Complex decision making in house design is about how a leading custom residential Architect makes detailed choices while designing your house.
While your Architect is designing your house, he/she is making complex decisions: how tall, wide, deep the thousands of elements will be, their pattern, their method of connection, how Code and just plain common sense dictate how components are arranged, if the solution solves the needs expressed in the PROGRAM for your house, if the condition is durable, weatherproof, safe and strong. And will it work with the other elements to result in an attractive architectural appearance? And that’s not all: there are building setback lines and easements and underground and overhead utilities running across your land. All of these influence what your Architect is allowed to do with your house.
And there’s much more. Your subdivision might have an HOA (HomeOwners Association) with its own set of architectural requirements relating to height, style, features, roof slopes, window arrangement, driveway and garage location, landscaping, views, materials, colors and other considerations.
Now imagine that you are trying to take all of these words, diagrams, thick reference books of laws, and your real life land and then create, on a computer, a three-dimensional model called a house that adheres to all of those requirements. Not a simple or easy task.
This sort of critical thinking and creativity demands intense focus and brain power. Nothing your average person can do. Nothing most people can do well. This is one of the reasons it takes Architects so long to obtain their professional architectural degrees from major universities (accredited by the NAAB), and so long to intern (like doctors) under the careful watch of other older, licensed Architects for years, then take a battery of grueling tests with hundreds of questions and design skill testing over several days, then more internship, then finally licensing by at least one State BOA (Board of Architecture), then continuing education courses every year for the rest of your professional life. Who has the skills, intelligence, patience and focus to do all that? Architects.
Ever wonder why your Attorney or Doctor or Accountant charges the rates they do? Because what they do is difficult and takes a great deal of education, training, testing and experience. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it. Same thing with architecture.
Back to complex decision making in house design. Imagine drawing something in 2 dimensions, understanding that it represent shapes and conditions in 3 dimensions. Now think about drawing floor plans. As in more than one level.
And they are not exactly the same. There are some parts that align, other areas that are balconies, looking over spaces below, or outside, and others that are critical structural elements that have to bear on each other. Once again: this requires focused brain power, like playing 3 dimensional chess (several transparent chess boards arranged on top of each other, with the game pieces in different locations on each, and each board’s pieces are affecting the pieces on the different levels). That might start to give you some idea of how Architects think.
And when an Architect is designing the Building Sections (highly complex vertical slices through your house, that looks like a big knife cut through a layer cake, but it’s your house), things get very interesting (and complex). Some walls, beams, trusses, doors and windows, floors, ceilings, insulation, footings, porches, decks, roofing and other elements are in front of, at, or beyond the plane of the cut through your house.
Understanding how all this aligns is crucial to understanding how an Architect thinks. He/she is always imagining walking through and around the built 3D object: your house. All they are doing, while they are creating the Construction Documents, is taking slices and snapshots of what they see in their mind. And this 3D internal imagination power is one of the strong skill sets that an Architect brings to bear on your next house project.
Contact: Rand@HomeArchitects.com 828-269-9046
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