Jennifer Weiss Architecture 2024

ABOUT JENNIFER WEISS ARCHITECTURE

Jennifer Weiss has over 35 years of proven professional experience in the architecture industry, having developed professional design expertise early in her career as an Architectural Designer at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and KMD Architects, and later as a Construction Project Manager - developing knowledge that now informs her design process and helps guide clients through complex projects. She founded Jennifer Weiss Architecture in 2005.

Jennifer Weiss Architecture (JWA) is a full-service boutique architecture studio that is committed to excellence in custom architecture and design. We combine rigorous design with proven construction management experience - a combination that leads to a distinctive design process and end product that are aesthetically and intellectually rigorous as well as financially informed. We value beauty, efficiency, logic, pure expression of materials, and clean lines and forms that allow the architecture- the space, light, materials, spatial relationships - and its inhabitants to thrive.

In addition to ground-up work, JWA has expertise in major renovations and additions to significant works of architecture by notable architects including Joseph Esherick, William Wurster, Ernest Coxhead, Robert A.M. Stern, and the developer Joseph Eichler. JWA’s work has received critical acclaim, having been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Dwell, Architectural Digest, California Home and Design, House Beautiful, San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Remodelista, Gardenista, and in an advertisement for Apple, Inc.

JWA projects include residential, cultural, corporate and academic buildings. With offices in San Francisco and Napa Valley, JWA has projects throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, Sonoma and Napa Valley, New York, Los Angeles and Hawaii.

BERGGRUEN GALLERY PROJECT

Berggruen Gallery, one of San Francisco’s most renowned and prestigious art galleries, recently opened the doors to its eagerly anticipated new gallery space, after forty seven years on Grant Avenue. Located at 10 Hawthorne Street, in the arts district within San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood (SOMA) and directly across from Snohetta’s new addition to the SFMOMA, the new gallery location itself marks a departure for the institution. Architecturally, it is also a major leap. Jennifer Weiss Architecture designed the new space - transforming the battered historic brick warehouse, previously housing a dark and circuitous nightclub, into a spacious museum-quality gallery, filled with natural light. The 10,000 sf are distributed across three floors, and are connected by a new central, partially transparent, grand staircase. Sightlines across and through the entire gallery space were carefully curated - providing visitors with powerful visual connections with the art, the gallery team, other visitors, and even the city beyond. The stair to the lower-level is triple width, which creates a strong connection between the lower level and the main floor, allows for ample daylight to reach the lower level, and allows the stair itself to double as overflow seating during presentations. With nearly fifty years of experience in the art world, gallery owners Gretchen and John Berggruen worked closely with the design team to customize the space. Stylistically the space is minimal and subtle - intentionally deferential to the art - and with materials and details that are current and fresh, while also being inviting and comfortable... much like the gallery owners themselves. The result is a space with a range of scales for viewing art, from intimate to grand, and from dramatic to familiar. The program was laid out with very different personalities in mind. The new space is fresh and forward looking, but housed within a sturdy historic building...a fitting metaphor for the gallery’s new direction, that is also deeply rooted in their well established reputation.