ARCHITECTS

Michael Allan Black was born on June 28th, 1937 in Los Angeles, and grew up in Palm Springs, where he attended Palm Springs High School. He studied architecture at UC Berkeley and USC, graduating from USC in 1961. His first job in Palm Springs was as a draftsman in the offices of Williams & Williams (E. Stewart Williams and Roger Williams) from February 1964 to July 1967, after which time he set up his own practice. He registered as an architect in 1966, and AIA in 1968.

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He also started his career in design education, teaching construction estimating, detailing, and environmental design at the College of the Desert from 1966-67. Later in his career, from 1976-1983, he was a tenured professor of architecture at SCI-ARC in Santa Monica, and subsequently guest lectured at UCLA, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo among others.

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Throughout his career he had a special focus on planning for Native American communities including for the Morongo Indian Reservation. His work in the desert area was extensive. He designed custom homes for Palm Springs clients, commercial, civic, and social projects across the valley. In Rancho Mirage he is acknowledged for his work on Tamarisk West Phase Two (1968) and for the 90-unit condominium development, Desert Village (1975), which expresses the dramatic, late-modern sculptural style he also adopted for the Pomona First Federal Bank building (1974) on El Paseo in Palm Desert. Planning and the environment were central to his ethos. In Palm Springs Life in the mid-1970s, Black was quoted, “If the desert continues to grow at its present rate without the necessary restrictions, we will find ourselves in a very urban environment that used to be a desert.”

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He died in Santa Rosa, CA on April 9th, 2008.