Pioneer Information
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Danadjieva received a degree in architecture from Bulgaria’s State University in Sofia in 1960. She then went to work as a set designer and art director for the Bulgarian state film industry. While an art director and a production designer for feature films, her work received several international film festival awards. In 1963 Danadjieva and her partner Ivan Tzvetin entered an international design competition, submitting a proposal for a plaza, museum, and monument in Cuba which placed second. Although the project was never built, she became increasingly interested in architecture, studying at the École des Beaux-Arts from 1964 to 1966. While in Paris, she worked for the architectural firm Denieul-Marty-Paoli. Danadjieva and Tzvetin submitted the winning entry for the San Francisco Civic Center in 1965, but the project was never built. The following year she established her own practice in San Francisco, and became a project designer at Lawrence Halprin & Associates. Between 1967 and 1976 Danadjieva led over twenty urban design and city-planning projects with the firm, including the Washington State Capitol in Olympia, the Jewish Home of San Francisco, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Her first large-scale project with the firm was the Ira Keller Fountain in Portland, Oregon (1970), the second being Freeway Park in Seattle (1976). That same year she left Halprin’s office, founding the multidisciplinary design firm Danadjieva & Koenig Associates with Thomas Koenig. In 1978 they created a conceptual design for the James River Park System in Virginia. In 1990 the firm was commissioned to extend Freeway Park to include the Washington State Convention and Trade Center. Her work has won numerous national and international awards, including an Honor Award in Design from the American Society of Landscape Architects. Danadjieva maintains a practice in Tiburon, California.
