Sala House

[1][3] Built in 1983 and 1984, the Sala House was a collaboration of Alexander and Gary Black, who at the time were architecture professors at the University of California, Berkeley, working together with Bob Smith, David Tuttle, Seth Wachtel, and Andre and Anna Sala.

[5] The process of building the Sala House reflected "the client’s central role and self-empowerment, a construction deeply and fundamentally rooted to its site, structure uniquely fitted to the requirements, and a methodology never imposed from the drawing board.

"[4][1] The center of the home is a farmhouse-style kitchen based on Andre Sala's memory of the farmhouse that he had visited as a boy in the south of France.

[4] With a post-and-beam structure, the exterior of the house is a one-and-one-half-inch concrete shell in striped pink and grey that echoes the colors of the eucalyptus near the home.

[2] Alexander's 1977 book with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, A Pattern Language, remains decades after publication one of the best-selling books on architecture; it describes a network of 253 patterns drawn from traditional construction that relate to design at every scale, including regions, cities, and neighborhoods, as well as houses, rooms, and gardens.