Robert Sawyer

Robert Sawyer's guiding belief — that a building should be of its land, not simply set on top of it — didn't start on paper. It started in the trades. Before he designed his first project, Robert trained at the Frank Lloyd Wright Studio Foundation, and over a 40-plus-year career, worked through 19 apprenticeships across nearly every construction trade. He knows how a building actually gets built because he has built it himself — and that hands-on foundation is the reason his firm designs and constructs as one accountable team, rather than handing a vision off between separate contracts.

That integrated approach has produced work across a range of scale most architects never touch in a single career: commercial landmarks including the LA Furniture Mart (with John Ruhlen and Bruce Becket) and AT&T Conferencing Centers; award-winning residential communities such as Bryan Woods in Garner, NC, Avondale Terrace, and Tamarack on the Lake (with Kenneth Boisseau and Wilson Carter); the Raleigh-Durham RL-23R, the largest aviation project in North Carolina's history; and more than 1,100 individually designed housing units, alongside high-end custom homes and recording studios for major artists and labels.

Robert's influence on the industry reaches beyond his own portfolio. He founded Architectural Business Magazine, serving as President of the Board of Directors and Publisher, and remains active with the American Institute of Architects, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences, and Music West, Inc. His work has earned the Presidential Gold Medal of Lifetime Achievement (2017 and 2020), the Los Angeles 2020 Award for Architecture, and Best of the Westside in the Architect category (2014–2017).

Off the jobsite, Robert has received the President's Volunteer Service Award for his work with organizations including the Venice Heart Committee, the Venice Family Clinic, and the ABC Trust.

Robert is also a rock musician, and the two disciplines share more than a surface connection: both depend on technical mastery deep enough that it disappears, leaving room for genuine improvisation — whether that's a guitar solo or a design that responds to a site no one has built on before. His collaborations across the rock world have shaped a sound as distinctive as his buildings.

At the center of it all is a simple conviction: the people designing a building should understand, firsthand, everything it takes to build it — and a structure, done right, is always of its land.