How this award-winning Architect designs homes

but i have a friend who watched one of my recent videos he's like you know architecture might as well be like the dark arts he's like i have no idea how it comes into being rather than just the end product the glossy photos um it's so much more interesting to me to to learn about how you arrived at that final product growing up you know i think that is like where my love of maybe design began and it started probably with drawing i remember walking to main street in zanesville to the public library finding a book and the book was called you know tree houses that you can build the drawings in the book are amazing and it just captured captured my attention when i see your sketches that they make me want to be a better architect they make me want to draw they they draw me in in a way probably not dissimilar to the way that the sort of treehouse book drew you in but i see that and i'm like yeah that's why i did this because i want to be able to draw like that and i look at my sketches and i say my sketches don't measure up to this for people who look at your sketches in the same way that i do and and find them inspiring is it literally just finding inspiration somewhere and trying to copy or do you do what are resources that people can use if they're interested in kind of replicating your style like how would someone do that you know what i i tell our staff members and i tell my daughter and you know architecture students i've run into is just don't stop drawing i i feel like you will draw as well as you drew when you stopped drawing so you could be 50 if you stopped drawing when you were eight you'd still draw like an eight-year-old so you know just keep drawing just don't stop and as much as it it's like daunting to look at the blank piece of paper be loose about it sure and you know use a fat marker and have fun if you want to do good design and and you can be fasted at the same time you don't have to like explain it to anybody you know i worked at a 50 person firm out of school and it was not as design driven as we are now so if you wanted to do design you had to be quick otherwise you had people saying hey you're spending too much time there i worked for 150 person firm right out of school and i had the very same experience i started modeling the stuff in 3d and then hand sketching over it because it's the hand sketches that sold it to all the partners and then once you do that then you then you get in a little designer box and they bring you into the office with all the other partners and you get to sketch with them instead of doing the bathroom details upstairs i'm i'm a big fan of sketchup there are times where i can be drawn into putting too much detail on sketchup but i want to do enough detail or enough modeling that i can then take the pen and trace yeah and you know explore uh from that messaging model but what's great about sketchup is you don't have to construct the perspective it's there the proportions you know you can play with proportions with your pen but you can you know at least get it close yeah you know in a model you can move around it i do similar things in fact i'll even model like material sizes so if i'm checking out board sizes or some certain kind of detail i'll just copy that across the face of something and it ends up being a quick way to test ideas then of course you're you're sketching over the top of it right using it as a base layer it is a good hack and you can be fast now i do think there are this was you know early 2000s when i got into sketchup so i think you know nowadays there are programs that have caught up with it and you know are you know probably just as good but for me i i know it so well it works for me and it's also the kind of thing that i find is super intuitive for people to use and interact with so like sketchup models you can easily send to clients for them to spin around and you know interact with and you can sort of have a viewer on your ipad and i just always found that the learning curve for that i mean it's free number one right fast free and easy to manipulate intuitive i mean this is just so much more accessible so yeah i think it's still pretty relevant actually what's nice about it i find is and we use archicad for our construction documents we're a mac based office okay purely a mac-based office and you know we archicad is a monster and it's super expensive yeah um but if if you want to do a conceptual design you know and start with a blank piece of paper an archicad it's tough because in comparison to sketchup you know in archicad if i want to make a window opening you know it starts asking archicad starts asking me a bunch of questions about the window you know that i don't want to answer how thick is the glass what's the jam thickness you know what's your sash size i don't want to go there yet um and sketchup affords you that opportunity to just cut an opening just um be better and move that wall yeah so that's why i fell in love with it what's a typical workflow for you guys someone comes to the office and they're interested in hiring you walk us through what that process is like i mean do they have do you guys have an interview process and i realize during covid it's probably a little different but you know do you have a waiting list like how does it how does that work you know it starts out with a video conferencing tool called go to meeting we're getting to know our clients as best we can you know with that tool um our clients and their their site our first you know step is okay let's walk the property with you usually our clients are absolutely in love with their property and and that's actually a cue for us like it's a part of what can make