Architecture Design Collection

Do you need an Architect?

The stunning homes you see in glossy magazines are almost always custom-designed by licensed architects. They are the unique creations of men and women with the skill and the know-how to explore new and unexpected possibilities. But, what if your own dreams are more modest? Must you hire an architect?

Maybe not. If your taste runs toward traditional, you may opt for one of these cost-saving alternatives.

1. Purchase a Stock Building Plan

Stock building plans are drawn by architects and home designers for mass marketing through magazines, catalogs, and Web sites.

Advantages: You can easily find stock plans for houses in a wide variety of sizes, styles, and budgets. If you are able to find a stock plan that works for you, you will save the cost of hiring your own architect.

Disadvantages: The architect who designed your stock building plan has never met you and does not know your tastes and needs. Moreover, stock building plans cannot take into account the nature of your building lot or the climate in your region. Many people who purchase stock building plans eventually decide to hire an architect to make modifications.

2. Use a Production Home Builder

New homes in suburban housing developments are often constructed by production home builders. Production home builders have contracted with architects and designers to create plans suitable for the region and harmonious with other houses in the development. When you work with a production home builder, you must select one of the builder's offered plans. You then "customize" the plan by choosing exterior siding, light fixtures, bay windows, and other architectural features from a menu of options.

Advantages: Builders can work more quickly and more economically when they follow familiar, traditional plans. Since the plans are locally created, they will probably be suitable for the climate and the terrain.

Disadvantages: Your home will be assembled from a limited array of standard features. Although you may request some customization, your house will not be a custom home. It is likely to look very similar to the other houses in your development. Your builder may refuse, or charge highly for, any changes that are not on the established list of options.

3. Hire a Certified Professional Building Designer

Another cost-saving alternative is to hire a Certified Professional Building Designer (also known as a Home Designer) to design your now home. Home designers do not have the same level of education or the same licensing requirements as architects, and their fees are usually lower. Nevertheless, professional home designers do hold professional certificates which demonstrate that they have completed coursework and achieved experience in the field.

Advantages: Home designers specialize in private homes - not office buildings, shopping centers or gas stations. For this reason, a home designer may actually have more experience designing houses than some licensed architects. A good home designer can create a customized home tailor-made for your family.

Disadvantages: Like builders and real estate developers, home designers tend to produce plans which are traditional. In general, home designers do not have the training to create especially complex or unusual designs. If you have special needs, or if you desire a home that is truly unique, then you'll need to hire an architect.

How To Find An Architect?

Here's How:

1. Ask friends, neighbors, and co-workers about their architects. Also check with Realtors and builders in your area. Find the names of architects who designed projects similar to the one you plan.
2. For restoration projects, check with your local historical society or historic zoning board.
3. Search through online directories. Most will let you search for architects by location and by speciality. (For the best architect directories, scroll down this page to our resources list.)
4. Call prospective architects. Find out whether they would be interested in your project.
5. Ask whether there is a fee for an interview.
6. Request literature that describes the firm's qualifications and experience.
7. Meet with several prospective architects.
8. Confirm that the architect you are meeting is the person who will actually work on your project.
9. Determine your architect's design philosophy.
10. Ask how long the project will take.
11. Discuss fees and anticipated construction costs.
12. Ask for references from past clients. Find out how past clients feel about their new home.
13. Visit at least one project by your prospective architect. Ask the owners about any problems that may have been encountered during the design and construction of the project.
14. Verify your architect's licensing and other credentials. A licensed, registered architect (RA) will have different education and training than a certified building designer (CPBD).
15. Find out the professional affiliations of your prospective architect. An architect who joins an organization is not necessarily more highly qualified than a non-member. However, by joining a group such as the AIA (American Insitute of Architects) or the ASLA (American Society of Landscape Architects), the pro indicates indicates a committment to the values and standards of that organization.

Tips:

1. You may be working closely with your architect for many months. Choose someone you can communicate with.
2. Interview prospective architects at their offices, if possible.
3. Plan to spend at least one hour on your first meeting with a prospective architect.
4. Be sure to scroll down this page for more resources to help you find the right architect for your project.

