Twenty years is a long time, and Alfred Twu has spent them all at MWA! We sat down with Alfred to celebrate this huge milestone and talk through two decades of work, seeing MWA change immensely over 20 years, and the board games he’s designed to help people understand why housing and transit projects take so long to build and why they matter. We’re so glad to have had him with us this long, and even happier to share his story!
ALFRED’S PROJECTS
Two Decades, One Firm
Alfred has been here longer than 20 years. He started as a part-time student intern, and moved to full-time about a year later after graduation, so his true tenure is even longer! Alfred has shaped some of MWA’s most significant projects during his time here.
Alfred has worked in all of MWA’s project types, a true chameleon who has supported housing and infrastructure projects of many kinds. Recalling some of his proudest projects, Alfred talked about the mix of project types in his portfolio and the sheer length of the work. Many of MWA’s projects take more than 10 years from start to finish, and there’s something satisfying about seeing a project through for that long. He pointed to the SFPUC Southeast Plant Biosolids Digester Facilities project as an example, which kicked off in 2013, and is still under construction today. Central Subway Yerba Buena/Moscone Station is another, which began in 2010 and wrapped up in 2022. Central Subway is also one of the few MWA buildings Alfred has walked through more than once since it opened, which is always a special moment for him. So much of the firm’s work isn’t public-facing, so getting to continually walk through a finished, occupied project and say “I worked on that” is a rare thing, and Alfred treasures it every time.
Growing with the Firm
Few people at MWA have watched the firm change as much as Alfred has. When he started, MWA was a San Francisco firm with a location in Oakland and a small Portland office. For years, the Portland team made the trip down to the Bay Area for the holiday party, until last year, when, for the first time, the trip went the other way!
Alongside this, Alfred pointed to two changes he’s genuinely happy to see: a much stronger focus on sustainability, and better work-life balance across the firm as a whole.
“Alfred is very knowledgeable and experienced, and he is someone everyone knows they can rely on. Whenever questions or challenges come up, his expertise and calm guidance make a meaningful difference. We all truly appreciate everything he brings to MWA.”
Projects that Inspire
Beyond SFPUC and Central Subway, Alfred’s housing portfolio includes the Willie B. Kennedy Apartments, a senior housing project in San Francisco built right on the front parking lot of an existing senior housing building. In this project, the new building doubled as the entrance gate for the one behind it. The team devised a clever solution to a design problem by looking at the site differently.
MWA is often known for affordable housing, but Alfred pointed out that affordable senior housing has become a bigger part of the work, particularly renovations. He finds renovation work fascinating because there’s already a group of residents and a property manager who can tell you exactly what’s working in the space and what isn’t, which is valuable and specific feedback that is harder to collect in new construction projects.
One of his current projects, 401 Santa Clara, is a senior housing renovation in Oakland currently in schematic design, featuring a much-needed structural retrofit and accessibility upgrades. Alfred noted that the building has, ironically, never been wheelchair accessible, a holdover from an older design philosophy that assumed anyone using a wheelchair would always have help on hand. Today’s approach designs for independent living instead, which says a lot about how far the architectural profession and code standards have come since the building’s original construction.
Serving People’s Essential Needs
Outside the office, Alfred is deeply involved in local Bay Area politics, with a focus on housing and transportation. As a commissioner on the Berkeley Rent Board and member of the Berkeley Planning Commission, Alfred reviews zoning changes alongside other architects and stakeholders with a wide range of perspectives.
Alfred’s investment in civic health has led to something delightful: he designs board games about housing and transit policy to engage and inform citizens in a fun way. North Berkeley walks players through the real debate over what to build on a former transit station parking lot, modeled on a real dispute over a Berkeley site. Players negotiate the same trade-offs that came up in the real 2018 fight between neighbors who wanted more housing built and neighbors who didn’t want the lot touched.
Alfred’s design philosophy is refreshingly simple: a game should be easy enough that a group can learn it and finish in about an hour, built around one clear central conflict.
The instinct behind the games traces back to something Alfred sees as a real blind spot in architecture education: design school treats almost everything as a design problem, when a lot of the real obstacles to better housing and infrastructure come down to funding and zoning, not design. Licensing exams cover things like contract types, but rarely touch how projects actually get funded, even though funding shapes nearly every real project an architect works on. He also thinks there’s a structural reason so few architects end up in politics: architecture school is unusually time-consuming and isolating, leaving little room to build the broader network that tends to pull people toward public service. When talking to Alfred, it’s clear that the thoughtfulness from designing these games comes from caring about getting good things built, not just designed.
On the policy front, Alfred flagged Senate Bill 79, a California law aimed at allowing more housing near transit, which takes effect next month. He expects it to open up opportunities in neighborhoods that haven’t seen much affordable housing before and noted that most affordable housing funding in California comes from the county, state, or national level rather than city budgets. This is part of why the nonprofits MWA works with often operate across many cities and states at once.
TWO DECADES OF CHANGE, FRONT ROW SEAT
Alfred has also had a front-row seat to how the mechanics of the profession have shifted underneath all of us. At MWA, he picked up IT responsibilities somewhat by accident after a previous part-time IT person left. He’ll happily tell you the job has actually gotten easier over the years even as the firm has grown, since so much now lives in the cloud and hardware is more reliable than it used to be. Alfred remembers two genuinely symbolic milestones: the end of office phones, and the end of printing full drawing sets for submittal, both of which used to feel like permanent fixtures of the job.
Recent policy changes have also cut down on the amount of public-facing presentation work MWA has to do. In the past, any given project could be voted down, which meant investing heavily in the drawings and public meetings needed to build support. Today, affordable housing projects are approved automatically in many cases, a change Alfred sees as a win, since it shortens the years-long path to funding and construction, and cuts down on the costly extras that used to get tacked onto a project without necessarily making it better for the people who’d actually live there.
Twenty years, a planning commission seat, a stack of board games, and countless watercolors. Thank you, Alfred, for all of your years at MWA and for undoubtedly making it better!
Curious to see more of Alfred’s artwork? Visit his art website here!