Ben blends craft-driven design with strategic project leadership. His diverse portfolio includes the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall in New York, mixed-use developments across the Bay Area, mass timber student housing, and an Arts and Humanities Building at CSU Monterey Bay.
Ben’s design approach is characterized by intellectual mobility. Moving between design charrettes and technical coordination, and incorporating digital tools paired with hand sketches, he brings a forethought to every problem to see the design concept realized in the built work. Ben spends his free time on product design, creating award-winning lighting and furniture. This work informs his larger-scale endeavors at WRNS, creating architecture that is rooted in the process of making, material research, and transformative fabrication techniques.
Regardless of context, the search for innovation is Ben’s true North, the unifying theme that connects all of his work. Ben has been instrumental in orchestrating sea level rise resilience strategies on several recent projects, synthesizing input from a myriad of community groups and public agencies. The resulting designs include dramatic public open space integrated with shoreline protection strategies and human-scaled architecture.
Ben believes strongly in an inclusive process as a means of achieving contextual, environmental and regional authenticity, because a building’s users have much to teach. They help him to reimagine space and the ways people occupy it.
Ben received his Master of Architecture at UCLA, with a dual concentration in Critical Theory and Digital Technology. He received his Bachelor of Architecture at Cal Poly, where he was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal. A frequent lecturer, Ben has spoken at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, UC Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, and has led design workshops at Cal Poly’s College of Architecture & Environmental Design. He currently serves on the board of directors of Radium, a non-profit, community-based arts organization—using his expertise to help realize the Bay Area’s first waterfront performing arts center in his home town of Alameda.
