How we stay excited about specifications...
We aim to produce the highest quality documentation, with written documents and cost estimates
fully coordinated to your designs. Taking our commitment to the next level involves consistently
doing more: Ensuring reference back to appropriate standards, maintaining consistency with
code requirements, and engaging in on-going product and material exploration and
research, all to be able to make educated recommendations to our clients.
fully coordinated to your designs. Taking our commitment to the next level involves consistently
doing more: Ensuring reference back to appropriate standards, maintaining consistency with
code requirements, and engaging in on-going product and material exploration and
research, all to be able to make educated recommendations to our clients.
ACCESSIBILITY
We have developed a Division 01 section to provide a single point of reference for Accessibility requirements for your project. While all appropriate sections include their own unique requirements, they direct the contractors back to this section for coordination with the work of other trades, and provide the General Contractor a means to ensure all trades understand the importance of the standards. 
PERSONAL SERVICE
We love great design! All of our staff being architects, we want to be involved in your project and explore the myriad ways that your vision can be realized and your design constructed. We have developed a method of meeting with your project team on a weekly basis, and then remaining in your office for a period of time after that weekly meeting to continue to consider options and explore materials with individual team members as needed. This is how we can be your "in-house" out-of-house specifier. 
"Specifications: The other construction document" to the Portland AIA's Small Firm Round table, and I am now presenting lunch-n-learns to our clients to better indoctrinate their staff in the the beauty of the written word! Invite us over to your firm, and let's enjoy some Blind Onion Pizza!
Here's a link to our presentation: TEACHING
We learn more when we teach. I maintain my inspiration for project documentation once a year by presenting to the Professional Practice class for Graduate Architecture students at PSU, under Prof. Ned Vaivoda. The connection and appreciation the students have each time is really invigorating. I have also made a similar presenta-tion, "Specifications: The other construction document" to the Portland AIA's Small Firm Round table, and I am now presenting lunch-n-learns to our clients to better indoctrinate their staff in the the beauty of the written word! Invite us over to your firm, and let's enjoy some Blind Onion Pizza! Here's a link to our presentation: 
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DELEGATED DESIGN &
BASIS-OF-DESIGN Selecting and designing around specific products as basis-of-design and the use of delegated design for complex systems are important aspects of your design process. We have carefully developed specifica-tion language to accommodate these important aspects of your design and documentation while helping ensure building code requirements are respected. We also help the design team determine when engineered design with de-ferred submittal will be required, or can be avoided - Something that will be important to your project's GC! 
SPECIFICATION TOOLS
After much review of various systems, we are converting our specification writing process to use two systems: Building System Design's SpecLink software and InterSpec's e-Specs program. We would be happy to explain our conclusion, as well as how your office might collaboratively manage your own specifications with our oversight. 
CONTENT BASIS
The content of our specifications continues to be based as it has from the origin of the firm, to come from the MasterSpecs provided via our license with AIA/Avitru (formerly Arcom). In our transition to SpecLink and e-Specs, we are bringing the MasterSpec structure and content in, and then enriching that with our proprietary experience-directed articles and lessons-learned. 
TRAVELING
...and architects love to travel, right? Well we believe it's so important we insist on it! Our staff to take their paid vacation time to travel and expose themselves to new places. Here are some places we've recently seen and want to share with you: Museum of Art of the Twenty-First Century (MAXXI), Rome by Zaha Hadid Kolumba Museum, Cologne by Peter Zumthor |
LEARNING
Furthering our understanding is very important to us - It's our passion! We attend conferences and we invite our clients and other collaborators to join us: At local AIA events and seminars, at regional design conferences and through lunch-n-learns we help organize in your office. Here are some events we've attended or participated with in recent years: Oregon Design Conference, Living Future Unconference, AIA Building Envelope Council, Greenbuild, Construct, AIA Committee on the Environment, local CSI learning events and tours, and the biennial Oregon Design Coinference and biennial Monterey Design Conference. We look forward to seeing you at one of these, or inviting you along - Please ask to join us! 
SUSTAINABILITY
We are driven to support and augment the efforts our clients are making on a daily basis, on every project, to use less energy and water, to include products and materials with higher recycled or other non-virgin content, to select finishes and materials that include reduced or no harmful ingredients, and ultimately, to support those manufacturers who provide resources toward these same efforts. Here are a few resources we would like to share, created by groups that are doing the right thing: 
PHOTOGRAPHY
Architectural photographs are the primary means we have to experience the spatial and tectonic qualities of the projects that captivate us. Michael started taking photos of buildings from his earliest recollection, and still likes to capture the texture and richness of materials wherever he goes (most of the images on our website). An architectural photographer worth knowing is Sebastian Weiss, whose ability to capture light's play on building forms is remarkable. We would love to show you some photos... |
PRODUCT AND
MATERIAL RESEARCH Our staff are constantly on the look-out for new products, improved materials, unique finishes and updated processes. We bring these to the table whenever we meet with you, incorporating lessons-learned from past projects, ideas for materials and finishes from our other collaborations, and resources and contacts we maintain with manufacturers and product representatives. 
DETAILS
We enjoy the buildings you anticipate, and we would like to help you make them real. We are not scribes in a corner, picking-up revisions from your red-marked spec's, slaving away on a cost estimate (though we have to sometimes). We are designers too, and we love details. Share with us the imagery you've developed, the sections and sketches, and allow us to recommend products and possibilities to improve your design. We'll integrate this design process, help find that metal finish you've envisioned, come up with some better ways to align those surfaces or transition the materials at that corner ...and we'll all have more fun! 
CHANGING PATTERNS
Architects are sociologists at heart, intrigued by human behavior, and always interested in how those beliefs and actions can manifest their importance through design changes that support them (pardon my archispeak). Our staff is ever-attuned to changing standards and behaviors, as well as our clients' evolving designs which embrace developing behavioral patterns. Whether that is helping find the right acoustic materials to support the open-office work environment, providing updated specification requirements that support the shift toward more ecological and low-energy materials, or suggesting new systems to better operate in communal, gender-less restroom facilities, we are intrigued and excited about helping you. For more information about gender-neutral design, see this Metropolis article: (Image: Mahlum Architecture’s gender-neutral design solution for Grant High School, Portland Public School District)
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