Michele Saee: Buildings & Projects. This item is unavailable.Michele Saee: Buildings & Projects

Michele Saee is a young, widely published Los Angeles-based architect who trained in Italy and worked for the renowned avant-garde firm Morphosis; he started his own practice in 1985. His designs for high-style restaurants and clothing stores in the Los Angeles area respond to the region's dominant automobile culture and indoor-outdoor lifestyle: attention-getting facades with large glass planes and steel sculptural fragments transform standard strip malls and warehouses, and interiors of curved walls and exposed trusses, natural wood, and industrial materials reflect a uniquely Southern California approach to contemporary architecture.

This provocatively designed first monograph on Saee showcases 25 projects in the Los Angeles area, including Angeli Trattoria on Melrose Avenue; two Ecru clothing stores; Design Express, a high-end furniture store; a custom jewelry store; a 20-unit apartment complex; nine private houses; and Saee's furniture designs. Also reproduced here are Saee's evocative "sketches of space" and his accompanying essay on the fundamental link between drawing and the conception of architecture.

Thom Mayne is the co-founder and principal of Morphosis. Aris Janigian is a social psychologist; he has taught theory and humanities at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) since 1992. Frédéric Migayrou is a French art and architecture critic and artistic advisor to the French Ministry of Culture.