a good good client is an appreciation for what they have we try to ask a ton of questions and then and really that's probably what we're doing more often than anything else is teasing out right yeah like being open so don't don't show up there on site with a solution all right i know what we're doing here you know i you know what's funny though i sometimes i feel like people have that expectation that as an architect you have this special set of eyes that when you arrive in a place you immediately know what the right solution is and so for me it's oftentimes it's about educating the client beforehand about that process that it is this kind of incremental iterative process that we learn a little bit you know every time we meet together i learn more about the client i also learn more about the site by spending time out there or you know we have to sort of pick and choose the the sort of overlay of restrictions that are going to guide the design process right because you're you're talking about the site right but the site has all these this huge set of restrictions then of course you have your your clients tastes and then you have budgets and you have like laws and regulations and what you can and can't do and yeah so it's it's interesting um to hear you guys kind of you guys really zone in on the site as your sort of first play in the design process is that right you're sort of gathering a bunch of lines and it sounds simplified the first few marks that you make on paper you're going to start making some lines and you start out with thousands of lines and they're all are informed by what you learned about the person that you're working for and their site and so you know some of those lines might be you know the solar orientation you know the wind patterns you know some of those lines might be regulatory and what you've learned from the survey some of those lines might be bearing points on a particular island view or lots of different lines just add up to this massive puzzle yeah and and what your goal of an architect to do is gather all those lines together and you know start making those marks on the blank piece of paper and then you're slowly pulling out the ones you don't need anymore until eventually there's a design revealed sometimes it's the it's the lines that you don't draw the information you don't put in there that the client then interprets in a certain way that's the thing that that moves the design process forward and i i see so much of that in your sketches but i also think this is guy who walks on site and like that's in his head like i think that and and i know and i know better as an architect i really want to get into that okay we've we've started gathering all this information and then at a certain point you have to you have to start making the marks on the paper like i really want to know what that process looks like right can we use englishman bay retreat as an example how did it come to be what what did what preconceptions did they come to you with if any and how did that process go our client at englishman bay i designed a home for his cousin and it was you know two miles north of the site and so he just out of the blue called us one day and he was describing something um that you know for me uh personally was exciting and it was because i think because he was talking about it like the images that were going through my head were like swiss family robinson treehouse you know based on our tree house discussion earlier you can tell i was like i was all in yeah tell me more yeah i came to learn this later but he had lost a a daughter in life um which had to be a tremendous blow to him well he had two other you know two daughters still in his life and you know obviously his wife as well and this place and spending time with them here in maine on the coast with their family was super special and you know he didn't say that in the first conversation what he talked about was all these cool things he wanted to do with his daughters you know and you know one of the things he mentioned was sitting under the stars and looking up at the sky with a telescope you know and he described you know opening opening a hatch on a sailboat and climbing up to the top deck and you know being under the stars and a sleeping bag intent come on what client says this in the first phone call of course i want this project when do we start yeah yeah when do we start exactly so you know the site itself um has been in his family for a long time and he sort of grew up running around in these woods the entire understory in the in the woods there is covered with sphagnum moss and so you're walking around on kind of the spongy you know i'm sure you've you've seen it before it's everywhere yeah yeah um it is everywhere there and you know he described really loving that his parents own uh cabin in the next property over and that that's where he had you know as a kid sort of spent time they would traverse across the property that the retreat is on now to a pebble beach and over time they had basically worn a path across this property as i'm thinking about marks the first marks that you're making on a page like that pathway becomes one of those marks right and you don't know what that's going to lead to you don't know what that means here's an edge yeah you know how do you think of a puzzle i got to find the edges of the puzzle totally yeah yeah um and so that was one edge i found there's also a very tall rocky outcrop just as high as the first floor level is you know in the house right now which the house sits up on steel columns i mean that's a very conscious decision right in itself i'd be interested to hear how that yeah how that happened part of it was that rocky outcrop