Reclaiming the Craft: Albert Sawano’s Bespoke Architecture Model Challenges the Corporate Metrics of Design
After years inside one of the largest architecture firms in the world, Albert Sawano received a front-row seat to the industry’s dominant model. It also clarified what he no longer wanted to become.
From a two-person family office with his father to leadership roles at multinational businesses, Sawano was running on what he refers to as the corporate “hamster wheel” of architecture. Promotions came, larger projects followed, and responsibility expanded. Yet the further he advanced, the more he felt the distance grow between architecture as a craft and architecture as a business product.
“Firms of a certain size are businesses first,” Sawano reflects. “Clients become customers, the work becomes a product, and employees become worker bees. For an industry that is fundamentally an art and a craft, that model never quite sat right with me.”
Eight years ago, he stepped off that track and founded Synchronis, an architecture firm that offers design solutions for institutional, residential, and commercial projects across California. It leverages its technical expertise to build purpose-driven K–12 educational environments, workspaces, and lifestyle areas that bring about a positive social impact. Positioned as the nexus of architecture and product design, the studio operates as a boutique practice while maintaining the systems approach required for large-scale developments.
“I’ve spent years working on extremely complex high-rise and multi-use projects,” he explains. “You learn that buildings are systems. They’re not isolated sculptures. They’re organisms made of interdependent parts.”
He likens architecture to biological structure. “Cells organize into tissues, tissues into organs, and organs into functioning bodies. Architecture, I believe, demands a similar structural logic,” Sawano says. According to him, retail, office, residential, and parking components appear as fragmented elements, but when conceived as a coherent system, they align with clarity, and that reflects in the way the studio functions.
“Our process starts with the problem,” Sawano says. “We look hard at function, cost, and constraints. We build what is essentially an organizational backbone, taking the idiosyncrasies out of it and finding the purest expression of what something wants to be. At first, the design can look almost clinical, like a pure assemblage of pieces. That’s where the interesting work begins. We then morph that functional truth into something beautiful.”
According to him, artistry is guided by the problem itself. Rather than beginning with a sculptural gesture and retrofitting performance, Synchronis allows function, budget, and client priorities to shape form. “Pieces fit together nicely when you zoom out and look at everything as a system,” he says.
Technology serves that philosophy. The studio leverages Building Information Modeling (BIM), an intelligent, 3D-based design management software, to construct full digital twins of projects, extracting drawings and data directly from the model. Synchronis also implements rendering software to build VR walkthroughs and high-quality design visualizations.
“From day one, clients see their building in three dimensions, with lighting, materials, even people,” Sawano explains. “There’s no reliance on persuasion. They can literally walk through what they’re going to get.”
Purpose remains the defining principle of the studio. In cities such as Los Angeles and regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, Sawano notes that mid-rise apartment blocks often reduce to formulaic “shoebox” structures, driven by financing systems and tight profit margins. “It’s a pure expression of the realities of the marketplace, but we’re talking about where people live a good portion of their lives,” he says.
That tension became tangible after the recent California fires. In Altadena, where entire neighborhoods were impacted, Synchronis is working with middle-class families to rebuild with limited insurance payouts. Sawano highlights how traditional construction costs, inflated by demand, made conventional approaches prohibitive. In response, the firm invented a modular system, referred to as Inhabio, that includes the fabrication of building components abroad and assembling them domestically to create cost-effective yet dignified homes.
Internally, the studio structure mirrors its external ethos. Sawano and his Los Angeles partners operate as collaborators, eliminating a separation between leadership and hands-on craft. At Synchronis, he emphasizes that long-term relationships take precedence over maximizing profit on individual projects. “Sometimes we don’t make as much on a project as we could,” he says. “But that’s okay, because we’re playing the long game. If we become trusted advisors, colleagues to our clients, that’s more valuable than squeezing returns from one commission.”
In that process, the studio frames profit as a byproduct of meaningful work executed with precision. Architecture, in Sawano’s view, must reclaim its center of gravity. “I chose this profession because I believed I could contribute something,” he says. “If we lose sight of that, if we forget why we started, then scale and speed don’t mean much.”
