It Can Be Difficult To Control

When do buildings feel just right?

As your occupants live, work and play within your designed spaces, thermal comfort becomes an important quality that can make or break an environment quickly. Often, building designers strive to keep room temperatures comfortable throughout the building — but all too often, room temperatures fluctuate uncontrollably from room to room.

Perhaps you may have experienced working in an office that is too cold, only to discover...

Each nuance that a building emits comes together to become more than the sum of its parts. And often, that sum can be said to be an inherent character that a building exudes. But where does such character come from? And how do we know that a building has personality?

Even something as simple as the way a handrail feels as you glide your hand along it while going up the stairs can feed into what you perceive as an environment’s personality. Those details that feed the senses come...

As an architect, you are in the business of creating “scenes”. And a scene is defined in the dictionary as “a place where an action or event occurs”. But your goal isn’t necessarily to create only one scene, but instead is to create a sequence of scenes in time. You see, with a sequence of scenes, you can guide occupants toward what they are looking for, you can help them navigate as they get oriented, and you can help them remember their experiences within your...

Within architecture, there are many places where occupant choice surfaces. Every time an occupant makes a decision on where to go, what to focus on, or what to feel — they are interacting with your architecture, and making decisions based off of it. So, why is occupant choice so important?

Choice is everywhere. And for you as an architect, it is your job to distill those choices within your environments for your occupants. By making their choices clear, and meaningful, their experiences...

A recent study was done, mentioned in The Economist article entitled Pricing and the Brain: Hitting the Spot, where actual changes within the brain occur that substantiate this: If told something is more valuable, then a person actually enjoys it more. As the article explains, there may be something to this involving expectation. So how does this relate to architectural design?

Well, what if upon entering a building, someone told you that it was designed by a very famous and...

Buildings often rely upon wayfinding design to give their occupants a sense of building orientation, and to perhaps spark that mental map that tells them where they have been as well as pointing them in the direction of where they need to go. And while wayfinding signage and other directional elements found within buildings can be helpful, I do think that a good architectural design should not be dependent upon such signage. That is, the design should inherently convey to its occupants a...

As architects, we often try to design and think of buildings as vessels which engage with their occupants on many levels — including the emotional ones. And of course, those designs which connect with their occupants on emotional levels, are the designs that often have the most profound effect. Yet frequently, designers use their “instincts” to orchestrate novel and harmonious building design features that will serve to not only inspire, but also to connect with...

Who would have thought that a concrete block could be rendered invisible? Well, with the use of augmented reality technologies, just that has been achieved. By allowing sensing technologies which are capable of face-detection to act as an intermediary, the invisible concrete block system is able to tell exactly where an observer’s line of sight is, in relation to the concrete block. With that information, the system projects images of the surroundings that coincide with that...

Structure of Gravity | © Image Credit: Maria Lorena Lehman | MLL Design Lab, LLC

DESIGN INSIGHT

The above close-up section of a recent environmental drawing I created explores what I call the structure of gravity. This paradoxical term speaks to the bridging of architecture between the earth and sky – as built form rises upward as if to collaborate with the science of gravity through the structure of design expression. This piece invites one to consider the behavioral...

INTRODUCTION – ADAPTIVE URBAN ARCHITECTURE

Urban design within cities around the world has impact upon the citizens they serve. As environmental designers, it is important to continuously evolve how cities beneficially influence citizens as they live their daily lives within these urban areas. A critical way by which to accomplish this is to design urban architecture within such cities so they cooperate and collaborate together to yield a relationship of co-creation with their...