Painting by Maria Lorena Lehman: © All rights reserved.

“My paintings inform, as they take form.” 
— Maria Lorena Lehman 

By using the process of art creation, I am able to see more deeply into environmental design. Art is my way of bridging between disciplines, and it is also its own discipline that brings forth a wonderful lens by which to explore architecture and its most critical principles and philosophies.

IMMERSIONS INTO PAINTED SPATIAL CONSTRUCTS

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Painting by Maria Lorena Lehman: © All rights reserved.

“When paint strokes delineate architectural detail, a new design fluidity emerges.” — Maria Lorena Lehman 

What if the creative action of drawing and painting could help one see into architectural design more deeply? This type of artistic challenge goes beyond striving to represent an architecture in a hyperreal style. Instead, this way of seeing architecture involves different levels of artistic...

The Levels of Deepening Perceptions of Nature

Unlocking the beneficial effects of nature can happen at different levels that go deeper and deeper with different types of nature experiences. As designers of the built environment, it is important to consider how architecture and urban constructs work to harmonize and synergistically connect with nature. I believe that architecture can bring people to experience and understand nature at much deeper levels – even those aspects of nature one...

Discovering the World Anew

As a designer, where do you find inspiration? Furthermore, how do you find new ways by which to push architectural design innovation? For my futurological design projects, I am greatly driven by using what I call “interdisciplinary bridges” to unlock new ways of understanding our surrounding world.

Architectural design is constantly asking its creators to design for perception in new and unique ways that uplift quality of life for the better. And for...

Looking Behind the Design Process

As an architectural designer, it is important to not take your design tools for granted – particularly when striving to innovate what architecture can to do in better ways. The micro-lecture video above shows a behind-the-scenes look into the making of a speculative new design tool I created. And while this design tool does not exist today, it very intriguing and mind-expanding to think about how such a realtime architectural design quality scanning...

Abstraction Before (Hyper)Realism

A seemingly counter-intuitive way to sharpen one’s design vision is to begin with architectural abstraction. I did this with two images as shown in the video micro-lecture above. On the left, is a painting I created of a seaside city built-context. And on the right is a ‘napkin sketch’ I created of the same seaside cityscape. While both images are abstractions of a coastal environment, the methods used to create each help me see into my...

Touching the Soul with Design

An architectural environment can be designed to help people meet their needs and goals. This type of architecture works by helping a person to actualize their potential at very high levels – whether focused on increasing their creativity within an office building, healing from an illness within a hospital, or by following their curiosity to learn within a school. But what about creating an architecture that helps one to unlock a sense of fulfillment and...

A Light that Peeks

Have you ever been walking through a dimly lit hallway while seeing a light at the end peeking from around the corner of one of its side walls? It is likely that this light evoked your curiosity, guiding you toward it to see where it was coming from and where it might lead. This type of light that seems to “peek” at you is really a guiding light that invites you along an architectural journey. This is what I call a narrative of light – when light is...

The link between art and design is blurring in my current architectural explorations. As you can see in the set of images above, I am engaging as artist to see more deeply into the environment as a designer. On the left, you can see a drawing I created while studying the root system of a tree. And on the right, you can see how I translate this root system into a speculative architectural design façade that seems as if to grow organically – as architectural form.

It is through...

DESIGN FOR ACTUALIZATION

What does it take to design environments beyond wellness? And how does one know when a design beyond wellness is reached? For this, it is important to look beyond the environmental design discipline – to reach into realms of poetics and human potential that shed light on what it means to design for thrivability.

Yes, environmental design has a responsibility to be aesthetic, functional, and even meaningful. Yet, it must not stop there. It is important to ask:...