Why Hire a Professional Architect?

Architects are licensed professionals. Like doctors and lawyers, they have completed university programs and lengthy internships, and they have passed a series of rigorous exams. Their training covers many areas, ranging from landscape design to structural engineering.

This diversity means that architects can see possibilities and find solutions to your special needs. While a builder or a home designer may make some adaptations at your request, a good architect will anticipate your needs - even if you are not sure how to express them.

What Architects Do

For some projects, architects wear many hats. They may create the design, do the drafting, select the materials and supervise the entire work process. Ideally, your architect will visit your building site and observe the direction of the sun, the placement of trees, and the location of the best views.

These services will add 8% to 12% to the final cost of building your home.

For other projects, the architect's role may be limited to drafting the blueprints. If you can find stock blueprints similar to your own dream house, you may be able to hire an architect to make alterations. Changing an existing plan is always less expensive than designing a house from scratch.

Before drafting a design, a good architect will spend time talking with you and other members of your family.

What Architects Ask

• Where does your family watch television?
• How important is an informal dining room?
• Do you like to give parties?
• Do you regard the bedroom as a sanctuary where you spend many daytime hours? Or, is the bedroom simply a place to sleep?
• Do you need a private area for your computer? Or, would you prefer the home computing center be located in a central location where children can be supervised?
• What bothers you about the house you're living in right now? And, what do you love about your current home?

Even if you are working within a tight budget, it does not make good economical sense to cut corners on design. Talented professionals will help you avoid costly mistakes - and can assure that the home you build is ideally suited for the way you live.

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Architecture is the imaginative blend of art and science in the design of environments for people. People need places to eat, work, live and play. Architects transform these needs into concepts and then develop the concepts into building images that can be constructed by others. These projects can be as small as an entrance way and as large as an entire college campus—and everything in between.

An architect serves in a leadership role to bring together the design and budgetary requirements set by the client, restraints of a site (where the building will be constructed), needs of the building’s users, and the limitations of materials into a unique and balanced design solution. Decision-making, team leadership and creativity are the key elements of making architecture.

Succinctly put, an architect is a licensed professional with specialized skills who designs buildings and cityscapes and helps make real the unique vision of their clients and communities.

The word architecture can have many meanings. Depending on the context, architecture can refer to:

1. any man-made building or structure
2. a man-made building or structure that is important, large, or highly creative
3. a carefully designed object, such as a chair, a spoon, or a tea kettle
4. a design for a city, town, park, or landscape
5. the art or science of designing and building buildings, structures, objects, and outdoor spaces
6. a building style or method
7. a plan for organizing space
8. the flow of information on a Web page
9. the planned design of any kind of system
10. a systematic arrangement of information or ideas How do you define architecture? Tell us!

Is This Architecture?

Depending on your perspective, you might use the word architecture to describe any number of things. Which of the items listed below would you call architecture?

• A circus tent
• An egg carton
• A roller coaster
• A log cabin
• A skyscraper
• A computer program
• A political campaign

Frank Lloyd Wright on Architecture

Here's what the American architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, had to say about Architecture:

"What is architecture anyway? Is it the vast collection of the various buildings which have been built to please the varying taste of the various lords of mankind? I think not.

"No, I know that architecture is life; or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived. So architecture I know to be a Great Spirit....

"Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change. That is really architecture."

A Baseline Definition of Architecture

Human language so pervades our world and suffuses our world view that it is practically invisble. We don't think about words and language, but naturally assume that it somehow corresponds with the world. So much so, it surprises us when non-native speakers can't understand us. We watch a science fiction film and are not surprised—in fact, we don't even notice—when aliens speak perfect English.

Architecture occupies a similar place in human consciousness; the configuration and manipulation of materials to enclose and control empty space is universal to all human cultures. Not only that, human "building" pervades every aspect of the human world in the same way language does. From the most crowded, modern urban areas to small, isolated communities of hunter-gatherer tribes, human life constantly encounters, builds, and modifies human arrangement of space.

