What southern California asks of a building, before anyone asks anything of it.
The coastal shelf between Ventura and Santa Barbara is narrow. The mountains come down close to the water, and everything built here is built in that gap.
That constraint is usually treated as a problem of setbacks and slope. It is also a question of what a building owes the ground it sits on: which way it faces in the afternoon, how it handles a dry summer, whether it holds the marine layer out or lets it through.
A vocabulary of place is what accumulates when those questions get answered the same careful way, project after project.