you know influenced that because that rocky outcrop when you're standing next to it you feel kind of in a bit of a depression for where the house wants to want it to go sure and so your ability to sort of experience the coastline and the water were you know affected by that and i would say also it was influenced by our client in that first conversation we had about a tree house yeah essentially it feels like a bit of a tree house yeah so you're out on site assimilating all this information that's coming in from the client and you are you have some understanding of what the program is i'm assuming at this point right what spaces are you actually going to be designing the rough square footage what does that first kind of conceptual like are you doing three concepts are you doing just just sketching are you sketching out there are you like how does that what what are the nuts and bolts of that process what does that look like is it three schemes is it tell me about that it was you know two schemes you know the other scheme i essentially separated the living space completely separated the living space from the bedroom space and they were sort of two bars if you will you know connected by a bridge this the resulting scheme that they sort of fell in love with was more of you know still the living and the bedroom wings were absolutely separated but it has more of a sort of courtyard like feel to it yeah um and it wraps in a use u-shape which the way i described it to him is that the u-shape was a continuation if you will of the trail along the water that they had worn into the woods and i wanted to bring that path or trail into the house so that uh you know as you sort of traverse the circulation of that hue you are inwardly looking at the rest of the house and the activity that's going on in there and at the same time the trees branches are brushing against the windows and you're sort of traversing that you know coming up with that story and that narrative is just as important as the marks you make on paper so one of the things that i love most about residential architecture is there you know rather than the 150 or 50 person firm experience that we had there where it's all about slam slam slam get it right this you have some room to think and you know conceptualize and actually put together a story that someone can really buy into and it sounds like your client came to you with sort of uh maybe a kernel of an idea and it was you who started sort of writing the plot and infilling the details and really coloring the characters in it the narrative quality of architecture is what separates it from being just you know anyone can design a house i mean we've all lived in homes we all know what they feel like and we probably would design one very similar to what our childhood experience was because that's home that feels comfortable but you know the job of the architect is to really as you say synthesize all of this disparate information and and hang it around a story you know what makes this place so unique and so cool and that that i think is a particular gift of yours to to be able to look at tho all that information but then build that story that resonates with that client so is the presentation then all hand sketches is it like do you like before you know as i'm looking at some of those sketches that project you have like a site analysis that you're doing like is that literally the starting point and then you start developing the floor plans from there and elevations or how does it actually come into being well just as much as you have to tell a story and and come up with a narrative for the design you don't want to be so far ahead of your client that they aren't a part of the process that's that's what i think uh drawing has the ability to do better than a computer can when you are sketching and drawing it allows the viewer to fill in the pieces that aren't photorealistic with you know their interpretation of what they're seeing and you know they become a part of iterative process that you're sort of undertaking much more so than if you show up and say hey here's your house it's done we don't show them everything at the beginning we got to start with you know hey here's here's your site here's all of the lines that we've sort of gathered from the survey from our site visit uh from google earth when we were on site we noticed there's this beautiful moss covered boulder that you know is special and here it is you know on our drawing sort of identifying all these things because what you want to do is you want them to kind of be there looking over this with you and saying oh yeah that's special that's important because if you're able to do that then moving forward they're they're in the they're in the boat with you totally you know you don't you don't want them in the other boat you know sort of not understanding what what's happening you want them to be a part of what's happening but the other scheme that you had i presume you you presented both schemes yeah yeah so what's what's why they get in one boat and not the other what's the was it all story or was it the visuals i mean what's your what do you think pushed them i i always i always feel like you almost have to have uh two or three schemes to sort of show your client that you have proved this out and you may have one that you want to sort of guide them to yeah but you can't get there if you only show them one i think it would be almost impossible because they will always be wondering well was there another solution that we should have looked at or not yeah so you've got to show them at least two or three schemes and the way i look at it is you you want to sort of show them what they're expecting to see or you