PYATOK ARCHITECTS was established in 1984 by Michael Pyatok, FAIA, and has grown to include three additional principals: Peter Waller, Elizabeth Yost and Curtis Caton. The current principals together provide over 100 years of experience to serve the needs their clients and communities. Located in downtown Oakland and staffed with over 30 design professionals, Pyatok Architects focuses on community planning, affordable housing, student housing and high density, mixed-use developments. The firm has been recognized locally as well as nationally, receiving over 100 awards for design excellence.

Pyatok Architects is committed to the idea that both client and community need to work together in the design and planning process. The firm has developed an array of participatory design methods using easily understood graphics and models to help participants make well-informed decisions. Years of community work have developed the firm’s ability to listen intently and respond sensitively. Pyatok Architects’ staff serves the community in many capacities -- volunteering on the boards on non-profits and city-wide task forces, leading regional training workshops, and lecturing nationally about how to design better quality affordable housing.

The firm’s work has been published widely, including in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek, the Atlantic Monthly, The Chicago Tribune as well as major U.S. architectural journals. A professor of architectural design, Michael Pyatok continues to lecture extensively on the firm’s housing work at conferences and universities as well as writing seminal articles on issues related to multifamily housing and community design, the need for more compact, transit-related developments, and design methods which include citizen participation.

Michael Pyatok has been a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright Fellow in Helsinki, Finland. He was awarded a grant by The National Endowment for the Arts to write a book on how to design higher density affordable housing entitled, “Good Neighbors: Affordable Family Housing.” In 2006 Builder Magazine’s “50 Most Influential People in Home Building” recognized the contribution of Michael Pyatok and the firm to the design of affordable housing.