Elijah's Restaurant, 7061 Clairemont Mesa Blvd, San Diego, CA 92111
Ricardo Rabines and Taal Safdie are the Founding Partners of Safdie Rabines Architects, an award-winning architecture, interiors, and urban design firm in San Diego. The husband-wife team met while completing the Master of Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, and went on to establish SRA in 1993 with an initial emphasis on custom single-family residences. More than three decades later, their portfolio has grown to include numerous project types, from academic facilities and civic buildings to mixed-use housing, bridges and infrastructure, and large urban master plans.
Taal and Ricardo’s work aims to capture the essence of each project’s site, and is driven by a mission to create significant, meaningful places. Their designs are guided by the betterment of the public realm and provide indoor and outdoor gathering spaces that encourage interaction. Their work consistently embraces sustainable design principles and integrates nature within the built environment, enhancing the well-being and identity of surrounding communities.
A selection of notable projects include the Scripps Seaside Forum conference center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, which hosts researchers from around the world and is a favorite local wedding venue; the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook, designed into a vast hillside to provide commanding views of downtown Los Angeles; UC San Diego’s Epstein Family Amphitheater, an on-campus public venue for concerts, lectures, and other wide-ranging events; and the San Elijo Lagoon Pedestrian Bridge, innovatively suspended from Interstate-5 to provide new pedestrian connections to a popular North County trail system. The firm has also designed nationally, including the mixed-use Crystal Flats development for the Walton Family Foundation in Bentonville, Arkansas; Evora, a luxury live-work community in Las Vegas; and the new Lusail Pedestrian Bridges that trace the waterfront in Qatar’s second-largest city.
Throughout their careers, Taal and Ricardo have been active members of the architectural community, participating in lectures, juries, and conferences locally, nationally, and internationally. They continue to be actively involved in the design of every SRA project, setting the tone for the creative direction of the firm’s body of work and its influence on public spaces throughout and beyond San Diego.