perceive they're expecting but also show them something that um they weren't expecting it's that one was two schemes and they pretty quickly like they just gravitated toward the the one that you ended up with or was there was there a back and forth because sometimes i show them things and they're like well i definitely don't like that and that helps to kind of point you in the right direction too what happened was on that particular site okay the rocky outcrop sits in the sort of middle of two completely different views okay one one is wide open ocean where it is expansive uh windy noisy waves crashing that rocky outcrop divided in that wide open somewhat scary southeast view from the calm cove much more intimate more wooded side of you know the other side of the rocky outcrop and it was just a sort of natural fit when i described it to the client at the first presentation you know the the scheme that we ended up with fit that divide much better than the previous one sure yeah yeah and you know being able to say that's where the bedrooms belong the quiet side and this is where the living space belongs big view side noisy side that sold it you know i think for them i'm looking at this sort of um presentation and i don't know if this is your presentation board but it has a site plan with the sort of maybe some of these marks that you're talking about it's got prevailing winds it's got the solar aspect it's got views and things like that and then you have sort of three perspective views of the house is that something you presented to like was that the presentation uh yeah i think it was um i think you know what what ended up happening in this particular presentation is i actually flew out to boulder colorado where they live because at that time we were working at such a distance from them and they could not travel to maine for the presentation i felt like i needed to show up with as much as possible in order to sort of somewhat be efficient normally we probably would not show the perspective in the first presentation because if you start start showing their perspectives um sometimes they're not totally on board and not ready for that so you want them to buy into the the site diagram and the plan first so it's a site diagram really because i mean that's where i start too i mean i would start with a site plan just knowing conceptually like you said okay this is where the living spaces are sleeping spaces are here this is generally how you're gonna arrive to the site but then i mean there there has to be a massing component to it too right you have to be thinking about this thing in three dimensions i mean naturally as you're sketching i imagine this idea evolved the idea of a treehouse obviously is it's up lifted above the ground can you talk about like how does the three-dimensional component like where does that start for you and i would be blown away if i was a client and i saw these conceptual drawings because they are they are i see them as conceptual not everything's figured out and but also as an architect i think wow i mean that's a lot to invest in like one of say maybe three schemes um so talk about that process and how it evolves like do you see this as you're sketching you're like oh yeah this is definitely lifted up and this is a tower piece over here or how does that come to be you know people outside the architectural world think that you start in one one end of the sort of blank piece of paper and end up in the other corner and you're done you know and it just doesn't happen that way it's it's a collection of lines and i i think the same thing applies to the 3d aspect of this you know while i'm sort of diagramming on the site and and i want to sort of emphasize this because i i've learned this drawing at sort of 1 to 20 scale for me is important because i'm able to sort of you know look at the big picture i think it's easy for a young architect and i did this when i was younger it's easy to you know jump into the detail and start drawing that quarter inch scale well what happens is you forget about sort of all those lines that are coming in from further away and so i've i've forced myself to come up with a floor plan at 1-20 scale it's tiny yeah right but what what happens is you know i'm thinking 30 000 foot view and remembering okay that's the big open ocean view that's the quiet cove side my approach is from you know this side of the house what does that mean um you know to the internal spaces you know i learned this from a guy by the name of jim leggett i showed up at a aia convention in chicago one year and he was given a presentation he talked about draw as small as you possibly can he would draw these you know very small perspectives and sketches and then he would take him over to a copier blow them up you know and then you know and it would just develop over time and get more and more detailed with a larger scale i love it i always found it really intimidating to start a project at a larger scale because i felt like the plans felt open and undeveloped in a way because there's like you said there's like so much you don't know about the building so just starting at that small scale is a great hack for really they're conden these condensed pieces and it forces you to think in in just a larger scale like approach and i presume you were thinking about these masses and volumes as being like okay well this is lifted in the air and this is a tower and i mean do those elements all start as kind of geometry like square geometries like orthogonal pieces or are they are you do you say well that's a view so i want this to be a shed roof or how does that work speaking specifically to the the englishman bay retreat um you know those two sides that i