These are the ideas that have evolved as the anchors of our work:

1.   Site
Buildings are earth, made of matter, and a continuation of the geological processes that produced their sites, part of natural evolution. A building marks and amplifies its unique spot on the globe. Like a lens, it brings to focus its particular time and place.

2.   Space
The essential medium of architecture is space, air, rather than substance, matter which contains the emptiness. Architecture is the construction of charged voids, frames of opportunity, fields of possibility.

3.   Instrumentality
We are interested in buildings as apparatus rather than object, as instrument rather than monument. We think of architecture as support for human events, more like a camera than a photograph, more like a telephone than a conversation. We are interested in generosity and opportunity rather than program and stasis.

4.   Materiality
In the search for the authentic over the image, the actual materials and systems of assembly, the process of construction, become the aesthetic. We want to make objects which expose their cause, buildings which are perceptual process. We like to think of construction as growth. Not an idealized form, but the actual performing of the work made precious.

6. Time
Traditionally architecture’s tools encouraged the description of the static or very slow.  We were unable to talk to ourselves about how buildings live in the river of time; we could not hold on to light and shadows. Built buildings teach the lessons of time, of their changing presence from day to night, and how they settle into their worlds in use.  The reality of times passage becomes a design element. Our buildings respond to the conditions of changing sunlight through the day; the shift in becoming the source of light at night, and the changes of temperature through the seasons. We build stages for the subjects of our work to play out their constantly changing lives.

7. Green
Green architecture is not just about the future of building, but the key to any future. We have developed both passive and active energy systems. These include intelligent passive design using solar orientation, shading, day lighting, window layers, and active systems like sensors which calibrate and balance interior environments, photovoltaics, geothermal and river cooling. We use renewable resources, and build lightly, using the least possible materials and effort to encompass the most possible volume and space. Our entire practice revolves around the idea of economy and optimization.

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http://www.saitowitz.com