For example, what if you mentioned how important daylight is to you on your wish list and in response your architect designed and oriented a sun porch for you that offered a unique, quiet, get-a-way space that was partially open (with French doors and interior windows) to a larger living space? Perhaps the creation and placement of the sun porch would suggest a wrap-around shed roofline, a nearby entrance porch, an adjacency to the family room, as well as proximity to the kitchen and thus begin to shape the design of your project. Further, suppose the sun porch would add no more square footage to the project’s total anticipated square footage, just re-apportion it.
Would the sun porch have utility for you? Maybe your first instinct would be to shift its footprint and absorb it into another space, resulting possibly in more kitchen floor area. Or you might elect to spread its square footage evenly among the other rooms. But what if you stepped back and further considered that the sun porch design would provide not only abundant daylight but distinct spatial relief from the larger living spaces? Could it become your favorite sunny spot to escape with a cup of tea and the paper? What if you could you use it for multiple functions: breakfast, light office work, kids’ homework, or entertaining? How many times a week and for how long at a time do you think you might enjoy it? How might it make you feel compared to the other rooms in the house? What percentage of your leisure or work time would you spend there? Would you appreciate the differentiation of space it affords?
Now, if you were told that you couldn’t have a sun porch for some reason, how would you feel? Would you be willing to take some action, make a trade-off, in order to have a sun porch after all? The answers to these questions would begin to gauge the utility of the sun porch to you. If it is ultimately useful and important to you, it’s also an example of the kind of hidden value a thoughtful architect could create for you.
cost
Without getting too bogged down in economics, there are two primary types of project costs for us to consider: tangible monetary costs and intangible costs, both short- and long-term. The monetary costs include costs for property acquisition, infrastructure, construction, and architectural design services including building engineering. Generally a property has already been acquired or is in the process of being acquired when the idea for a project is first born, so the cost to acquire it is known, but the other monetary costs are not at first. They can be roughly estimated by researching typical cost per square foot of building area according to local contractors or building professionals and by inquiring into the services provided by local site and building professionals as well as their fee structure. Once a project enters the design process, site and building professionals in conjunction with contractors can provide a more refined sense of both short-term and long-term monetary costs associated with particular actions.
The most elusive and frequently overlooked costs though are the intangible costs that are often expressed as a design opportunity cost. For every design decision made there is a potential design opportunity cost, the cost of not pursuing an alternative. When that cost isn’t tangible, it’s difficult to quantify and has a tendency to be dismissed. It’s vital that such intangibles are evaluated.
boxy house in the middle of the lot
Click on this photo to see it in the note cards/prints gallery.A detailed look at a wood, fluted, Roman Doric pilaster in Salem, Mass. reveals the artistry of a classical mainstay.
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