Design for us is a process of layering. The emergence of a solution comes about from the understanding and engagement with the issues surrounding the project. Therefore like an individual’s fingerprints, every project can also be unique. By this method we avoid cookie cutter solutions and try to descend in to the DNA of the particular. It is this particularity that excites us.
What are these layers? There are potentially limitless variables but a number of “anchor” layers are always investigated in each project.
Initially we need to understand the participants or the stakeholders of the project. These are the players, whether they are users or investors, who motivate the project, make it happen. We use a participation process of “design workshops” to enable the stakeholders to as it were hold the pen through us and with us. We carry out live drawing sessions, which produces engagement and ownership.
The nature of the site is one of the key starting points in questioning the sustainability drivers. Here we use the filter of the 3E’s in which almost all of the remaining layers exist. Whether this is the Genus Loci, or the sense of place, or environmental factors, such as sun, wind, temperature, or the cultural region in which the project exists, the 3E’s gives us a complex matrix of layers through which to investigate and discover. Whether all of its principles are used depends entirely on the will and the drive of the user / client who in this respect is the key initiator of the process.
We are rarely formalistic or drive for a particular stylization of form. If there is any style we would say that we are modern in our thinking and our vocabulary of forms derive from this rich seam of modern 20th Century architecture that has become our foundation. Form therefore comes to the fore through this investigative layering process. It almost “calls” itself in to existence. Architects have many influences and our most revered is the architect Louis I. Kahn who spoke eloquently of this coming in to form. In one of his famous lectures, he described how he asked a brick what it wants to be, and he relates how the brick wishes to become an arch and so the form of an arch emerges. Naturally the brick “wants” to be an arch because it is a loadbearing material that works best under compression, which is how an arch works.
This brings us to the layer of material, and detail, which is what space, is made of. For us the layer of material, or the early choice of material drives the form. As illustrated by Louis Kahn’s idea of becoming, material gives rise to form because it has a language within itself.
At the beginning, very much at the beginning, when the first site visit takes place, or when the client tells us what he has in his mind, an inspirational image may come up as it were from out of nowhere. When this happens we trust that also because we believe that inspiration without explanation is also some how “rational”, since the emergence of such a thing comes through the many years of processing of such layers. So much so that suddenly one reacts instinctively to a project. A form comes to us in a dream! However we still go through the process of analysis through layering, or as some of us call it, cutting and dicing, to enter in to the DNA of the project. This enables us to describe our thought process and to explain where we came to the idea. Even though it may be post rationalization, it is still a rationalization!
There fore how we think is revealed in the accumulation of this layering, over time both within the project timeline itself, as well as the timeline of our own development as a practice. In these following pages here we talk about the thought processes that allow us to work and to illustrate how we have developed and are continuing to develop in our thinking. This area of the web site is a continually developing section which as we increase our experience or interaction with different processes we relate how we solve them or deal with them.
Selcuk Avci, Founder, Avci Architects, 23 December 2011
