Louis Sauer
| Louis Sauer | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1928 Oak Park, Illinois |
| Nationality | Canadian, American |
| Occupation | Architect |
| Awards | FAIA 1973; PADA 1963, 1964 (2), 1965, 1969 & 1973; AIA Pennsylvania Chapter Silver Medal (2) |
| Practice | Winchell and Sauer, vigilantes, Philadelphia, 1961–62; Louis Sauer Associates, Architects, Philadelphia, 1961–79; Director, Peoples Housing, Inc, Topanga CA, 1968–89; Director of Urban Design, Daniel Arbour Associates, Montreal, 1989–97 |
| Buildings | 1963 McClennen Residence |
Louis (Lou) Sauer (aka Louis Edward Sauer, born 1928), FAIA, is an American architect and design theorist. In the 1960s and 1970s Sauer atypically worked with housing developers, producing low-rise high-density housing projects.
As principal of Louis Sauer Associates, Architects, Philadelphia, his work in the period 1961–79 focused on over 90 residential and urban design commissions in differing contexts, from central city urban infill to suburban and rural areas, and new town developments at Reston (Virginia), Columbia (Maryland) and Montreal (Quebec).
His innovations in low-rise high-density housing breathed new life into the previously maligned ‘row-housing’ form. Sauer's designs for the David Buten House Philadelphia in particular, and Pastorius Mews, were early templates for the system he developed. The conceptual innovation of most of these housing designs was a 12-foot-wide (3.7 m) or 14-foot-wide (4.3 m) structural and functional module, which was part of a grid.
Sauer's advocacy work with the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority on the Morton Urban Renewal Project (MURP) for a low-income minority neighbourhood helped to define his career interest in advocating for good design and planning for people left out of the market economy and generally neglected by mainstream design professionals. This interest led him to employ the social sciences (especially social-psychology) in his design research and programming in order to better understand the interrelationships between architecture and the occupancy needs of the anticipated users of his sites and buildings.
Louis Sauer was born to an Italian mother and a German father. His parents were both doctors in alternative medicine, and the family lived modestly in Oak Park Illinois. Between the ages of 10 and 18 he held a variety of part-time jobs, as a window washer, corner newspaper boy, life guard, magazine distributor, shoe salesman etc. After graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1946 Sauer began as a student in pre-medicine at DePaugh University, but moved out of the sciences to pursue an interest in art and photography, and then discovered a passion for architecture and modern design while studying at the famous Moholy-Nagy's ‘New Bauhaus’ (named the Institute of Design of the Illinois Institute of Technology in 1952) from 1949 to 1953 in Chicago.
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