Tyler Kobick is a Bay-area CA Licensed Architect and General
Contractor with a focus on housing, public-interest design, custom
fabrication, and ecological design. He is the founder and President
of a 21-person firm, Design Draw Build, where the firm specializes in
adaptive reuse, custom residences, multifamily housing and
architect-led design-build methods of project delivery. He believes
strongly in warm-modern, critically regionalist architecture.
Tyler began his career as a stone mason in Northeast Ohio where he
apprenticed under a master mason and soon enough started his own
construction company. After hiking a large section of the Appalachian
Trail, he fell in love with the Mad River Valley of central Vermont
where he trained and built for 12 years with many different architects
and artisans on custom residential and commercial projects
predominantly under the architect Dave Sellers, whose methods
catalyzed the contemporary design/build field. In 2010 Tyler founded
Design Draw Build and traveled to build unusual commissions in
different areas of the US until setting up a more permanent location
with his business partner Jo Marcy in the Bay area in late 2014.
An educator and community-builder, Tyler seeks to revitalize and
preserve town and urban centers by embracing the material culture of a
place with sustainable locally-applied building technologies.. From
2005-2008, Tyler built rural medical clinics in the mountainous region
of south-east El Salvador, and founded a model school for land-place
based education, called Amun Shea that still teaches a couple hundred
students a year. In 2009 he helped found the Ecological Design
Co-laboratory Studio–a sustainable design-lab and think tank at the
University of Vermont where he taught design-build classes and donated
student-built structures to local school programs to promote local
food and outdoor skills. Today, Tyler teaches architecture at the
University of San Francisco in a variety of studio and skill classes.
He is also a co-chair of the Regional and Urban Design Committee for
the AIA EastBay, and currently sits on the Board of Directors for the AIAEastbay.
Passionate about live cultural production, playing and seeing live
music, he has served as a lead designer for temporary festival
structures at The Square Roots Festival, Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, and
for Superfly Productions.
Tyler holds two degrees in architecture, a B.S Arch from the
University of Cincinnati, and a MArch from Dalhousie University in
Halifax, Canada.