David Meckel
Wednesday, September 12, 2007 
In 1985, David Meckel came to San Francisco on a one-year leave of absence from his practice and teaching in Los Angeles. He had received an invitation from CCAC's president, Neil Hoffman, and the chair of the board of trustees, Steven Oliver, to come establish an accredited architecture program within the arts college. Now, 22 years later, that program and the others around it, have propelled this lively institution into a major force in the bay area and beyond.
Join us this Wednesday as David shares the story of how these events unfolded and the synergies that encouraged this to happen in a uniquely San Francisco way. By taking advantage of the very bay area provincialism that his Los Angeles colleagues had warned would be the beginning of a huge career mistake, the largest city in the US without an architecture school birthed one quite easily. He will share his observations on the region's rich system of architectural initiatives that have evolved over the past 30 years, and how they have flourished to this day - from Mark Mack's Western Addition to John Peterson¹s Public Architecture. A common thread in David¹s own method of building community can be traced to the spatial and social strategies he learned in his very first job. He will show us how he has used these ideas as the building blocks for the environments he has helped shape over the years.
David Meckel began his career working with Charles and Ray Eames in their Venice, California studio. Five years later he directed all of the design work for the 1984 Olympics in LA, which Time Magazine declared Not just the year's, but surely the decade¹s most glittering and effective demonstration of the power of creative design. He was chosen as one of ID Magazine's ID Forty Design and Technology Innovators in 1997 and was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 1998.
He co-founded the Interior Architecture program at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles with Richard Saul Wurman, and founded the Architecture program at California College of the Arts (formerly CCAC) in San Francisco. CCA¹s San Francisco campus, a converted 120,000 sq. ft. solar-heated facility, was named one of the Top Ten Green Buildings in the United States on Earth Day 2001. For the past 12 years he has chaired the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's Design and Architecture Accessions Committee. In his work as a professional competition advisor he has directed competitions for the Mississippi Riverfront in Memphis, Habitat for Humanity¹s Urban Habitat in Charlottesville Virginia and the Rooftop Sculpture Garden for SFMoMA. He is the Campus Architect for the University of the Pacific in Stockton and Pacific's McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento where he has collaborated with over a dozen firms, including Gensler, SmithGroup, Fisher Friedman, Pfau Architecture, TomEliotFisch, Fong & Chan, Sasaki and the SWA Group. He also serves on the Design Advisory Committee for architect selection and project peer review for the campuses of UCSF in San Francisco. Since 2000 he has been a Peer Architect for the GSA's Excellence in Design Program.
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