When we began our firm over a year ago, we spent time thinking about how we want to represent ourselves. The development of a clear identity was important for both expressing our uniqueness and solidifying the concept of our company. Likewise, the process of designing for a client is an opportunity to assist in clarifying their own sense of who they are and shape how they are perceived. We have found that many of our clients are looking to us to find this collaboration. As architects, we enjoy the challenge, and two very different projects show how such exploration can drive a design process.
While working for a university client, we were commissioned to renovate a floor of a historic building, designed by a prominent architect. The client asked for an approach that would express the character of the building itself and which could be repeated as more floors were renovated. While focusing on the program for the occupants’ space and community needs was important, our design looked to capture the spirit of the original architecture and to reinforce the role of the building in the campus experience. Researching the architect’s design career, we found elements from his complete body of work, as well as from within the building itself which could be reinterpreted to create an identity that links the history of the building to an exciting new future chapter. Part of the enjoyment of the design process stemmed from learning with the client, as researching the architect’s work led to a fuller understanding of the importance of the building within a broader context.
On a different scale, we recently began work for a newly emerging commercial client, who was looking for a design which strongly reinforced their vision. Their clarity of identity allowed us to assist in strengthening their brand through architecture. As the first impression of a place, the lobby and connected public spaces needed to embody the idea of the company in a dynamic fashion, allowing the balance of the space to be designed for more functional internal needs. Working with this highly collaborative client, we pursued several avenues, all of which expressed different aspects of their brand. This exploration allowed the team to decide what was most important about the company, and was an excellent platform for the investigation of ideas, making for an enjoyable and interactive design process. Though on a tight schedule, spending time on the expression of the most prominent spaces was critical in subsequent design decisions, as their development informed the rest of the project.
It is interesting to us to find the connection between the iterative process with our clients and our own recent process of focusing our firm’s identity. Before even taking on clients, we sat down and went through not only options for our firm’s name, but how that would be expressed in print and on the web. Working with a graphic designer, we looked closely at how the focus of our work related to the visual expression of the company. Multiple options and concepts were created as we pursued ways of identifying who we intended to be. Paring those ideas down into one single expression was a way to solidify how we wanted to work as architects and how we would approach collaborations with future clients. We took away important lessons from that process, reinforcing the connection that architecture can make between self-expression and space. Through our recent work we have found that by looking with our clients at how they want to shape their spaces, we engage them in thinking about what is important within their company or campus. By working through different ideas and paring the design to a clear idea, we find architecture can shape not only space, but how we understand ourselves and where we are and want to be.
This piece was contributed by Stephanie Goldberg, AIA, LEED AP is a principal at Life.Science.Architecture, Inc