Practice Makes Perfect
For the first 20 years of our practice, our firm focused on production architecture—fast-paced, highly varied projects where success is measured solely by speed, efficiency, and cost. Though at times unglamorous, it allowed us to establish a clear process for developing client’s ideas, translating them into architectural form and producing accurate detailed drawings for construction.
As our role expanded into higher-profile projects, we maintained our work ethic and the rigor of our approach. Our sense of urgency and responsibility to owners remains unchanged when managing project budgets, schedules, deliverables, and the impact on daily operations. Our framework measures project successes beyond the parameters of time and cost and keeps us rooted in the fundamental expectations of our clients.
Leading with Collaboration
Our ability to organize, collaborate, and lead the complex efforts of realizing architectural endeavors is as significant as our ability to delineate our ideas on paper. Working with engineers, users and the public, our leadership manifests through architectural programming, charrettes, and other forms of input. These communications shape the critical early stages of project development and craft a broader definition of success for our clients. Project leadership, not just project management, has become a benchmark of our positive client feedback.
Embracing Technology
Architecture is tasked with transforming complex ideas and inert material into built forms, creating environments for people to live, work and play. Technology plays an integral role in communicating our ideas to our clients, engineers and contractors. We create a workplace where our staff is enabled by technology, where their ideas are developed and tested. Our staff is empowered—not limited—by the tools at their disposal.
While fully embracing leading edge technology, we insist upon utilizing all of the tools at our disposal. We employ traditional sketches and physical models as well as modern three-dimensional and virtual reality imaging. Technology is, after all, simply an advanced means to facilitate the vision of our clients.
Getting Feedback
We constantly measure performance, whether through a client’s evaluation of a floor plan, an employee’s measure of our professional development, or even scoring the success of a project meeting. As the saying goes, you cannot improve what you do not measure. Bringing the greatest value to projects through our vision, our ideas and our people requires constantly seeking better ways to deliver our services. We utilize short, three-question surveys after meetings, in-depth evaluations at major project submittals, post-occupancy surveys and other means to collect comprehensive and varied responses to our work. It is critical to convey to our clients the importance of their input to our success.