How We See

The scale changes. The problem does not.

Architecture begins with people trying to make a place.

A house, a retail building, an industrial facility or an entire district may be different in size and purpose, but the fundamental questions remain remarkably similar. There is land. Weather. Water. Movement. Structure. Material. Cost. Regulation. Construction. And ultimately the people who will occupy what is built.

An architect learns to see those things together.

A line moves and the structure changes.
The structure changes and the room changes.
The room changes and the elevation changes.
The elevation changes and the material changes.
The material changes and the cost changes.

Nothing in a building happens by itself.

The Work Behind the Work

The Duris Residence overlooking the South Shore of Stagecoach Lake in North-Western Colorado is the only house presented on this site for a reason.

At the scale of a house, nearly the entire act of architecture can be seen. The land, the first decisions, drawings, dimensions, structure, materials, interiors and construction remain close enough together that the relationship between them can be followed almost completely.

It allows us to show what normally disappears.

Before there is a building, there is a place.

The land has already established conditions.

Slope, trees, road, views, drainage, snow, sunlight, access and orientation begin shaping the project before the first wall is drawn.

The architect does not impose a building on an empty sheet of paper. The work begins by understanding what is already there.

Drawings are small. Their consequences are not.

A line drawn across a screen may become excavation, concrete, structure, drainage, material, labor and cost.

Move the line and other things move with it.

Architecture is the continuous act of understanding those consequences before they become expensive physical facts.

A plan is not a diagram of rooms.

It is movement.

Arrival. Distance. Light. View. Compression. Expansion. What is visible through one space into another. Where somebody pauses. Where people gather. Where privacy begins.

Those experiences are already being considered while the building exists only as lines.

Structure is space.

The structure is not something added after the architecture has been designed.

Span, load, geometry, support, material and enclosure determine what spaces are possible. The technical problem and the architectural problem are the same problem.

At some point the lines stop being representation.

They become wood, concrete, steel, glass and space.

The building gets more detailed. The idea should not disappear.

Dimensions. Cabinets. Flooring. Hardware. Lighting. Tile. Equipment. Openings. Materials.

Thousands of individual decisions enter the work as the project develops.

The task is not merely to make each one correct. It is to prevent thousands of decisions from becoming thousands of unrelated decisions.

What the Client Is Buying

What a client buys is not a set of drawings.

The drawings are the record of thousands of decisions about land, structure, movement, weather, materials, construction, cost and the life that will eventually occupy the building.

Much of that work disappears when architecture is successful.

The finished building can look simple. It can look obvious. It can even look inevitable.

It was none of those things.

We show the work because clients should understand what is being resolved on their behalf, the depth of professional care involved, and why those decisions matter long after the drawings leave the office.

Architecture hides its own difficulty.

This page shows what normally disappears.

Commercial Architecture and Urban Planning

The same problem, at a larger scale.

A roof creates runoff. Runoff becomes a site problem. Enough sites create an infrastructure problem. Infrastructure requires collective decisions, investment and agreements. Buildings become streets. Streets become neighborhoods. Neighborhoods become cities.

The scale changes.

The human problem remains.

Architecture has always existed within a larger conversation about land, economics, construction, community and how people choose to occupy the world together.

That conversation continues in our Research / Writings.