Torti Gallas & Partners Architects of Community
Passionate about designing buildings and neighborhoods that quietly transform the urban environment, Torti Gallas is committed to improving the living conditions of distressed communities throughout the United States and around the world. Combining the disciplines of architecture, planning, and urban design into a single practice, they have leveraged lessons from their early history as a suburban-based housing firm to create a practice devoted to designing and creating the housing that brings catalytic change to urban neighborhoods. Their residential commissions are not the "one-offs" of elite houses, but the multiple housing forms-mixed-use apartment buildings, rowhouses, single-family homes-that comprise the fabric of a city. Torti Gallas is dedicated to raising the level of this architecture to a new high. This aspect of the built environment is largely neglected by the architectural profession today but hearkens back to a tradition that, before World War II, was not only a respectable segment of the profession but also created some of the country's finest neighborhoods, including Forest Hill Gardens in Queens, Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and Russian Hill in San Francisco, the work of such seminal figures as Grosvenor Atterbury and Charles Platt. Torti Gallas's extensive architectural and urban design work will be presented in three main chapters: Buildings, Neighborhoods, and Places. These will include a total of sixty built projects, as well as a sampling of current work.