My working process is based upon layered research and documentation of the natural and social conditions of a place. The goal of this process an indigenous architecture that is as inevitable a completion of its context as the trout is of the eddy behind the rock. I look for abstract systems of order inherent in the reality of a place and for tangencies that integrate the social, the technological, the natural, and the mythological orders.

Clark Stevens

Clark Stevens is a practicing architect, principal and co-owner of RoTo Architects, Inc. in L.A. He has also lectured and taught throughout the country, and was Visiting Critic from Practice at the University of Michigan in 1997. He has been an adjunct faculty member and juror at
SCI-Arc since 1995. His range of professional experience includes a wide variety of building types, from large scale commercial to residential and cultural. Product design also figures prominently in his professional experience.

His professional experience includes work in 1986 as a designer at Skidmore, Owings and Merrill in Chicago. He began his association with Morphosis Architects in Santa Monica in 1987 as a consultant, where he first became involved with industrial design. While there he was the collaborating designer of several kinetic lamp prototypes and of a cast aluminum clothes hanging system for clothier Leon Max. In 1988, he was the project architect of Morphosis' prize-winning entry to the Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek (Berlin Library) competition. Clark left Morphosis in 1991 with Michael Rotondi to form RoTo Architects, Inc.

Clark holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The University of Michigan, where his work is inculded in the College of Architecture's permanent archive. His undergraduate design work was included in the 1985 National A.I.A. Traveling Exhibition of Student Work. In 1989, he received his Master of Architecture with distinction from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He was the recipient of the school's Julia Amory Appleton Traveling Fellowship, awarded yearly in recognition of the recipient's body of design work, academic performance, and proposed topic of research.

Clark's work has been featured in numerous publications and exhibitions. His firm, RoTo Architects, Inc., has received at least one professional honor for each of its completed projects and has been recognized in over 75 architectural publications. In 1995 he was selected for the "40 under 40" list of the 1990's in a national competition, a tradition honoring young architects that dates to the original list of 1941.

As a lifelong naturalist, Clark approaches the design process as an extension of the structure and "intentions" of landscapes and natural systems. His working process encourages improvisation and collaboration by all participants in the building process ­ users, craftspeople, and the site itself.

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