Over a period of 20 years, since moving from her native France to study architecture at UC Berkeley, Anne Fougeron has built an impeccable reputation, designing dozens of brilliantly light-filled Bay Area homes as well as commercial and civic spaces, and growing her firm to nine people, including three other senior architects. She is articulate, irrepressible, and commanding enough that in an earlier era of architects as tastemaking celebrities, she'd be formulating a legendary persona. Here and now, however, a modernist should not plan to become rich nor famous. Says the always-direct Fougeron, "If you really want to make money, you shouldn't be an architect." Especially, she adds, in a largely male-dominated industry. "Woman-owned firms represent only a fraction of the firms in America. The rest offer a business model that is much more comfortable to people."

Yet by any reckoning, her practice is increasingly vibrant and varied, and a marvel of design problems well solved. Her recent office and clinic spaces for Planned Parenthood Golden Gate have won several awards, and she currently has commissions as diverse as renovating a farmhouse in France, building low-income housing in Hayes Valley, and remodeling the Ingleside branch of the city library, in addition to designing several local homes. Says Pierluigi Serraino, an architect and advocate of Bay Area modernism, "I would argue that Fougeron is the character from whom the more groundbreaking ideas will come."

Signature style: A continual exploration of transparency in the literal and conceptual senses. Light wells, glass of varying opacities, and intermediate spaces that are neither inside nor out give her structures great airiness. Dynamic surfaces and volumes highlight her deft use of natural materials.

Modernist-phobia: "People get afraid, but it's not like architects are going to design a house that's uncomfortable or doesn't have a bathroom or a kitchen. In most cases they're just going to create more spectacular rooms that are much nicer to be in."

Design character of the city: "The worst buildings are along the Waterfront right now—large, awkward boxes with poorly executed details. I find it very disappointing that the city's most prominent sites don't get the most innovative design.

Advice to clients: "Paper is cheap—building isn't. Take the time at the beginning and make sure you're getting what you want."

Home architecture here: "It's becoming so expensive to build that the home market is now being reserved for the very wealthy. That is really unfortunate."

Fantasy project: "Designing a major public building that touches a large number of users and visitors. Or how about a new house for Gavin Newsom?"

To see her work: www.fougeron.com

The many provacative Bay Area Homes and era-mixing remodels executed in Neal Schwartz's nearly ten-year-old solo practice promote dialogue as much as the man himself. With a background in public policy, and a split career as both head of a four-employee firm and graduate-level instructor at California College of the Arts, he has a knack for seeing all sides of a situation. "In school, we often talked about the idea that a leader is not someone who tells people what to do, but rather creates a situation in which people can move forward towards a goal," he says. "I use this every day in my practice."

That makes Schwartz very client friendly and a deft negotiator with planners and neighbors. But it also means that even his boldest projects, which expose serious tensions between the area's design traditions, look like no big deal. "The greatest compliment I can receive about my work is that it feels easy, as if it belongs, and that the process I lead my clients down feels like a natural evolution of the initial ideas." He seeks, he says, "a certain calmness that belies the struggles to get there."

Signature syle: Remodels that take common California architectural elements—often Edwardian or ranch—and transform them into a warm but unmistakably modern idiom.

The ranch home: "We love working on these homes. The basic tenets of modernism are already there: a focus on lights, freedom of movement, and strong indoor-outdoor relationships. We just need to uncover those elements, dust them off, and use each to its best advantage."

How to inspire a client: "I try to let issues of style emerge organically. At the beginning, if I keep the discussion to the funtion of the spaces, the way you move through them and the way the light comes in, everyone usually agrees and gets excited."

Vicissitudes of public opinion: "At the dog park, I was talking to a woman who was battling a developer building something next to her, and she mentioned one of my houses as a prime example of a great modern project. She had no idea it was mine. But in the next breath she described another of my projects as an example of what she didn't like."

His dream commission: "I would love a museum, a library, or a school. If I had come up with Alvaro Siza's Galician Center for Contemporary Art in Spain, I would probably die smiling."

See his work at: www.schwartzandarchitecture.com

Born in London, trained at Cambridge and Princeton, and with daring projects from New York to China, Mark Dziewulski is set to make his mark in the Bay Area. Working in teams and in solo practice, he has executed dramatic large-scale projects, including a World War II memorial in Warsaw and a tower for the United Nations in Beijing. Projects like these, along with two houses in Carmichael, near Sacramento, are earning him a reputation for bold, sculptural work, garnering awards and raves from the international design press. "He's someone who has scrounged around looking at different moments in the history of architecture, and then made them his own," says Mitchell Schwarzer, chair of visual studies at California College of the Arts (CCA) and author of an upcoming architecture guide to the Bay Area.

Having practiced in Sacramento since 1993, Dziewulski moved his office to San Francisco two years ago (he also has a London office) and a year later landed his first city commission, extending a glass lobby off a 1960s cigarette box office tower downtown on Sansome Street. He now hopes to find residential clients as well. They had better be prepared to soar. "Clients come to me for something that is modern, not an Italian villa," he says. "I like that you can push the envelope with residential work." 

Signature style: Monumental. Swooping roofs and round skylights recall the heyday of Southern California commercial architecture, while his ambitious massings allude to the era of heroic modernism.

Northern California design: "Clients are taking a risk now, and they want higher standards of design. They just weren't aware that they could have a really amazing house to live in."

Why bold architecture: "Fifty years on, buildings with character, like people, are the ones you enjoy being around. The buildings designed to mimic the neighbors look a bit sad over time. The poetic ideal is important, especially for a home. It has to have a soul."

Working with clients: "It's a common joke among architecture students that form follows money, not function. But I think that form follows client. If you can get them behind you, show that it's smart and works financially, you can do a lot."

Designing his own house: "I'd go insane! You can't design in a vacuum. Every good building has a good client."

See his work at: www.dzarchitecture.com 

Some people practice architecture as a craft, but to Luke Ogrydziak and Zoë Prillinger, a vivacious pair who met in the late eighties at Princeton, remodeling or building houses is as much a theoretical as a practical venture. "I may be too high-falutin'," Prillinger says, "but in truly creative practices, design is an ongoing practice of formal exploration." Luckily for those who also want a house at the end of the process, the duo's conceptually sophisticated designs yield extremely livable spaces. Their first project together was an installation at the Princeton School of Architecture that included a dramatic panopticon in the central stairway, and they've executed nearly a dozen local homes and remodels since, with several more underway.

"They're of a generation that's really up-and-coming," says Schwarzer, CCA's chair of visual studies. "They studied at East Coast architecture schools with a strong theory component, and that's very healthy for California architecture."

Perhaps their most intriguing new commission is the Enigma House, an extensive remodel of an existing four-story Pacific Heights Edwardian that guts existing interior rooms to create a series of open, loftlike interiors. They'll also be working on one of James Turrell's signature skyspaces in Sonoma County, something that allows them to pair with an artist who shares their sublime concerns—and keep their heads in the clouds.

Signature style: It's hard to encapsulate, since each project sets them on a different design course, and no two places end up looking alike.

Brainiac lingo: "We try to isolate the question that belongs to every project. Architecture, like any other expressive medium, is just a language to study some abstract issues."

Biggest challenge to home-building here: "Planning restrictions in residential zones remain the primary obstacle for progressive design. The neighbors can really be quite vocal, too."

Best way with clients: "Our better projects involve the clients' idiosyncrasies...or pathologies. If you follow that strand, it always leads away from the generic."

Fantasy project: "Something on the Peninsula. The area is at the center of science and information revolutions, yet lacks architectural expression equal to its paradigm-shifting influence."

See their work at: www.oparch.net