Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

As you design your architecture, notice not only the common vantage points, where your occupants look straight ahead as they travel through your building, but also vantage points like when they look upward. While occupants don’t often look upward while walking through your building — you may want to reward them for being just curious enough to look in other directions: upward, left, right, and downward. Remember your occupants aren’t looking straight ahead all of the time. Design key moments where it would make sense for your occupants to look — an invitation to explore your design, making it more than just a building they go through, but turning it instead to a building that “heightens” their experience.

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

As you’re designing, ask yourself about those key milestone moments within your design that will speak to your occupants as they journey through. After all, you are in a sense writing an architectural story, where you guide your occupants to look, hear, touch, smell, and so forth. Also, remember that with well-designed milestone moments within your design, you can change occupant speed, as occupants typically slow down to look upward, or speed up if they see something ahead that they want to explore more closely. Understand that you are guiding occupants with your design, through their perception. And knowing this can help you to design a more powerful architecture that speaks to them on more exciting and engaging levels.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

When you design your architecture, give attention to the way you engage neighboring buildings. Pay attention to the proximity between your building and theirs, and find ways to respond — whether by using contrast, juxtaposition, or paralleling. Also, give attention to the surrounding culture and context where your building will reside. Understand problem areas that neighboring buildings create for the community, for you may try to solve for those with your design. Also, note that the distance between your building and the next can speak volumes. Pay attention to what you do with this voided space — by determining how it will be used. In other words, don’t let the in-between spaces detract from your building design.

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

It is important to ask yourself: What are the unique contextual relationships that contribute to what my building needs to become? Also, ask yourself about where the neighboring building fell short in their design. Notice what worked and what didn’t work for them. But do note that you are not to copy their design solution. Rather, you are meant to be aware of it as you design your building, factoring it into your solution by choosing to purposefully create a design response, whether obvious or subtle. Either way, remember that that neighboring building may not be there forever, so make your building work by standing the test of time.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

When you design architecture, how do you think about scale? Is it something that you simply understand intuitively, where you design for it on the fly? Or do you try to make statements with your architecture about scale? …where you give some serious thought to the behaviors, emotions, and thinking that may go on for an occupant when you provide for spaces of different scales? In the image above, you can see how the scale is enlarged — as though to engulf the occupant experience within. So, I invite you to think about scale within your own work — are there places where you might want to exaggerate it? Or are there places where you would want the scale to be more intimate?

To Apply This Strategy, Ask Yourself:

Find ways to play with scale that make sense for your given project. Ask yourself about whether changing the overall scale of a space would impact occupants for the better. Often, scale can become about needing more physical space — but please do keep in mind that there are ways to play with scale that use the same amount of space. The key is to understand the different ways occupants might respond given the different ways that you present scale to them within your work. Within the image above, occupants may think of that space as lonely, inspirational, or inspiring awe. It all depends on context. So, be sure to give your use of scale another pass, to make sure that you’re creating the right kind of space within which your occupants can thrive.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

Within most buildings, transparency manifests through typical windows and skylights that occur throughout the building. Yes, they let in light — but are they really a “sculptural” part of the architecture? You might ask: How much do these fenestrations contribute to the interior space for occupant perception and functionality? You see, when transparency becomes part of the architectural form, a few things begin to happen. This mindset shift allows your masses and voids that make up your architecture to yield a unique architectural language — and the lighting atmosphere that results for your occupants within will be more sculpted, more dynamic, and thus, more exciting to experience.

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Remember that the position of your building upon its site is critical to achieve good natural lighting effects — especially when dealing with masses and voids that make up your building’s architectural language. Consider occupant views, different light intensities, and the use of color with transparency to give shape to your interior architectural spaces. Have you ever stopped to consider that light, filtered through your architecture, can exist as an architectural element that guides your occupant along their journey through your work? Don’t take lighting for granted, using it only to meet functional needs — you should also consider the power that is has as a poetic architectural element that can bring much inspiration, guidance, and beauty for your occupants through your architectural design.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

The transition that exists between your different architectural elements can really help to guide your occupant’s gaze (visual attention) as they scope out your work. You see, perception is really an act of exploring — and when you guide your occupants to explore within your work, you are in a sense inviting them to experience it more intimately along their journey. So, as you design your different architectural elements, and the way they “fit” together, be sure to also seriously consider their in-between design gestures. That is, you should allow your various connections to “talk” to their surrounding elements in a way that guides the eye to experience your space.

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Transition can be created by using techniques involving rhythm, variations in geometric forms, or play with masses and voids that guide your occupants to explore the space. Remember that you are creating a unique architectural “language” with your work, and the transitions which you embed within are your “words” that guide your occupants through.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

For your building, it may help for you to develop an architectural language that relates to your building’s scale, material, and location. And as part of this language are the all-important details. Use sensory design to make your details come alive, just as the Ronchamp image above uses its details to bring poetics through its form. Thus, you should use detail to do more than “fill in” a design void. Instead, use it make architecture more than the sum of its parts — by tapping into sensory design for poetics.

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It may help you to look to nature for inspiration on how it details its forms and functions. Notice the language of a leaf, a tree, or a flower. Find the beauty and function revealed within them. Then understand their purpose, just as the details within your own building design must have their purpose as well.

Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

When your occupants look upward, what do they feel? A sense of awe? Amazement? A yearning to continue on their journey through your building? Designing a ceiling is of critical importance — and not just because this is from where much of the lighting may come. A ceiling can be sculpted to reveal masses and voids which complement what goes on below. Wonderful domes often connect occupants to the heavens, and lower ceilings often create great spaces of intimacy. I urge you to think creatively about your ceiling designs as they are more than a “topping” — rather, they are expressions that help your architectural design sections to come alive.

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Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

The image above of The Palais Des Congres De Montreal shows how the selection of an architectural material (colored glass exterior panels) can have numerous effects that reach well into the realm of providing for a unique and positive occupant experience. As you select materials for your built space, think of more than simply how it will sit in its static position within the architecture. Think of its transient properties — created when light passes through, when occupants walk by, when the exterior temperature changes, or when the material can morph kinetically. These are just a few examples, but really the possibilities are almost endless. Then, be sure to factor the effects of the material’s behavior upon your future building occupants. After all, some materials like glass can have positive or negative effects, depending on how they are used. The main idea is to explore your materials thoroughly during your design process — to capture both their static and transient qualities for improved occupant experience.

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Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

Have you ever thought about a building skin being used to broadcast real-time information? Perhaps it doesn’t have to be a direct broadcast, but rather an interpretation of information — a sort of architectural information visualization. The image above is simply to get you thinking about the exterior of your building skin, as an element which can pull or push data. Such data can be conveyed to occupants within or to building visitors in the exterior, or even perhaps to a surrounding community that can see or hear this broadcast. If you could do this for your project, what type of information would you want to broadcast? What type of information would you want to translate through your design? And how would you hope that it impacts your occupants and surrounding culture?

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Featured Image Takeaway Design Strategy:

Be sure to think more holistically about what your building skin can accomplish. The building skin in the photo above helps to absorb traffic noise, and is also said to change perceptually as a visitor moves around the building. (1) So, what perceptual advantages does the design of your building skin give your occupants? While temperature control or amazing interior to exterior vistas are wonderful occupant benefits, how else can you use your building skin to shape your occupants’ experiences for the better?

Image Description Citation: (1) http://www.flickr.com/photos/7539060@N06/4819922319/

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