DESIGN PRINCIPLES
There are two magic tricks an architect and their architecture must perform. The first is the ubiquitous ‘disappearing’ act. We must make vanish the myriad of regulations, codes, standards, and bureaucracy of building. We must also render invisible the systems, products and specifications necessary to structure the final vision. This requires experience, insight and skill to free a project from from the visible tethers of constraint, allowing it to soar.
The second trick is to conjure awe. Architecture can wrest emotion and render descriptions lost in spatial wonder. Evoking more than mere construction, the act of design and its resulting architecture takes mastery of four principle elements: Light, Skin, Void, and Time. These four are the elemental corners used to manifest inspiration.
© 2025
With its counterpoint, shadow, light provides warmth, color, dimension, and cathexis. Even in the most minimal amounts of light, we understand our space and our places through the balance of light and shadows. Architecture can turn to the light, open itself to it, or create shade and dark sanctuaries when it wishes. With these intentions and choices, design can direct and define our experiences. Fortunately, light is rigorous and predictable, making it a powerful tool to wield. I begin all my designs with a study of the light present in the site.
What are we made of? Our mettle is manifest in surfaces, the skin of things. Throughout architecture, we are confronted with surfaces and what sensations or impressions each relates to us. Comfort or contrast. Firm or fluid. The permeability of the palette we assemble defines the experience. Deployed with great care and discerning, materials are design’s allies. I see materials and their skins as characters in an ensemble. How they are scripted produces the music and lyrics … what we call the details.
Architecture is not sculpture. It is instead lived-in and experienced spatially and practically. We use it as we also enjoy it. An equally important structural aspect of our architecture is the space we choose to define and leave unoccupied. These voids are the venues of our lives. We past through them, pause in them, reside and work in them, and ultimately we recall them and return to them. The absence of design is as important a counterpoint as shadow is to light. I often plan from the void, looking particularly at North African and Asian prototypes.
Flat circle, saddle-shaped, voltairian mechanism, or just inescapably lineal? … take all the time you need. Architecture is simultaneously at odds with the question of time while it is dependent upon it. Past and future is linked at the point of design. The roots of design run deeply through the ages, but its blossoms are freed to be new and distinct. The architect must wield a relationship between these two timeframes. In design, the consequence of permanence is also the promise made to the past. In my design, I seek to use familiar words to speak new sentences.