Strengthening the Relationship between Occupant and Environment

An architecturally designed environment, when newly built, stands ready to welcome occupants inside – to utilize its environments from which they can extract function, beauty and meaning. But have you considered that your occupant will actually develop a relationship with your designed architecture over time? And that this relationship will deepen with each occupant visit to the environment you create?

In some ways,...

Why Architecture Experience and Meaning Matter

When one extracts meaning from experience, value is given through a lesson learned, a memory formed, or even a new idea created. And since environments are catalysts for experience, it is wise for designers to give attention to what meaning is both conveyed and interpreted.

Architecture experience and meaning go hand-in-hand. Experience often leads to meaning, and meaning gives value to experience. So, what role does architecture play in all of...

The Link Between Emotion and “Sense of Place”

Architecture can trigger emotion. Just look at how designed memorials can trigger emotions like pride, sadness, or gratitude. Similarly, other building types can yield surprise or can even mellow one’s mood. It all becomes a matter of how a particular place is designed — to trigger for an emotional response in its occupants.

Emotion in architecture can often be linked to how well an architecture exudes a “sense of...

Greater than the Sum of its Parts

What should the term “sense of place” mean to you as an architect?

A “place” is a simple term at first glance; but when you delve deeper, various issues spring forward…

For starters, there are specific features that usually tend to come together to make up a “place”. One of these features might include a physical configuration like having a center with boundaries, neighboring sub-center clusters and a peripheral...

Within your building it is very important to meet basic human needs — whether they be your occupants’ needs for shelter, to work productively, learn alertly or even heal more quickly. Yet, that is not all that good and inspired architecture should do. As you may have noticed, within great works of architecture there is often a more spiritual side to those buildings which “moves” those occupants as they travel within them — and thus, is born spiritual design....

Many major companies and institutions (like Starbucks and some major airports) are now making sure to include free WiFi wireless connection to boost sales through major increases in customer traffic. And in doing so, they are using this incentive for customers to come in and buy their products and services.

But, as more and more people come to these venues with their mobile digitally connected technologies, what does that mean for the design of the buildings which house them? How do...

As people travel through the world today, they experience many dimensions to the spaces they encounter. Whether within a building, or when exploring a city, people are navigating with the help of things like cars, handheld instruments like smart phones, cameras, books or various map-like devices. However, one thing is for sure…

New technology often leads to realizing new ways of designing spaces with a “sense of place” — and that is something you should be keenly...

If by chance you watched the 2010 Academy Awards you may have noticed that the “Animated Short” category was won by the film called Logorama, directed by the French animation collective H5. This interesting film, like so many others, has actually proven to be a bit controversial. But I do think one thing remains clear — so many of our environments are “branded” in many ways and at many levels.

In Logorama, the entire animated environment is made up of...

What will turn your architecture from merely being a place that people go to, into a place that people feel attached to — a space where they have made a connection and one that is meaningful? Many theories exist and contribute to what can make a place…well, more than a “place”.

In reading the article entitled What makes neighborhood different from home and city? Effects of place scale on place attachment, I found that this study determined that scale plays a...

Your architectural design reverberates.

Yes, architecture maintains walls made up of materials and even wayfinding systems that convey important information; but, the beauty and function that radiates from an incredible architectural work into the soul of those that experience it is often the culmination of seemingly invisible effects exuded by that designed “place”.

Pay much attention to the “invisible” and “intangible” effects which...