One almost universal thing architect designers hear from clients when they're done working together is that they're completely surprised by the number of decisions that go into designing their home.
Doing architecture design just involves so many decisions that it can be really over whelming without someone to guide that process and as architects it's their job to methodically lay out a system for making those decisions and then also guide them through the particular timing that those decisions have to happen in.
When you actually go through the design process architect designers realize that all the things they spend five or more years teaching them in school is actually a really small portion of what they do.
Of course there's design thinking and a methodology and history and theory and technical information that can be taught but experience is the only way to learn how to think like an architect, and to get comfortable with the design process.
But when you start practicing, you start putting buildings together you realize that most of what you're doing is communicating with people communicating with your clients, dealing with financial issues, dealing with construction and technical issues, and how you resolve the materials and joints and connections.
All these things of course are subservient to the design concept and the idea and that's very important but there is a huge raft of knowledge that you need to put a building together even something as seemingly simple as a house.
Alright so in this article we're going to be reviewing all the materials architect design use for a typical client meeting. You'll not able to see the exact meeting but we'll have this meeting for the gallery house to review the exterior shell package and you'll get an idea about the agenda that architect designers use and the materials that they develop the physical materials the models the drawings all this stuff.
Talk about an architect designer methodology, approach, how the process works and kind of bring you in that way.
As an architect designer your agenda shall be always opens with addressing client concerns and questions and a sort of recap of where they're at, in the process a sort of zoom out: this is where we were last time when we met this is where we are now things that we've been working on things like that.
Having an agenda ensures that by the end of the meeting you have all of the questions that you wanted answered heading into the meeting answered.
And then we'll do some meeting notes as follow-up after this and the meeting notes we'll assign tasks to everyone based on the things we decided in the meeting.
Once when you move from the opening we're gonna get into the meat of the agenda and for this meeting we want to be talking about the shell of the building.
So the shell are things like doors and windows exterior finishes materials just basically the shape of the building.
As an architect you have to be thinking about a dozen steps ahead of where you're at right now and this is true for every part of the design process.
We know that this building is going to be in construction in the summer.
The summer is the busiest time of year for our construction crews so we need to get on a concrete subcontractor’s schedule and a site where contractor’s schedule and in order to do that we need a foundation plan and in order to develop a foundation plan we need to know where all the structural loads are coming and in order to do know that we need to know what the roof design is the shape of the building we need to know where our doors and windows are in the exterior shell.
We also need to know where our plumbing is our electrical is there's probably a thousand different things that we actually need to know, but if you're to take all those decisions and put them in front of your client and say: “well we need to know this, this, this…" it's overwhelming.
I mean it's overwhelming to me as an architect and I've done this many times before but to present all those decisions at once to your client is it's just irresponsible and it's sort of it's unhelpful actually.
And so what we do is we're as architects is we're going to order the decision making process and we're gonna parse out the number of decisions into these neat little packages.
I've done this long enough to know that if I follow my design process from beginning to end I'm gonna land in a good place.
Each one of these client meetings I view as a snapshot along the continuum of the design process.
This really sets my approach to the materials that I generate for each meeting. That approach means I'm gonna have a diversity of materials. I'm gonna have some drawings which are hard lined like the floor plans like the site plan.
These are drawings and design components that we've been working on for a long time so it makes sense that they're fixed, they're they're more fixed, they have structure to them they are things we've been talking about for a long time.
I'm gonna have some drawings which are hard lined but some not everything is figured out and for this particular presentation package it's gonna be the exterior elevations.
I'm gonna also have some sketches so some design ideas that are presented in sketch form, so that's another layer of information.
I'm gonna have a computer model, for this particular one I did a Sketch up model and that's going to show a different set of information.
I have a whole bunch of images and magazines things that are not my architecture but they suggest finished architecture and it's a really easy way for a client to be drawn into a certain image of a building and relate to that pretty quickly.
I'm also gonna have a whole bunch of material samples that we can actually pick up and touch and engage with.
Now I don't show up to these meetings with finished renderings.
It's my belief that really the only finished rendering that matters is the finished building at the end of the project.
So if I produce a finished rendering and I say, “Look what I've created as the architect, here you go. What do you think of it?”
The client can either like it or hate it, it doesn't draw them into the process in any way.
It sort of puts the architect in a different place.
This process here is collaborative, it’s democratic, I really want to draw my client into the decision-making process and so having a range and diversity of you know information that doesn't feel so fixed as a finished rendering does, just allows for more of an open dialog.
It's easier for someone to look at an image in these you know magazines and these print outs and Pinterest boards and say, “oh I like that” or “I don't like that” and we can establish a common language of design rather than me saying, you know, “Your house looks like this” that doesn't provide any sort of dialogue.
