It is the manifestation of the relationship between all the people involved in the design process. What does that mean? The project is the embodiment of personalities, goals, dreams and ideals into a composition. The people, their attitudes, experiences, abilities etc form the foundation of possibilities for the project. A developer “designing” speculative homes or buildings for a demographic or location will come up with a very different solution for a project than a world traveler client, an architect with many varied interests and a master craftsman. The first thing a vast majority of developers do is to scrape the site of all vegetation and flatten it out. They remove all the attributes of the site that we would use to help evolve the design. They are not interested in evolving a design, they are making a product for sale or rent.
Architecture is far more than just an object, it is the state of mind and attitude of the people that worked on the project. Synthesis is positive, compromise is negative. Would you rather work with people whose first response is, “We’re going to need to compromise here,” or would you rather work with people that say, “Let me think about that for a bit, I think we can turn that into something even better.” Architecture is about people, people that want something better. The team you put together will greatly affect the outcome. The best people make the best project. The most creative, free-thinking people do not necessarily cost more and the project they help you create will have a much greater design value than small minded, unimaginative ones. The most important decision you make relative to your architectural project will be who you work with.
Architecture is also a process, a continuously evolving entity. Like the raising of a child, a project will develop its own personality, and at some point in its growth, you will begin to make decisions based on what’s right for the project. Just like your child, the project is an extension of yourself, but it must also stand on its own. To help that happen, each project is aided by having a unique set of architectural rules or guidelines as well as a “big idea” above and beyond the basic program, just as parents have social and cultural rules lovingly and caringly put in place for their children that go beyond the basics of hygiene and safety. These rules add clarity to the project by providing a basis for decision making that is within the language of the project. These rules help to avoid chaos and arbitrary decisions (or enhance them if that’s part of the program). The project will have coherence – part of the process and product of synthesis. It will look, feel and function as a comfortable whole. Incoherent projects are not fun and decisions are made strictly on a case by case basis with little if any relationship other decisions or the project in general. It is hard to remember why certain things were done with that method. An example of a project rule would be, “dimensions will have a relationship to stock material lengths and sizes.” This helps plan and size elements while minimizing waste. The rule is not followed dogmatically, it is there to order the decision making process. If relayed to the builder they will have fewer questions because they will know why certain decisions were made in a project wide sense.
The architectural process should be enjoyable and positive with a minimum of busyness and pretension. You should know yourself much better when the design is finished. I keep the busyness (business) aspect to just the amount needed to have all the parties feel comfortable, this in turn allows for more time to be spent on the project proper. We use a General Agreement as opposed to a contract. It says in essence, “We’re doing a project and we’ll get paid for the work we do. If the client or the architect, for whatever reason, doesn’t want to continue the project, we will stop.” Pretty simple and to the point. Architecture is all about meeting people’s needs - the clients, builder, city, bank etc.
