Preserving history while innovating across typologies and expanding geographies
Established in the early 1960s, SWA Sausalito is the firm’s original and oldest continually operating studio. Fittingly, until 2024, the office was led by two of the firm’s longest-term employees, Joe Runco and John Wong. The latter is responsible for growing the office’s large body of campus planning work, including decades of work for Stanford University. The birthplace of the “large landscape architecture firm,” SWA Sausalito has a highly diversified portfolio both in its program types and locations, with a significant number of public space and planning projects across Northern California, as well as in China, the Middle East, and increasingly in Japan, led by the studio’s Managing Principal Shuntaro Yahiro. The office is home to SWA’s Accounting, IT, HR, and Imaging teams.
A stone’s throw away from the water in the bayside arts-oriented city, the Sausalito studio occupies the original site where the Marinship Company built WWII ships in the 1940s. A new barn-like Butler building houses the company’s designers, while the original concrete and wood structure became a recording studio, serving icons including Fleetwood Mac, Santana, and Metallica.
Sliding glass doors open the office to the east and west. Staff maintain the West Garden, a plot with over 40 species, and a garden wall that exhibits various materials from SWA’s current and past projects. The East Yard offers a deck for staff to enjoy lunch or an extension space for weekly Hooch happy hours.