Louis Sauer Architect

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.