IN PRAISE OF PRAGMATISM : FISHER FRIEDMAN ASSOCIATES

In 1951, Rodney Friedman entered the School of Architecture at the

University of California at Berkeley, where he studied under such noted

architects as Erich Mendelsohn, William Wurster, Joseph Esherick,

Paul Rudolph, and Charles Eames.

Since the inception of Fisher Friedman Associates, the firm has

been widely recognized as a national leader in residential design.

Such recognition, comprising more than 250 awards for design and

planning, and inclusion in numerous books and publications, attests

to the firm’s success in finding imaginative solutions to the problems

of each individual project. During the 1960’s and 1970’s, the work

of the firm was almost completely residential in scope, but since the

early 1980’s it has included academic buildings, student housing,

office developments, civic facilities, adaptive re-use, and large-scale

urban planning.

In his forty-six years as the “Friedman” of FFA, and the sole practicing

architect of the founding group, Rodney Friedman, at age 75,

continues to produce a vigorous and influential body of design work.

Friedman has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Yale,

Harvard, and MIT, among other institutions, and his work has been

included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York

and the SF MOMA, as well as the 1989 traveling exhibition of Soviet

and American Architecture.