The Art of Building Together

Inside Skye Schuchman’s Sausalito studio, where maps, materials and a shared belief in place are becoming part of the city’s next chapter.

The floorboards creaked beneath each step as we climbed toward the second floor of Sausalito’s ICB Building. Outside, the afternoon sun had begun its arc toward Mount Tamalpais, casting the delicate shadow of birds along a wire against the stairwell wall. At the top were two imposing glass doors marked SKYE SCHUCHMAN STUDIO.

Skye Schuchman apologized almost immediately for the mess.

In his defense, I had given him very little warning.

I had come into Sausalito that afternoon to interview Amy Svendberg and, finding a pocket of time before leaving town, changed what had been planned as a remote conversation with Skye into an in-person visit. A working artist’s studio rarely waits politely for company.

He opened the door.

Inside, tables were covered with drawings, cutting mats, brushes, mosaic fragments, pieces of wood, paper studies and half-resolved experiments. A dress form stood near one wall with a measuring tape draped across its shoulders. Brass rods stretched into geometric compositions. Driftwood filled a white ceramic vessel. Sheets of drawings were stacked and layered across work surfaces. In one corner, the tools of making seemed to become a still life of their own.

Behind Skye’s desk stood a large, monolithic work that I remembered immediately. I had fallen for it during my first visit to his studio the year before. Its balance of geometry, landscape and abstraction had stayed with me. In many ways, that piece would eventually become the spark for our first collaboration.

Skye put on music as we settled onto a bench beside the window. “October” by Okonski began playing softly through the studio, its piano filling the room without overtaking it. Outside, the afternoon sun was moving across Sausalito toward Mt. Tam, warming a space that Skye said could be cold in the morning before the light finally found its way through the windows.

Below us sat Heath Ceramics, another enduring piece of Sausalito’s creative identity. Beyond it, the hills rose in the distance. From that bench, it was easy to understand how place enters Skye’s work. Not necessarily as a literal landscape, but through proportion, material, geometry and an awareness of what surrounds him.

The studio itself seemed to operate in much the same way. Finished pieces shared space with experiments. Brushes gathered in ceramic vessels. Mosaic fragments covered cutting mats. A dress form stood beside stacks of drawings and material studies. On one table, a globe-like form was slowly being transformed with tile, adhesive and exposed fiberglass. Nothing felt staged. It was a room actively engaged in making.

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A Building Made for Making

The ICB feels particularly appropriate as a home for artists because it began as something entirely different.

Its origins belong to Marinship, the enormous wartime shipyard constructed on Sausalito’s northern waterfront in 1942. During three extraordinary years of production, Marinship launched 93 vessels before closing at the end of World War II.

The building that would become the ICB was originally Marinship’s Mold Loft and Yard Office. Inside its enormous open space, shipbuilders laid out full-scale templates that were transferred to steel during construction. After the war, it became the Industrial Center Building. In 1955, abstract artist Walter Kuhlman became its first artist tenant, helping begin an artistic lineage that continues today.

That transition, from industrial production to artistic production, mirrors the larger story of Sausalito’s waterfront. When Marinship disappeared, artists, writers, musicians and craftspeople began occupying the remnants. Barges became homes. Industrial buildings became studios. An infrastructure designed to manufacture ships became fertile ground for a different kind of experimentation.

Skye has lived in Sausalito for more than two decades. Our map project, he told me, gave him an opportunity to look carefully again at a place that had become deeply familiar.

That familiarity is important. His work does not simply happen in Sausalito.

It absorbs it.

A Globe on the Table

When I arrived, one of the most immediate works in progress was sitting directly on a table: a glass globe partially covered in small mosaic tiles.

Skye pulled out his sketchbook.

The drawings showed circles orbiting circles, lines radiating outward, notes scattered around a central sphere. He was developing a lighting installation for Tile Fever, conceived around a five-foot-diameter globe suspended above the showroom and clad, at least partially, in tile.

The object on his desk was the prototype.

