Our job as small firm architects is not only to design great buildings or to prepare construction documents, which become the legal contract between owner and contractor. Our responsibility is far greater than what’s listed in our agreement between owner and architect.
Our clients have big dreams, little idea of how to achieve their goals and often carry unrealistic expectations regarding schedule and budget. The job of a small firm architect, whether working with residential or small commercial clients, is to lead them through an experience. We are valued guides, showing our clients the way through the obstacles and overwhelm of major construction.
When a property owner begins their search for an architect, they assume competence and design skills. That’s simply the ticket to entry. They expect that their architect will design a beautiful building and provide the documents required by code and suitable for construction.
One of the reasons that Fivecat Studio has been so successful is that we don’t consider ourselves in the architecture business. We’ve built a reputation for distinctively detailed design and we’ve received our share of accolades, but that’s not what people remember after they work with us. When our clients talk about us to their friends, they speak about how we cared for them and how we lead them successfully through an intimidating and overwhelming process. It’s the experience that our clients remember and the reason they refer us to their friends.
Do you guide your clients from concept through construction in order to manage their expectations? Do you focus on the experience of the architectural process? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.
During the sixteenth century a famous Italian peerage, the Medici family, gathered in Florence the most considerable and impressive personal estate of the ancient world through work, commerce, banking and intense relationships throughout the world discovered until then.
A member of this family, Lorenzo, better known as Lorenzo the Magnificent, was the richest man of Europe. He set himself the challenge of renovating from the foundations the civilization of his time.
Lorenzo gathered in Florence the greatest intelligences, artists, poets, philosophers and architects, starting a magnificent season, renewing civilization from foundations.
The result of that season is named Renaissance.
Brunelleschi renewed the architectural language, going beyond German Gothic and Romanesque, building the most daring dome of that time. Leonardo renewed the scientific thought, Michelangelo moved like a typhoon and nothing in painting, sculpture and architecture was as before him.
Raffaello represented in his paintings parts of splendid cities, populated by a happy, beautiful and newborn mankind.
So we must not talk about Architecture, but of the men committing to Architecture their projects and purposes, a part of their future, their dreams. It may seem frivolous talking about dreams instead of design, drawing, projects, planning: in one word instead of Architecture, term containing and summarizing all previous concepts.
But exactly these men’s dreams make Architecture possible, as those dreams precede Architecture, they are its faint and confused prophecy, they incubate the progress and finally make possible its beginning.
Through architects the dreams of customers, kings and monarchs, popes and emperors, country and business leaders, merchants or average citizens become great buildings, monuments, mosques, churches, houses, cities and, by means of their achievement, the name of those dreamers becomes everlasting.
And the dreams of architects, charging on themselves all these aims and translating them into volumes, surfaces, spaces and emotions.
We look at cities and they narrate the stratifying of those dreams, becoming the constructed portrait of the civilizations they were dreamed by, that desired them, produced them and finally build them.
I do not want to talk about Architecture; I want to talk about that magic landscape preceding Architecture, the human heart, which is fragile and heroic, deep as the abyss of the sea, unfathomable like the vault of heaven.
Because this is the only way to really talk about Architecture.
Brilliant!
I have found a poet who has come down from his mountain in pursuit of a building so tall and beguiling that he might drop himself from it. In many ways he is a silly man, but he is entirely poet. Given the frugality of his life does he not then deserve in death to have a pleasing building from which to leap? It seems to me the tiniest sort of request, perhaps beneath him to ask.
I would like build this building for the poet but surely lack the gifts of design. The poet, as you might imagine, aches, and thus, persists. He will not be dissuaded, nor should he. So I will build him something, no matter how much its inferiority ails me. And likely I will lie to the poet and say, “Look, friend, it is a fine building. Climb ye now.”
Maybe, instead, I will go search for an architect to help me design a grand building for the poet?
You hit the nail on the head with this post. I feel our clients should enjoy the experience of the design process as much as they will enjoy the experience of the final design. If you want to take it one step further, the builder should feel just as comfortable working from your plans, so their experience is enjoyable also. I haven’t had to market my services yet since I started my business. All of my projects have come from client and builder referrals and I am extremely grateful for that.
Most definitely, the human relationships one builds while going through the architecture process, are the most valuable! I usually meet great people and stay friends with them after the project is over. It is a scary process for most people so our role as educators is very important. We want to assuage any fears and make the process as painless for them as possible.
dear mark
i’ll tell you a story
a friendship’s story
according to your point of view
the result of this story is a building, RESIDENZA ISABELLA, in latina, seventy km at south of Rome, in Italy
i hope you’ll appreciate
because architecture is not a technical application
willing or refusing we got a mission from the History
to draw a portrait of the times we live
friendly
omero
FRIENDSHIP STORY.
“I would like to renew the villa of my family, and build an addiction to it”.
That’s what the guy told to his old friend, the architect.
“I won’t draw this for you. Your father would prefer to see you not as a caretaker of his memory but involved in a building that marks the skills of his son, a building to renew the fame of your family’s name throughout the city.
There was pain in the air, and tension, almost violence.
Some months later the guy asked to meet his friend.
“I came to hate you, I tried to avoid the challenge you talked about, but you’re right. Start drawing it”.
So they started to work together to outline a portrait at the future of the secret soul of the young city they lived in.
A city built less than a century ago in the middle of an ancient territory of wild waters and ancestral woods, a territory whose myth was freezing blood in the veins of early mankind’s sailors and inspired writings of ancient poets.
And their dream started to take shape, deciding to give to it a female soul, and thinking about the building as a Lady.
Slowly, drawing after drawing, the Lady took shape, her visible profile under the summer’s light, hiding her secret profile, to represent to the city her sunny beauty.
She impressed on her skin the memory of ancestral and remote landscapes, the hedge of far hills at the horizon opposed to the sea.
And the mornings of the sea, just a few miles from the site.
A block of rough local stone, scarred, cut nearly as if to pursue those hollow veins that emerge when you extract the blocks from the quarry.
And an aerial and transparent roofing, of blue crystal cut along triangular lines of fracture, those same secretly implied lines tracked with infinite patience by cutters of gemstones.
The response to the request for a sustainable city.
A building totally integrated with renewable energy technologies, powered by a photovoltaic roof shield that becomes an architectural element and not an addition to camouflage.
Rather an elegant hat, a naughty veil, such as the ladies use on society occasions, with its diagonal and seemingly charming cut.
“I fear, I fear drawings taking shape on this sheets of paper.
They seem frames stolen from a Blade Runner pupil, I fear them, Beloved Mother”
“Don’t fear them, little boy, don’t fear your dreams, your prophecies, follow them, pursue them. I embraced you inside my womb half a million of years ago, when you just started walking on your legs, do you remember, little boy?.
Don’t forget the profile of ancient hills, never hide it from your eyes. Never permit your hands to forget the gestures of mining and carving my hips that I offered to you whenever you needed to build your dreams.
Fly as an happy butterfly, draw your aerial and transparent crystal’s dreams on scarred stone.
I’ll sustain your wings.”