Design Approach

The objective of this firm to provide high quality designs that make sense for this time and place.  The Florida environment is unique and beautiful - but a costly place to live in if careful planning is ignored. Long-term quality and efficiency does require careful planning.

Design quality is maintained by limiting the number of active projects in the office at any point in time because all projects receive the personal attention of the principal.

The approach to design is guided by humanist beliefs - in moderation, in the dignity of the human will, in permanent values, and in the necessity of discovery.  I am a Structural Rationalist and a Modernist who believes in the application of Appropriate and Advanced Technology.

Architecture begins with commitment, to the fabrication of a successful community that will endure.  Architecture is an idea.  It's an idea that is fulfilled with the commitment of one's life to a place - to the making of a place that is safe, comfortable, and engaging.

Every act of building carries with it the potential to contribute to architecture.  And when we contemplate building from an architectural point of view a successful work will have a greater value than convenience alone.  Architecture is the product of a long accumulation of efforts rooted in a people's desire for living well together.


 

Good work provides a community with a positive reflection of themselves.  It provides a confidence of knowing who they are, what they are doing with the bounty they have inherited, and where they are going, as a community, as citizens, neighbors, families, individuals, and human beings.

Architecture is one facet of our culture that can, by association, represent the essence of ourselves to posterity; of our morality, our virtues or weaknesses; it can represent the purpose of our lives, our inventiveness, as well as how we have chosen to live upon the earth.

To contribute to the idea of architecture requires of those who build to participate and extend the unfolding of the culture that we have inherited.

An architect serves a client as the midwife of positive change. The degree of change is directly related to the thoughtfulness of the client and their willingness to acknowledge the impact of their actions upon the environment and the lives of those about them. To cause no harm is the first rule of any professional, and for an architect that means to safeguard the place and the community that has formed and is evolving.

- Randy Swanson, Ph.D., Architect