Anne Fougeron, AIA, is the kind of architect who follows her endless enthusiasm for design, and it has taken her to far-flung places. “The Pantheon is one of my favorite buildings,” she says. “I had to stop breathing when I saw it for the first time.” A visit to the Aga Sophia church in Istanbul, Turkey, also left her momentarily speechless. “I had to sit down,” she remembers. Fougeron's undergraduate degree in architectural history instilled a love of the wide-ranging work of great architects—from Michelangelo and Francesco Borromini in the old tradition, to Alvar Aalto, whose buildings she toured on a trip to Scandinavia last summer, and contemporaries such as Renzo Piano, Kengo Kuma, and Hitoshi Abe. “I'm a great admirer of people who have a passion for architecture,” she says. “It just sort of soaks through. Style is less the issue than commitment to a certain vision you can sense in the work.”

Born to French parents, Fougeron had a trans-Atlantic childhood. She lived in Paris until age 5, when her father's work as a CEO for tire manufacturer Michelin brought the family to New York. By age 12 she was back in France, and then later returned to the United States to attend Wellesley College. She went on to graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley; married an American; and settled in the Bay Area, opening her San Francisco practice in 1986.

Since then, she's developed a reputation for houses that are meticulously crafted and colorful and that make use of innovative materials and technology. Fougeron counts on fabricators of all kinds to help execute her ideas, and as a result, there is little separation between production and the schematic phase in her work. She favors glass and metal, wood and stone, rectilinear shapes, and lithe, layered geometries that interact imaginatively with California's pleasant climate and golden sunlight.

“To justify its use, we had to get all this literature together showing different places it was used around the world,” Fougeron says. “But from the beginning, we chose that material and felt it was important to keep it,” even though it was time-consuming to import and install. “It became an inherent part of the design.”

In the years since the 440 House was deemed a success (it won two design awards and was published widely), Fougeron's confidence in building her trademark minimalist, light-filled dwellings has grown. “When we first did the house in Palo Alto, we were extremely concerned about how the roof hit this glass wall,” she says. “It's a detail that now wouldn't begin to frighten me.” A couple of houses on the boards illustrate her practice's current cutting edge—how to more organically embed the buildings into the land. One such challenge is the Buck Creek house in Big Sur, Calif.  It perches on a small site—most of it cliff—with spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean. Unlike many modernist boxes, which one could imagine lifting from the site and placing somewhere else, this house's volumes undulate with the land's contours. To protect the delicate ecosystem, and for structural safety in case of an earthquake, it's cantilevered over the land from a line 12 feet back from the cliff's edge. The master bedroom—the lowest volume—juts out over the ocean on a dramatic double cantilever.

For Fougeron, designing exterior walls that were nonbearing forced her to think about the building in a new way. On this house, which in abstracted computer renderings looks like it could be a rocky outcrop, it meant revamping some of her original ideas so the engineering could work. “We rely on our structural, civil, and geo-technical guys to give us recommendations and work through the design issues together,” she says. “We talk about certain things and go, ‘Well, that's fine, but these are the consequences,' which is why you want to work with consultants you know and trust.”

Although Fougeron's entire career has been defined by her desire for innovation, she was not always a modernist. After all, she came of age during the 1970s, and landing in San Francisco meant that her earliest projects were Victorian kitchen and bath remodels. “To keep motivated, I spent a lot of time eroding the corner, even though I put trim around it,” says Fougeron, who cites Mark Mack and Andrew Batey as early inspirations. Partners in the Bay Area firm Batey & Mack, they were known in the late 1970s for their lectures on regionalism. Noted architect and urban designer Daniel F. Solomon, FAIA, for whom she worked from 1982 to 1985, also sparked her interest in urban patterns.

But Fougeron points to her European childhood as the deepest source of her aesthetic values. There, she observed, people respect history but aren't a slave to it. “There are many instances where you feel old and new can work together,” she says. “There's nothing worse than trivializing history. In Italy I saw how Carlo Scarpa could take an old building and infuse new life into it by unapologetically adding things it needed.”

Even so, her attitude is that it's not style but content—how people interact with a building—that's important. When she designs houses, she searches for the space and atmosphere the clients would like to inhabit, whether it's comforting or uplifting, light-filled or intimate. But beyond the spatial manipulation and material palette, her firm is motivated by the fundamental belief that people respond to things that are well-made. “Carlo Scarpa, Frank Lloyd Wright—all those guys had a series of craftspeople working with them all the time,” Fougeron says. “We always try to figure out how to make things beautifully—sometimes with a lot of money, sometimes not.”

