Nothing in this life is more awe-inspiring or life-altering than the miracle of birth. No other event comes close to creating new life, but building your dream home is similar because it has a profound and life-changing effect on you. Nearly everyone has a budding architect inside them abound with ideas and most of them want to design their dream home. Many people do and they live to tell about it. I’m one of them and these are a few of my survival tips. Continue reading →

An architect’s design toolkit is overflowing with artistic visual products such as matrices, partis, tables and mass models used to solve architectural problems. One of the most valuable and intriguing is the bubble diagram. The bubble diagram is a simplistic functional diagram drawn with scaleless circles representing spatial entities connected by lines to show relationships. It is basic yet meaningful…and ordinary yet masterful and is critical to studying how a home works. Continue reading →

Juxtapose – verb meaning to place close together or side-by-side usually for comparison. I love that word and try to find ways to integrate it into daily conversation. “Excuse me, please pass the juxtaposed pepper.” or “Would you mind juxtaposing your vehicle so I can park?” or “If you persist with your antics, you may find your nose juxtaposed!” Hmm…maybe juxtaposed is better suited for archi-speak and in spite of my flagrant verb abusage it happens to be the inspiration behind the adjacency matrix. Continue reading →

Restriction…the mere mention of the word suggests a litany of negative meanings. Words such as can’t, limited, restrained and confined come to mind. From a child’s perspective it’s more severe and can mean banished. To most rational minds it’s an obstruction or setback, but to an architect it means opportunity. Continue reading →