Today’s Topics:
- Small Scale
- Large Scale
- Quality of Space
Small Scale
One of the most interesting things about designing is the space that you have to occupy.
In architecture school, 9 times out of 10, your first few projects will be starting on a small scale.
This gives you time to discover certain aspects of design, giving you a chance to learn new skills.
One of the best reasons to start small scale is so that you can master spatial quality within projects.
The point is to design everything with a purpose and the scale of a project can give you that much more control over the substance of your work allowing you to continue developing and designing better spaces.
Large Scale
When transitioning to a large scale, it brings much more importance to the organization of the building and how things relate and flow together.
There is much more work to do so it is essential to have already learned how to derive small spaces in a building. These qualities apply in a similar manner for each room, just as much as the overall project.
Currently in my studio we are designing a community center. It will be about 25,000 square feet of space. In the past the most we have done is 1,500 square feet. So the change is very drastic.
Something that could be often overlooked is the importance of spending a good deal of time working on each and every room.
It will take a deeper understanding than any previous designs that have been made to account for every aspect of the building.
Quality of Space
When you think about all of the various buildings around the world, when you look at them in person, each building can look very different from the next.
From that, you can see the quality of the design.
Then when you go and look at the floor plans for these buildings, that’s when you can see the quality of space.
The latter being a much better quality, it is also the more challenging aspect of design.
As designers, it is easy to design a building where all you care about is having the best appliances, and the nicest couches, but what does that have to say about the space?
The real part of design is designing the space. If you have a really good space, it will interact much better with the objects of that space.
This is something that takes time as a designer to develop and start thinking about, but is one of the most essential aspects of designing a good building.
Thanks for tuning into this week’s blog post. I hope you’ve enjoyed my spiel on scale and space. Let me know what you think in the comments. As always, Dream Big!
Alonzo Colon 