We design, inform, collaborate and work to craft your built environment. It's not high design or low design - its the design that fits you and your space the best. We did not pick the name lightly, we see building wisely as a demand upon ourselves to use the combination of creativity, intelligence, experience and observation to improve the built environment in the best possible way.
When I say "Build Wisely" this is what I mean:
A building which is "Built Wisely" satisfies four tenets. Those tenets are:
• Durability
• Flexibility
• Resourcefulness
• Beauty
• Durability: Buildings should last a long time. Sure, there are a few temporary constructions, but as a rule, a building should outlive its creators. This means thinking about how the building will respond to the elements it faces, how it responds to the neighborhood it inhabits, how it is maintained, and how its systems can be upgraded and repaired over the course of its long life. A building which can be efficiently inhabited over fifty or a hundred years is the most sustainable building. That is our aim.
• Flexibility: A flexible building does not mean it will bend in the wind, I mean that a building that is flexible can adjust to its occupant's needs and even how construction methods can change. Since prediction is impossible (especially about the future) flexibility allows for tweaks, adjustments and improvements to be made over time. Even for a building dedicated to one family or company needs to remain flexible so that as the group evolves, the building evolves with it. We design not for a rigid solution, but for a flexible response to the use.
• Resourcefulness: Being resourceful means using the resources you have to their fullest, and refraining from using resources you do not have. In every worthy endeavor the initial investment must be balanced with returns. A wisely built building must not be built so cheaply that it cannot be efficiently maintained and inhabited - no cutting corners. While "resources" are most commonly thought of in terms of money, a building is a physical presence in a community and those too are very real resources. Every site has resources in terms of sun, context and access. In any renovation or brownfield, the existing structures (visible and hidden) have resources that can be utilized to make the new structure better. A community has resources too, and not just public projects. Neighbors with experience in the area can be of assistance and help the team see resources hiding in plain sight. All of these resources must be valued and utilized. We do that by looking and listening to those resources.
• Beauty: This is a tricky word. Beauty is subjective. Craft is needed for beauty, and craft is needed to construct a building built wisely, but it does not encompass the feeling (can I even say love?) that is needed to see these projects through. A building which is not beautiful - that is not loved - will have no defenders when it needs them. In every construction there will be patches that will eventually become worn and roughed up a bit, but in a beautiful building those add to the whole, they do not detract. There is no true lasting beauty without craft - they are inseparable in my opinion - and so we design with an understanding of craft, of proper planning and construction methods. That craft is then used so that it brings out the beauty inherent in the materials and form to create a connection with the people in and around it. We do not have a style, but we strive to make everything we design beautiful.
One little side note - why did I not call out "sustainability" as a tenet? That is because it is intertwined with all of them. Durability, Flexibility, Resourcefulness and even Beauty all rely on the need to have a building which contributes back (albeit slowly) over time to its environment. That is sustainability. It is a given that what we do is sustainable.