At full scale, however, imagination had run directly into physics. Covering the entire five-foot sphere in tile could push the finished work toward 300 pounds. Skye was considering a translucent fiberglass structure instead, selectively mosaicked and illuminated internally so that the sculpture would become, in his words, a kind of “big glowing orb.”

It was an illuminating glimpse into how he works.

The original idea is not sacred. The process is allowed to argue back.

Material, gravity, illumination and scale all become collaborators.

Skye described wanting the globe to contain the visual variation of continents, moving between textures, darkness and light rather than simply covering the object uniformly.

Around us were the physical remnants of that experimentation: tiny cubes waiting to become mosaics, blades embedded in scarred cutting mats, rough prototypes, paper, fiberglass possibilities, brushes softened by use.

Everything felt available.

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Drawing a Different Sausalito

I met Skye the previous year through our mutual friend Dennis Green, owner of Karl the Store.

We hit it off immediately.

Not long afterward, we found ourselves having lunch at Sushi Ran when a conversation became an idea: What if the map inside the HAUS of HITE Sausalito Guide was not really a map at all?

Or at least not in the traditional sense.

I wanted an artistic interpretation of Sausalito’s historic coastline rather than another piece of generic wayfinding. A close friend and devoted map aficionado would later take issue with my willingness to bend the rules of cartography, but accuracy was only part of the point.

The map needed to tell a story.

Tourism in Sausalito tends to compress the city into a remarkably small piece of waterfront. Visitors arrive by ferry, move along Bridgeway and often turn around before discovering that the town continues.

We wanted the map to quietly pull them farther.

Toward Caledonia Street.

Toward the northern waterfront.

Toward the makers, galleries, restaurants, shops and people who form the more local rhythm of Sausalito.

And I wanted an ICB artist to make it.

When I had first visited Skye’s studio and seen the large piece behind his desk, something clicked. His visual language possessed exactly the combination the project needed: rigorous enough to organize information, abstract enough to resist becoming conventional.

Skye saw the connection too. Looking back on the project, he described his work as having an organizational rigor that naturally translated to cartography. More importantly, he understood that the point was to celebrate Sausalito through the perspective of someone who actually belonged to its artistic community.

The coastline became line. Locations became points. Geography became composition.

And suddenly the map itself was part of the story.

For Skye, who had lived here for 23 years, creating it became what he described as a trip through “memory land,” an opportunity to look closely at a place he thought he already knew. He also recognized something fundamental about the larger Guide: every point represented a conversation and a relationship.

That was precisely the idea.

The Sausalito Guide was never intended simply to document a town.

It was meant to connect one.

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From Map to Object

The response to the map opened another possibility.

What had begun as an editorial commission became an object in its own right. Skye began producing a series of handcrafted limited-edition maps, available through his website as a collaboration with HAUS of HITE.

The first edition found its owner during the launch of the Sausalito Guide on January 29, 2026, when Wayne Kalek and his partner won it in the evening’s raffle.

There was something wonderfully circular about the moment.

A conversation between friends became a map. The map became part of a publication. The publication gathered a community into one room. And the artwork created for its pages emerged from the magazine as something someone could take home.

Collaboration had created its own momentum.

Skye told me that working on the project made him realize again how deeply he cared about Sausalito, but also what it meant to contribute to the town through design and art by creating something that might remain long after the original project was finished.

That word, lasting, would surface repeatedly throughout our afternoon.

The Dock of the Bay

The map ultimately opened the door to another collaboration, this time with the newly established Downtown Sausalito Association, led by President Kass Green and Vice President Amy Svendberg.

What began as conversations about how downtown Sausalito might better represent itself developed into a larger visual identity project. Working together, HAUS of HITE and Skye began shaping a new logo and graphic language for the organization around a phrase inseparable from the city’s cultural mythology: “The Dock of the Bay.”

The details mattered. The dock depicted in the identity was grounded in an actual Sausalito place. The figures became silhouettes drawn from life. Pelicans, which had become part of the DSA's own visual vocabulary for the city, entered the composition as another recognizable piece of the waterfront. Rather than creating a generic coastal identity, we wanted the graphics to feel unmistakably rooted here.

