A building occupies a property.
A place is experienced.
The land is the primary canvas for defining your place. Great architecture responds to the landscape, the path of the sun and the changing seasons, allowing an experience to unfold — daylight and shadow, material and texture beneath your hand, the sounds and scents of the landscape, warmth and shelter, illumination as evening falls, and the comfort of simply being there. Together, these experiences contribute to the place that emerges.
The question therefore isn't simply what a place looks like when construction is complete.
It's what kind of place it becomes.
Defining Place is a way of thinking about what a place should become. Define Before Design™ is how that thinking begins — establishing what a project and its place actually need before design determines the answer.
The Defining Place Method carries an understanding of place from its existing conditions and earliest intentions through the decisions that shape what it becomes — and how it is cared for over time.
An introduction to Defining Place and why premature solutions create downstream problems.
Ongoing thinking on place, architecture, building and stewardship.
A principal-led working session to define what the project needs to accomplish before design begins. Requested, not booked.
Not a design.
The definition the design will answer to.