Michele Saee: Buildings & Projects

by Thom Mayne, Michele Saee, Patricia Phillips

Michele Saee is a young, widely published Los Angeles-based architect who trained in Italy and worked for the renowned avant-garde firm Morphosis; he started his own practice in 1985. His designs for high-style restaurants and clothing stores in the Los Angeles area respond to the region's dominant automobile culture and indoor-outdoor attention-getting facades with large glass planes and steel sculptural fragments transform standard strip malls and warehouses, and interiors of curved walls and exposed trusses, natural wood, and industrial materials reflect a uniquely Southern California approach to contemporary architecture.

This provocatively designed first monograph on Saee showcases 25 projects in the Los Angeles area, including Angeli Trattoria on Melrose Avenue; two Ecru clothing stores; Design Express, a high-end furniture store; a custom jewelry store; a 20-unit apartment complex; nine private houses; and Saee's furniture designs. Also reproduced here are Saee's evocative "sketches of space" and his accompanying essay on the fundamental link between drawing and the conception of architecture.

160 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 1997

About the author

Thom Mayne is an American architect. He is based in Los Angeles. In 1972, Mayne helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where he is a trustee and the coordinator of the Design of Cities postgraduate program. Since then he has held teaching positions at SCI-Arc, the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (Cal Poly Pomona) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He is principal of Morphosis Architects, an architectural firm based in Culver City, California and New York City, New York. Mayne received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in March 2005.