Business
& Labor
Aaron Anderson Turns Tales into Design
(archrecord.construction.com - 10/20/2006)
By Ingrid
Spencer
 Aaron
Anderson, principal of San Diego–based architecture firm
Studio Anderson, likes telling stories. That’s why he
couldn’t decide if he wanted to be an architect or a
filmmaker. After receiving his B.Arch. from Arizona State
University, he moved to L.A. to give the film world a try.
“I was so naive,” he says. “After a while,
I came home to San Diego, and to architecture, with a vengeance.”
Anderson worked for a San Diego firm
that specializes in entertainment retail design before deciding
to set up his own shop. But then one day he walked by the
office of Jennifer Luce and her firm Luce et Studio [RECORD,
Design Vanguard, December 2005, page 78]. “I thought,
‘If there’s anyone I’d want to work for, it’s
Jennifer,’ ” he says. Anderson walked in and got
a job. Working with Luce before establishing his own firm
gave him the opportunity to flex his creative muscles with
such projects as the Nissan Design America corporate offices
in Farmington Hills, Michigan. “One important thing I
learned from Jennifer was the love of new materials,”
says Anderson.
“She has a team of people constantly
researching such things as plastics, resins, rubber, coatings,
and new techniques for cutting metal. I’ve taken that
with me.”
Anderson says his three-person practice
has been given projects that he calls “little miracles”—a
showroom for a high-end Italian kitchen design company, a
collaborative renovation for a 10,000-square-foot restaurant
in San Diego’s Gaslamp District, a space dedicated to
the serious (and soapy) business of dog washing. “City
Dog is in an area where all the old industrial buildings are
being renovated,” says Anderson. “The area is an
eclectic mix of artists, young professionals, homeless shelters,
affordable housing, and rehab centers. It is so diverse that
there was a lot to draw on in terms of narrative ideas. The
space is literally 12 inches from the trolley tracks, so there
is always a dynamic mix of people milling around the front
door. That energy definitely defined the industrial, artistic
direction of the space.”
Born and raised in San Diego, Anderson
says he’s encouraged by the new construction. “San
Diego has always been a developer-run city,” he says,
“but things are becoming less cookie-cutter.”
While Anderson has fewer projects in
this, his second year on his own, he says they’re more
substantial, such as the house he’s designing for San
Diego dessert-maven Karen Krasne, and a potential gig in Thailand.
He’s also teamed up with fabricator Chris Puzio for a
proposal to design a fire station in San Diego’s Little
Italy, a design that uses the elements of air, fire, and water
as metaphor to tell a tale about the building and those who
will work there. “These aren’t my stories,”
says Anderson, “they’re about the clients, or the
spaces, or the purpose. Everything gets boiled down to purpose
and meaning. I thought that if you wanted to connect with
people and tell a story, you had to do it through film. But
architecture accomplishes that too.”
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Click for a slide show of images.