mentioned earlier of that rocky outcrap turned into two wings of the house and i always sort of try to think in terms of you know less complex when it comes to 3d the less complex the better especially here in maine i feel like in order to sort of shed snow and rain as simply as possible so those two wings in my mind at the time i knew i you know wanted to shed water you know in a certain direction the plan has to work first and it's a part of training my mind to not sort of like try to figure it all out all at the same time yeah which you know would lead to you know the inability to put a mark down right yeah it's paralyzing right yeah exactly yeah so uh or get writer's cramp whatever it might be you know you just can't do it yeah so those two wings i knew you know where those were headed and then i also knew you know in in speaking with a client and you know working this through with him and him wanting this amazing sort of rooftop deck that he could spend time under the stars with his daughters yeah you know that was another sort of guiding principle and it turned into the tower you know when you were up there and the evening is it feels like the edge of the earth it's just an amazing spot so i knew i had this sort of vertical element and i i knew i had these two wings and in plan i i knew i wanted to keep it simple i mean just budget ever when does budget come up i mean we all know it's a big part of this thing right um but it's something that i think a lot of architects don't really talk about is that a first phone call kind of thing for you it has to be a part of the conversation it has to be otherwise i feel like you're setting yourself up for failure we don't want to be inefficient in our process and you know draw all the way to the end and realize oh this isn't going to work this is way out of my budget so we have the conversation from the beginning and we will be very candid with them you know based on what we're working on and we've got 10 to 12 projects going on at a time and we're seeing these budgets come in we're able to say hey here's what we're seeing you know yeah um and you know let that inform our process okay and i would say also we have an incredible respect for the build community here in in maine yeah and there are some incredible builders and you know we tell our clients we want that person that's going to be building your home on this team as soon as possible i want our contractor to have some ownership you know to just be handed a set of instructions and say okay build this right you know without ever having input on it i i wouldn't be able to do that as a builder i'd much rather you know hey you guys thought about this what about that and let them be a a team member as i look behind you i see a wall full of books and like you know my instinct is to go grab some of those because i see a bunch that i don't have what do you have favorite books or resources i mean you you must be someone who references these books all the time the um what what are some favorite resources that you have they're maybe not beautiful picture books which i love those as well i love picking up the you know tom cundig and um looking through you know beautiful architecture and drawings i love that but there are other books that i also appreciate just reading sort of the methodology behind coming to the narrative yeah um so there's a book uh called the good house contrast as a design tool and it's like it's a read it's about using contrast you know in out up down dark light and how that applies to architecture being able to develop a narrative off of those principles and those methodologies can make it feel so much less abstract to a client finding the the edge between light and dark if you think about you know everybody wants to sit in the window at the restaurant right because it's at the edge of dark and light and it's a beautiful spot the book is about that and you know all of those contrasts that can you know inform your design i love it um it's interesting because when i hear you talk about walking this site you know and and talking through these ideas with your clients and hearing you talk about this idea of contrast just reminds me that i think one of the things that architects bring to the design process whether that's a house or a commercial building or a school is this ability to see things which you may sense and feel but aren't immediately obvious because when you were talking about that site i think about you know not only the light contrast of light and dark but also this idea about sound and you know changing of seasons and what it smells like and how it feels underfoot like all of those senses bringing those to bear on the story of design is um it's so relatable to the client and like you say you know that's the thing that invests them in the design process and makes it a richer project and i you know i just want to commend you for your work i really admire your design work and i admire your ability to talk about your process in a real down-to-earth way i think that is what makes you successful in in realizing these really beautiful projects and thanks for taking all this time this is so much time you've given me and for as someone who is also a principal and a firm i know how valuable that is so really appreciate it hey i love this it's fine i'll talk to you soon okay bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: 30X40 Design Workshop

Views: 326,538

Rating: 4.9719739 out of 5

Keywords: architect, architecture, architecture tutorial, architecture school, architecture students, 30x40, 30x40 design workshop, dream home, home inspiration

Id: wK3ZFXLbXlc

Length: 29min 26sec (1766 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020