David founded DTSalazar in 2005 on a single theory: what a building becomes is determined by the people who understand its full scope—from design intent through close-outs, across budgets, conflicts, teams and schedules.

While at UC Berkeley, he trained at Olle Lundberg's San Francisco studio, where the proposition was that a building's qualitative value is inseparable from how the joints are cut, and then at Zaha Hadid's London office, where the proposition pulled in the opposite direction: a building should never apologize to its constraints.

From ultra-high end residential estates to socially oriented projects around the world, he took both lessons seriously, and the work that followed reflected it.

Along the way, David earned a master's in design from Harvard's Graduate School of Design and another in real estate development from Columbia University. Since 1998 he has served on the senior committee of the Berkeley Prize, an international endowment for architecture as social art.

Sara is our Chief Project Officer. She spent over 25 years at Zaha Hadid Architects, most recently as senior director on The Henderson, a thirty-six-story tower and Hong Kong’s newest landmark. Earlier she was project architect on the London Aquatics Centre, built for the 2012 Olympics; the Phaeno Science Centre in Wolfsburg; and MAXXI in Rome, which won the Stirling Prize.

Sara has written and lectured on the discipline of climate-resilient infrastructure as something that requires architects, engineers, and policymakers to share authorship rather than divide it.

Known for her unwavering commitment to how a design becomes something that can actually be built, Sara now sits on the owner’s side. After decades of making the case from the architect’s chair, she knows what to watch, what to protect, and what’s possible when teams and clients are working at their very best.