some good architects

Moore HoneyHouse - Marlon Blackwell 1998

Phifer: I love the materials. What is the ceiling made of?  Blackwell: It’s made of felt.

Everything had to align end to end. In fact, I discovered just as we were about to turn the working drawings in that we were two inches off on the north end, and I literally cried. So we stopped everything and spent three days reworking all of the dimensions – gotta get it right.

At first, we thought clients would only want to see straightforward drawings. It turns out that the drawings and images that our clients are most drawn to—like, cartoonish elevation obliques—are our favorite drawings and images as well.

One side-effect to feeling the need to “educate” someone as to why your way of doing something might better is that you could come off as condescending or that you aren’t really listening to that person’s reasons for solving the problem they way THEY decided it would be best. To avoid this situation, I have used the process of creating a narrative to help explain what might seem simple or obvious to me in a way that helps the listener understand the process in a way that creates ownership in the end product.

Essentially the client is telling us a story about how they would like to live and use their eventual home and we, as their architect, are essentially their editors … the story that you bring to me and my eventual interpretation of how to effectively communicate your story. That’s why ... some architects are better than others.

Part of the collaboration is familial, but a lot of it comes from the kind of shorthand of our close relationship that then grows into a collective artistic vision.

Blackwell: Yes, a spatial narrative, which comes with a formal narrative, which comes with a material narrative. Or “logics,” we’ll call it: spatial logic, formal logics, and material logics that are front-ended in the project. This is the DNA that is loaded for us very early on. The reason is to overcome the limits of the old AIA contract, in which every phase of the design and construction process is discreet and broken down

We do this by being comprehensively observant and careful, with clear thinking about how to build to an heirloom quality. These core values allow us to explain ourselves, and people seem to like hiring architects like that.