Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

Adding to your design’s effects can happen throughout the day, transiently. Just as sunlight changes throughout the day, other elements impacting your design also change. Shadows created by the light rhythms and axial alignments are one aspect that can change your designs perception minute by minute. Additionally, issues like reflection have the power to create perceptual illusions and enhancements that will help your design relate to its occupants and to the contextual environment which surrounds it. Thus, as you engage in design development phases and you are refining your design using building models and 3-D visualization programs, it is wise to take a moment in your development to think about the materials, light, axial alignments, and reflections that will no doubt impact how your architectural work will function and be perceived.

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

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When your occupant touches a material within your building they are immediately given more information to compile into their mental image about your space. And this perception, influenced by their haptic senses, contributes to how successful their experience is within your building. Given this, I invite you to design texture in such a way that complements and deepens the meaning which your architecture aims to convey. For example, would a coarse and heavily textured wall signal an occupant to keep their distance? And would a smooth, finely textured wall invite them to come closer? The idea here is to go beyond the visual sense within your designs. Use other characteristics, like texture, to guide your occupants experience as they travel through your building. Because just as the visual sense can accomplish a lot — because of the tremendous amount of information that communicates — other environmental stimuli like texture also have the power to communicate. So be aware of what the textures in your design are communicating and guiding your occupants to do.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

What happens when you use color to dictate a building language to communicate with your occupants? Do you appeal to their sense of structure or contribute to their deeper understanding about the inner-workings of your design? Some architecture conceals its inner mechanisms while other designs go out of their way to reveal them. So, I ask you — how transparent are you with your occupants when it comes to how much your building designs reveal about their operation and maintenance? By concealing you may create a simplicity and mystery that triggers curiosity or appreciation in your occupant, while by revealing inner-mechanisms you provide a new kind of information that your occupants can use along their journey through your building.

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

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Design section drawings are very important because they reveal height immediately. And with height, you as an architect can accomplish some amazing things. In fact, according to Science Daily — “ceiling height can affect how a person thinks feels and acts”. In their article they explain that 10 foot ceiling heights foster occupants that tend to think more freely and abstractly, while 8 foot ceiling heights foster occupants that tend to think in a more detailed way. (1) So with this information, I encourage you to think about height within your architectural designs — by thinking about what activities you would like to promote within certain spaces, and asking yourself whether high ceilings or low ceilings would enhance or detract your occupants’ ability to engage in those activities successfully.

(1) Ceiling Height Can Affect How a Person Thinks Feels and Acts. Science Daily. April 25, 2007.

Image: on1stsite | Flickr

What would you do within your design if you had access to glass in architecture that was stronger and more durable than steel? Would you span longer distances with it? Create more transparent and “warped” forms with it? Or might you even create new combinations of perceptual intrigue — like a transparent cantilever which extends outward further, or a transparent building base which makes all that is above it appear to “float”.

Such questions in architectural design are important to ask yourself as a way to get you thinking “outside of the box”. So often, after using the same materials in very similar ways over and over again, you as an architect may forget, over time, to push the boundaries of what certain materials (like glass) can do.

So I invite you to take the materials and other architectural elements that you work with, and turn them on their head. Ask yourself what you would do if light could be laser focused within your design. Ask yourself what would happen if certain elements like windows could become transient. Ask yourself what you would do with Read more

Image: Jeremy Levine Design | Flickr

Architectural environments can be a type of extension of oneself. Thus, by understanding the clues that we leave behind in our environments, we can actually gain a better understanding of ourselves. And such clues are everywhere within the spaces where we spend our time.

Such clues are architectural objects — which are everything from the type of furniture we have to the type of books we read and store in our bookshelves. Such architectural objects collectively say a lot about us. And as such, you as an architect can use this information to not only design better spaces for your occupants, but to also learn more about your occupants before you ever design their space.

If you have the opportunity as an architect, to visit your future occupants’ current environment, I would say that is definitely a worthwhile trip. They say that a picture is worth 1000 words, and I’d say that visiting a person’s environment is worth triple that.

By seeing where your future occupant currently spends their time (engaging in a multitude of the activities that you are designing for), you will get tremendous insight into their likes and dislikes that may very well inform you about Read more

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

The beauty of design is that you can uncover unique ways to respond to a site and all of its features. By seeing site features — like water, a hill, or even a tree — as aspects that can be leveraged to make your design better, you will discover exciting new ways to engage it, and thus engage your occupants. Through your architectural building design, you have the opportunity to position your occupants, to frame what they see and how they experience it. Don’t take these opportunities for granted. Be playful with your initial ideas about how to make your main architectural gesture on your site. You may be surprised with what you come up with — as it may change your notion about what commonplace experiences should be like — like dining, working or learning.

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

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Color has the ability to emphasize. And what does this mean for your architectural designs? It means that you can create hierarchy, structure, order and repetition through differences. Color is a means by which you can create needed differences, in order to accentuate, subdue or compose a language. All of your building materials have color, even those that are transparent (as they usually reflect). And because of this, you can design environments that appeal to those visual senses, while also guiding the other senses toward what would be rewarding to touch, or where it would be rewarding to hear. Color reveals much of what is behind architectural elements in a glance…so don’t underestimate the power of color in all of your building materials — because their combinations yield invitations for your occupants to engage with their environments and with each other.

Image: ragnar1984 | Flickr

Buildings often rely upon wayfinding design to give their occupants a sense of building orientation, and to perhaps spark that mental map that tells them where they have been as well as pointing them in the direction of where they need to go. And while wayfinding signage and other directional elements found within buildings can be helpful, I do think that a good architectural design should not be dependent upon such signage. That is, the design should inherently convey to its occupants a sense of where they are when within it, and a sense of direction subtly instructing them on how to get to where they want to go.

For instance, an implied axial alignment of a well-positioned window which lets in a certain quality of light can pull an occupant in that direction if they sense it from another room. Another example is one of an exterior building element which wraps around the corner of a building in a way that pulls pedestrians toward the entrance as they are subtly cued to turn the corner.

Thus, within your designs there are ways to gently pull your occupants through, as they experience a harmonization of building orientation elements, where one leads to the next. And as such, designed building elements (as opposed to wayfinding signage) can be used as milestones to be experienced along your occupants’ journey. Additionally, such Read more

Image: magnetbox | Flickr

By simply looking at Japan’s subway system in the image to the right, would you imagine that a person living in this type of city would respond differently to stress as compared to a person living in the countryside? Well, research is indicating that there may just be differences between urban and city dwellers, involving how they handle stress. And furthermore, such differences may be most prominent when considering where a person grew up: whether in an urban or country area. (1)

Thus, when you design a building or residence, how might you think about its design in different terms (from a sensory design standpoint) as you take note of whether it is being used by a city or country dweller? Would such findings indicate that you as an architect need to consider designing for stress (and what yields happiness) with a bit more focus in urban environments? And might one assume that achieving such relaxation within urban environments is a bit more difficult for those urban dwellers? Also, what other demographics do you need to consider when honing in upon the perfect lifestyle architecture for your building occupant?

For instance, I find it interesting to think that a home, office, or school would call for different design elements depending upon whether it is Read more