DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

Experience-Specificity-Landscape

Experience best describes peoples interaction with building. It allows the interpretation of buildings through human perception, action, sensation and memory. Our interest in user experience ranges from the pragmatic to the poetic. How can simple everyday activities be rich and evocative experiences? In our projects we endeavour to bring these two conditions together.

Experience is generated by specificity. Specificity describes the physical or non-physical attributes that make a place, person or situation unique. It goes beyond more superficial understandings offered by ideas of appearance or identity. For us specificity is the fundamental condition necessary to intervening in any environment whether this is a piece of furniture or an urban plan.

These ideas of specificity and experience intersect most powerfully in concepts of landscape. People understand landscape in terms of experience. Landscape experiences are journeys or narratives. A landscape is occupied, inhabited, or explored according to the opportunities it offers. By contrast architecture is too often understood narrowly as object and accessed in terms of its appearance. All too often its occupation is limited by predetermined ideas and rules of function, building type, and image.

Landscape as a powerful metaphor allowing a less inhibited relationship to spatial environments. Dissolving the distinction between building and landscape encourages a richer interaction and supportive relationship between the two. Architectural intervention that is specific to its landscape will results in a more complete environment

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