Lacking building specialists who can help resolve the detailing on new materials, Fougeron knows her ideas can't get built, which is why she's become adept at finding daring contractors. The Internet has certainly made this easier. “A lot of people want to play it safe,” she acknowledges. “It's a kind of game where you're fishing around, and it's finding that initial person who takes work. We can have a sub come from 100 miles away if that's the only way it's going to work. The design is often relative to the kind of person you can find and the kind of dialogue you can open up.”

One of her longtime collaborators is Dennis Luedeman, an accomplished metal artisan in Emeryville, Calif., with whom she's been working for 15 years. Another regular is Paul Endres, AIA, an engineer and architect who was Fougeron's student at UC Berkeley. Together they brainstorm how to bring artistry to structure. “Anne creates designs that look very simple, but she uses a lot of handcrafted labor so that the architecture becomes more seamless,” says Endres, a principal of Endres Ware in Berkeley. “We revel in pushing each other to do more and more interesting things.”

The three put their heads together recently to design a sculptural steel staircase that rises from the ground floor to the penthouse of a loft conversion. Engineering is a complex science, Fougeron points out, and yet beautiful connections cannot be calculated. The engineer is looking at safety—Is it going to buckle? The architect is looking at both aesthetics and the experience of walking up and down the stairs—Does it move from side to side, have too much bounce, or do other things that make people uncomfortable? And the artist, who handles specific materials day in and day out, knows instinctively how they should go together.

“I'm interested in the beauty of craft and how well things can be made, whether it's a watch you wear or a car you drive,” Fougeron says. “In the old days, the base materials were better, and people knew the art of putting things together. You make buildings that are going to outlive you; the question is, How do they outlive you, and what is your responsibility in terms of how well they age?

The brainpower pool starts at the office, where Fougeron oversees five other architects and designers. Staff members sketch ideas together, and after the tone is set, one of the project managers works on developing the design. Inspiration can come from anywhere. “We have books here; stuff floats around and we look at it for a while and then look at something else,” Fougeron says. “For me, coming at architecture from an architectural history background, the idea of looking at things all the time—buildings old and new—is essential to how I see myself as an architect.” Model making is a loose, additive process involving a glue gun, in which models are put together, ripped apart, and reconfigured.

In San Francisco, the primary design problem is almost always how to funnel light and air into the middle of a narrow row house. Fougeron uses layering devices, such as third-floor setbacks and interior balconies and courtyards that draw light in from the sides, as well as from the front and back. For example, she dug the three-story structure of the 1532 House—an infill project that won a 2006 AIA California Council Merit Award—into a steep slope and wove in seven outdoor courtyards and decks. The third story, recessed to comply with building codes, has a balcony with a glass floor that illuminates the living spaces below.

branching out

Those sophisticated light-enhancing geometries are often recast in simplified forms on the firm's buildings for nonprofit organizations. Fougeron's interest in socially conscious architecture has led her into affordable housing and health care projects, including a series of clinics and offices for Planned Parenthood Federation of America. “On single-family homes, you understand how to make things in a very expensive way, and sometimes you can figure out how to get 90 percent of the effect for 20 percent of the cost,” Fougeron says. At Octavia Court, a mixed-use project that includes offices, vocational services, and 15 units of very low-income rental housing for developmentally disabled adults, Fougeron provided elegant glassy façades and views into secluded common courtyards. Her refined modernism is also on display at Carter Terrace, a Mercy Housing California-developed joint project with Van Meter Williams Pollack. It won praise in the local press for its pleasing scale and the inclusion of stoops, patios, and balconies with beautifully detailed cedar railings.

Pursuant to her goals for diversification, Fougeron and her firm made a recent jump in scale to Parkview Terraces, a nine-story concrete building on a prominent urban site containing a mixed-use senior housing facility—a joint venture with the San Francisco office of Kwan Henmi Architecture/Planning. And construction will soon begin on the $3 million Ingleside Branch Library, her first civic commission for a new building.

Those ventures will undoubtedly offer Fougeron something that private residences may not: the opportunity to observe up close how her buildings fare over time. As a perfectionist who actively searches all along the time continuum for ideas that resonate and endure, Fougeron makes a point of revisiting her past projects. “When you go back later, you see it in a different light,” she says. “Your eyes are fresher, and you can think about it more critically or appreciate it more entirely. It's an ongoing process.”