Kass and Amy became an important part of that process, not simply as leaders of the DSA, but as collaborators helping articulate what this next chapter of downtown Sausalito could represent. The project became another example of what had begun with the Guide: bringing together artists, business owners, community leaders and residents who might approach the city from different perspectives, then finding the point where those perspectives could meet.

For Skye, that meant thinking beyond how something looked today and considering how it might live five, ten or twenty years from now. A successful identity needed to work on a printed page, an embroidered patch, a T-shirt, a downtown banner or something that had not yet been imagined. As he told me, “durability and creating lasting, beautiful things is, like, a North Star in my life.” 

That philosophy extends beyond design. It applies equally to relationships. The map, the limited editions, the DSA identity and the Sausalito Guide are individual projects, but together they reveal something larger taking shape: a network of people choosing to build something together.

And perhaps that is where Sausalito’s next chapter is being written.

Not by one organization, one artist or one publication, but through collaboration.

Beyond the Wall

Skye is also thinking beyond Sausalito.

For years, his professional life has moved along two parallel tracks: commercial graphic design and branding on one side, his artwork on the other. Now he wants those paths to shift.

He has been working to present himself more deliberately as an artist, pursuing exhibitions, galleries and a more disciplined body of work.

But the ambition extends beyond getting more work onto walls.

He wants to get off the wall.

During our conversation, Skye brought up Christo and Jeanne-Claude and their monumental environmental installations. What captivated him was the scale of their thinking: projects capable of temporarily transforming landscapes while leaving a permanent cultural memory behind.

“I would love to do installations and work toward a larger kind of cohesive body of work that actually says something important in the world,” he said.

He described sculptural forms conceived almost as guardians, monumental objects built around geometry, mosaics, language and place. The idea is still developing, but his intention is remarkably clear: art placed in public rather than hidden in private collections, capable of changing a landscape and perhaps even connecting people across it.

Sitting there with Mount Tam outside the window, it did not feel entirely theoretical.

The mountain already seems to enter his studio repeatedly.

Its silhouette appears, disappears and reappears through his visual language. Landscapes become lines. Circles become celestial bodies. Brass, stone, mosaic and light become ways of translating geography into objects.

The landscape outside the window keeps finding its way back inside.

A Quiet Renaissance

As we talked, the sun moved farther across the room.

Skye mentioned that the studio begins the morning cold before light gradually pours through the windows. By late afternoon, the transformation is complete.

The tables looked different now. Brass caught the light. Glass reflected it. Paper shifted from white to cream. Mount Tam remained beyond the window while the working surfaces around us carried fragments of whatever might come next.

Watching Sausalito undergo its own quiet renaissance over the past year has been an honor.

Long before HAUS of HITE created a guide here, Sausalito was the place I came to escape.

After long days working in the tech world, I would take the ferry across the Bay and walk the tree-lined stairs and streets above the waterfront. The simple act of crossing the water created distance. Sausalito offered perspective when I needed it most.

In May 2024, it became the final place in the Bay Area I visited before leaving to hike the Pacific Crest Trail.

Perhaps it should not have surprised me that I returned after the trail and eventually began building something here.

But the Sausalito Guide was never really about my relationship with Sausalito.

It was about everyone else's.

It was about Dennis introducing me to Skye. It was about lunch at Sushi Ran becoming a map. It was about an artist at the ICB interpreting a coastline. It was about businesses opening their doors and people telling their stories. It was about an artwork becoming a limited edition, a guide becoming a gathering and one collaboration leading naturally into another.

That is what feels particularly important about what is happening in Sausalito now.

The future of a creative community is not built by a single artist, business, association or publication claiming ownership of its story.

It is built through connection.

Skye said something near the end of our conversation that stayed with me. Relationships, he argued, should be approached with the same intention as good design. They should be durable. They should build trust. They should leave behind something both people can appreciate later.

Perhaps that is the real story of our collaboration.

We thought we were making a map.

Instead, we were mapping what could happen when a community begins creating together.