Like language, architecture is difficult to define, if not impossible. One can certainly point to it: there's a building, see, that's architecture. You can do the same for language, that is, you can point to a sentence: see, that's language. But you really haven't defined anything. Picking the obvious isn't good enough. Let's pursue the language metaphor a little bit further. What you're looking at now is language; that's clear enough. What about the pictures at the top of this page? Are they language? They do just about everything language does. Facial gestures: language or not? Now extend that to architecture. Look at the building around you: there's no question you're looking at architecture. But what about the desk which your computer is sitting on? Is that architecture? What if you dug a hole, filled it with wood, and started a fire? Is that architecture? Like a building, a fire-hole and a desk are human refashionings of raw materials, they are both designed, they both serve some function, they enclose or order space in some way. So architecture is more than just erecting fancy buildings, it is a process that underlies the intersection between humans and the world and humans and the empty space they live in.

So let's begin with a working definition of "architecture":

• Animals, including human beings, are faced with empty space that is filled only with natural objects. This space becomes familiar to individual animals and individual communities, and most animals modify the natural objects around them in order to use empty space for some purpose (for instance, for shelter, i.e., a beaver lodge or a human house) or to define the organization of space (for instance, boundaries, i.e., a dog leaving a scent mark on a post, or a human fence). This is the biological basis of architecture. Architecture, like language, is something we share with other animals, but like language, human architecture is far more complex and probably far more riddled with meaning than animal architecture.
• When you really think about it, this definition means that more than just buildings can be included under the heading "architecture." This is probably true: it includes desks, cooking instruments, the way you organize your room (or don't organize your room), even clothing. All of these involve defining a space meaningfully and communicating that definition to others.
• In order to organize empty space, humans need to predetermine that organization, that is, they need some idea of how things should be located in space. Therefore, all architecture begins with world view, that is, it begins with a culture's sense of how objects and actions are organized in the world. Notice I stress objects and actions: architecture has as its principle function organizing the space of human actions: eating, cooking, speaking, praying, etc. More than anything else, the language of architecture is permeated with a culture's sense of what humans should do, where they should do it, when they should do it, how important it is, and how these actions relate to the rest of the community, the material world, and the supernatural world. Read that last sentence a second time. All architecture communicates to the members of a community the meaning of their actions, that is, how their actions relate to the rest of the human, material, and spiritual worlds.
• The definition means that architecture can be "read," that is, you can discover how a culture organizes itself socially, materially, and metaphysically. Architecture is like a book that a culture "writes" for other members of that culture; it is a culture talking to itself about the meaning and organization of the life of that culture. So looking at architecture isn't about pretty buildings, it's about understanding world view. This also means that whenever a member of a culture looks at a work of architecture, they understand that it has meaning and that this meaning governs their actions and understanding of the world.

What Architects Do
The role of an architect is not just to design buildings. Through the design, the architect must also protect the health, safety and welfare of the general public and the users of the buildings. Therefore, like medical doctors, one must have a license granted by a U.S. state or territory in order to refer to oneself as an “architect.” Doing so otherwise is illegal.

What is an Architect?

An architect is a licensed professional who organizes space. Architects design houses, office buildings, skyscrapers, landscapes, and even entire cities.

Architects are trained in many areas, from historic preservation to structural engineering. Like doctors and lawyers, architects have completed university programs and lengthy internships. In most parts of the world, architects must pass a series of rigorous exams in order be licensed. In North America, the initials RA designate a registered, or licensed, architect.

An information architect is a person who plans the flow of information on Web pages. This use of the word architect is not related to building design.

The services of a licensed architect depend on the type of project; fees may range from 10% to 15% of the total construction costs.

Kunjungi www.investasi-saham.com untuk investasi saham dan bermain saham. Panduan Lengkap dalam Berinvestasi di Pasar Modal, Bursa Efek Indonesia, Saham, Obligasi, ORI, SUKUK, Reksadana, Derivatif, Investasi Syariah dan Produk Investasi Keuangan lainnya serta Belajar Menjadi Investor/ Trader (Main) Saham.