Paul Okamoto
Paul has committed his professional architectural career to designing dwellings, neighborhoods and cities in ways that optimize environmental and social conditions. Over the past thirty five years, he has consistently championed projects with beneficial impacts on community quality of life and the surrounding natural ecosystem. Under the auspices of Okamoto Saijo Architecture, an architectural practice he founded in 1991 with Eric Saijo, Okamoto’s work can be categorized into several areas:
Green Building Design
Okamoto is the architect of several passive solar residence, including the Rubissow Farmhouse (1999) located in the Napa Valley, and the Johnson-Theis Residence, outside of Sebastopol, CA. Other green designs by Okamoto include the Novato Affordable Housing Competition (finalist in 1986); Household Hazardous Waste Collection Facility, San Francisco, CA (1994); Offices for the Department of Environment, City & County of San Francisco (1997); the Spaulding-Detjen’s Retreat, Sonoma, CA; and the Alameda Creek Watershed Center in Sunol, CA, for the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
Affordable Housing Rehabilitation
As a practicing architect, Okamoto has been the principal architect for affordable housing rehabilitation projects in the San Francisco Bay Area including Park Place Apartments in Morgan Hill; Parkview Senior & Family Apartments in San Jose; Kings Valley Apartments in Cloverdale; Casa Quezada (formerly the Dolores Hotel, a residential hotel in San Francisco); Aarti Hotel (also a residential hotel located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin); Crescent Park Apartments in Richmond, CA; Alameda Point Housing located on the former Alameda Naval Air Station); East Bluff Apartments in Pinole, CA; 1652 Eddy Street in the Western Addition of San Francisco; the Salvation Army Chinatown Corps, a mixed-use community center in San Francisco’s Chinatown; and the EastSide Cultural Center in East Oakland.
Neighborhood Planning
Okamoto has been the lead designer of several neighborhood planning projects including Bowden-Brompton, an inner urban industrial neighborhood in Adelaide, South Australia (1983-85); Weeks, a residential neighborhood with a rich agricultural history in East Palo Alto, California (1993-97); and Telegraph-Northgate, an urban residential neighborhood at the edge of Downtown Oakland, California (1999-2000). Many of these neighborhoods are facing major social changes due to gentrification and the shortage of housing in the Bay Area. By working directly with residents and neighborhood leaders, Okamoto has helped these communities create a shared neighborhood vision that then becomes a tool to help them proactively shape their environment.
In response to the need for proactive planning in urban neighborhoods, Okamoto spearheaded the creation of the Community Design Program while president of Urban Ecology, Inc., a nonprofit urban environmental organization (1992-94). This Program offers pro bono planning and urban design services in low-income communities to local neighborhood groups that are willing to organize around a community participatory design process. Other planning projects designed by Okamoto include Presidio Town, a proposed model of sustainable development at the former headquarters of the Sixth U. S. Army (1991-92), and the Ravenswood Business District, East Palo Alto (2008-10).