Buildings surely contain us and protect us, but we believe architecture should set you free.
Free to express yourself completely, challenged to do your best work, invited to a more direct and visceral connection with nature. If you are considering an investment in your surroundings, whether a building, a building interior, or a building site, and whether it is a personal, corporate or public project, no matter your budget, we invite you to try a process that will engage you deeply and empower you profoundly as we together devise an architecture that meets your needs but also inspires your possibilities.
We approach projects as prototypes: as an investigation suggesting propositions and as propositions that yield principles and as principles that yield projects: homes, workplaces, schools, corporate headquarters. We learn a lot about you in this process, and you will learn a lot about how liberating architecture can be.
Our work is done in 7 stages:
1. Research: interviews, questionnaires, exercises, precedents, and image boards all play a part in defining the constraints and also the possibilities of your project. Tangible results: a document that encapsulates both the flavor and the raw data defining your project. Before continuing, we will verify with you that we understand the project fully through the eyes of all of your stakeholders, whether a husband, wife and kids or a board of directors, management and staff.
2. Analysis: jurisdictional reviews, code reviews, cost comparisons, and program analysis yield a number of different ways of looking at your project. Here we verify that the project you want can be achieved within the constraints it must respect. Tangible results: a completed program document that now fully explains your intended project from all relevant perspectives. Before continuing, we will verify with you that your project can be achieved or consult with you to resolve any disconnects.
3. Systems: this conceptual design phase looks at the primary components of your project and proposes a way to build it. For a Waldorf School uncomfortable with right angles, this proved to be a series of hexagonal structures housing classrooms and a host of other program elements. For a large corporation interested in a headquarters maximizing collaboration and flexibility, this proved to be a system of glowing conference rooms and very lightweight workstations. For a house in Hawai'i, this proved to be a system of parallel walls that held up the roof and let water, air and earth flow right through the house. Your project and its opportunities and constraints will yield a unique approach to this question of systems. Tangible results: diagrams, sketches, models, renderings all visually expressing our propositions in order to build a consensus with you around a project approach.
4. Exceptions: every system has its exceptions, and we embrace them. Usually, these elements are exactly what lifts a project from the sensible to the exceptional, and so we take tremendous care to identify them and develop a strategy to celebrate them. Tangible results: developed visual representations of your project ready for budget testing and/or your approval to proceed into the documentation phase.
5. Design Documentation: every project needs to be explained to the authorities and to the contractors. In this phase we develop the construction documents or "blueprints" and the specifications from which your project may be bid and built. Far from a rote process, this phase is filled with problem definition and resolution, coordination among diverse team members of varying disciplines and perspectives, and successive stages of review and development.
6. Construction: this phase encompasses everything that happens once a project is fully documented, and can include jurisdictional review and permitting, bidding or final budget commitment, staging, construction, punchlisting and final occupancy. We assist you throughout the process to answer questions, address unforeseen circumstances, and support you and the contractor to achieve the intended results to your satisfaction.
7. Verification: you have been in your building now for 6 months, working out the details of your occupancy, discovering how it has changed your work or your life, and feeling the relief and satisfaction of this tremendous accomplishment. Without unduly intruding into your business, we want to know where the project succeeded and if there are any issues we can help you to resolve. Our intention is to leave you more than satisfied, and to learn as well from your experience.
We believe this approach to architecture and design yields uncommonly profound and inspiring results, and we invite you to investigate our portfolio and our various blogs, each one offering you our perspective on various project types and on the built environment as a whole.