There’s no excuse for this when you can go online and get these dimensions in a few seconds.

Sometimes I think that every young architect is faking it. They think they know a lot, but they don’t yet – and they don’t know it. One day I was in a client meeting and I realized: “I’m not pretending anymore. I actually know what I’m talking about.”