The other night I attended an event sponsored by the AIA (American Institute of Architects) and the Star Tribune, held at International Market Square. I’m so into this house stuff and design in general that I was pretty excited about going. The featured speaker (Architect and Author Duo Dickenson) was talking about getting the right house for your budget, something I’m all about. The only hesitation I had was that feeling that I was going to be crashing some private industry party and stand out like a sore thumb.

Off course because of traffic I was a little late and had to walk in about 5 minutes into the first speakers presentation. I don’t care who you are, no one ever looks cool doing this. Especially when the entrants is at the front of the room and the sudden change in light makes you blind for about 30 seconds. However it turns out there is no secret hand shake and my only regret was that I missed the first 5 minutes of that presentation which was pretty interesting. As well only about 20% of the people in attendance were actually Architects (they did a show of hands). I think that’s a good sign if you are one, when at your own events you’re out numbered 4 to 1 by clients.

Anyhow the featured speaker Duo Dickenson was pretty cool. He gave a great deal of insight on architects, builders and clients (us). He put out a challenge to architects to take their clients wants and needs and use that as the measuring stick of the projects success. He also talked about a growing trend in America where the average lot size has decreased over the past 20 years yet the size of the homes as grown larger and larger, Creating the era of the super-sized home. Duo’s concept is called “Right-sizing the house” and is done by matching the needs of the occupants with the size of their budget. The trick to doing this is in the design. good design can help make rooms more functional, spaces more fluid and even create the feeling of being larger just by simple things like the proper placement of windows.

I know from first hand experience on our project that a good Architect will gather all the details from you before he even starts thinking about how things will look. I think its also important as a client to have a good understanding of how you live and what you want out of the project before you even select the architect in the first place. We had a lot of conversations as a couple about it. Plus we were constantly pulling out samples of things we liked to share with each other. You quickly start to learn what you like and dislike and this makes selecting the right architect fairly easy.
In our case we were very lucky that Corey, our General Contractor listened to what we were talking about and put us in contact with Micheal our Architect. There are at least a half dozen places where Michael has made design suggestions that have and will save us money now and down the road. Some are small like sizing for standard materials while others are more extensive like doing a study of the lot to save on energy costs by designing and positioning the buildings so we benefit from passive solar. I think I’ll make my next post talk a little about that. It’s totally fascinating to see how much thought goes into it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 24th, 2007 at 11:24 am and is filed under Architecture, Design, Main. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.