And I find, a lot of times, clients are somewhat hesitant to say that they don't like something.
In this whole process I really try and encourage clients to tell me what they like and what they don't like.
It's the most efficient process. As architecture students we're trained to take critiques and some pretty harsh critiques and what I say is you know nothing you're gonna tell me is gonna hurt my feelings I've heard it all before.
So I don't mind if you say well I just hate this elevation it's just it's ugly like, I'd much rather hear that then the clients say, “Oh no I like it” but really a sort of half-hearted “I like it” and really be thinking inside “that's just awful.”
Because what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna run with that I'm gonna develop it and we're gonna take it through the next series of steps and if we get three more steps down the road and the client then says, “I actually don't really like that” then I've just wasted all that fee and that time and you know so it's just not a good use of resources.
And I kind of think of this almost like a Thanks giving table where you're setting out way more food and portions than anyone could possibly ever eat at one time, but it's your job to sort of pick and choose and as we work together from that side of the table- the client side of the table - and my side of the table, you know pick and choose the elements that really help create the story of this building in this place and this time.
And this is part of a finished thought it's not the fully formed finished thought.
I don't think any digital production method is ever going to replace the notion that architects sketch. When you do it in a meeting environment it has special value.
I've never been in a single meeting where there hasn't been a roll of trace on the table and sketching of ideas and a real-time sharing of information between the client and back and forth of the client.
It builds trust, it involves them in the process you know oftentimes they'll leave the meeting having generated some really cool ideas.
A client meeting is a chance to present your ideas but then also more importantly hear the feedback from the client like what's important to them.
When you sketch in front of a client you're working through a set of ideas with a client say you know in this particular meeting we presented a design for the kitchen and the pantry area and there was some circulation issues, so we had the refrigerator located in the pantry and they had always said that they wanted it out of the kitchen space but actually when you look at the layout of it it's a little bit inconvenient to have to walk into the pantry to always get into the refrigerator.
So we talked about you know different ways to relocate that.
And that involves sketching you have to be able to sketch your ideas real-time with your client and actually builds a lot of trust when you do that when you're able to come up with three or four or five different schemes or ideas real-time right there in front of them.
You can run through them quickly and say okay we can move the refrigerator here or we can move it here or we can close up this wall you can access the pantry through the laundry.
And when you're able to do that real-time with them it involves them it brings them into the process and it's just it's a way of quickly sort of moving beyond what could be two or three or four e-mails back and forth.
Did you try this? Did you try that? If you're able to do it real time it's just so much more efficient.
So another way I like to think about these client meetings, these sort of snapshots in the design process, is as if we are writing a story.
So the client and I come together and we pick up where we left off from the last time and we write the, sort of, next chapter.
When you really draw your client into this process and you start developing a common language of design with each other, and for us this common language was this idea of this art gallery - so a place to store art - this huge space, in what's a diminutive plan, this huge gallery space and then this extruded barn form.
We start developing this language of barns and galleries and those ideas their notions of what those things are and my notions of what those things are start to sort of coalesce and smash together and they land in the architecture that we're developing together.
Really one of the interesting evolution of that is when the client starts completing your own thoughts.
So one issue that we talked about during this last meeting was how to acoustically separate the living space from the dining and kitchen space here.
So we talked about you know possibly making this whole thing a glass wall, that was one
option.
We talked about making it this sort of thin partition wall with you know sort of hinged doors in it.
We talked about making it this thick zone and we talked about replicating what we're doing on the outside wall here which is you know sort of double-height glass but doing that here so that there's an opening in the bottom which is the sort of passage that you enter the living room from and then a glazed opening up at the top and that you pass through this thick zone of books up to about the seven foot level and then above that there's a big glazed opening.
The glazed opening preserves the view from the mezzanine out to the forest and the trees here this sort of enfilade - this opening of spaces between – connection of spaces- between inside and out, which they really liked.
And putting a partition wall here sort of gets in the way of that.
So that preserves that idea. And then the client said, “Yeah and then we can put a sliding barn door here and that that's the thing that will isolate it acoustically.”
You know the great part about the client completing your thought or coming up with the ideas for the project, is that it means that there is a common language evolving and even if we're not completely aligned in that you know smashing all of these ideas together and looking at these images and taking these materials and putting them all together in a really loose and fluid state, builds this collaborative design.
We both have equal input and the result is greater than the sum of its parts.
And you know I think we're in a really good place when the design starts suggesting what our next move should be, and that's a great example of you know the design suggesting what the right thing to do is.
Once designs start taking a life of their own you know you're in a really good place and that's where I think we're at with this.
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