Good Design During this Time

To ensure we are ready to navigate what’s next for Herscoe Hajjar Architects, it’s vital that we reactivate our space to balance health and safety for our employees and clients. Also, that we continue to respect each other’s well-being. Preparedness, agility, and resilience will be key as we start to consider the “New Normal” and Good Architectural Design is part of this reality.

Understanding Modern Home Design

Good architectural design needs to be more than a pretty house. As architects will tell you, good design is based on understanding the client's activities, the spaces those activities require, an understanding of space, perception, and familiarity with a multitude of building materials and products; all are important in these times.

Good architectural design and home plans must keep water and weather out, and control light, heat, and humidity; it must consider durability and upkeep of the products used, and the access needed to maintain building systems; it must include selection of the optimum structural, mechanical, and electrical systems; it cannot ignore permit fees, energy costs, utility costs, or taxes. Again, all are important considerations in these uncertain times.

Architectural Design In Light of COVID-19

When asked if he is seeing a change in design trends due to COVID-19 pandemic, architect Rob Herscoe says, “Clients are planning for home-schooling and planning tennis courts and basketball courts—a lot of things people would go somewhere to use, are now on their own property. Kids have play rooms and ample outdoor space to build treehouses. And people are building home gyms, knowing they’re not going to use their health club memberships.”

We must look at a perspective project not just as an individual structure, but as an interconnected part of a much larger world. We must continue to study and examine the way that the house design will appear aesthetically in context, consider the position of the sun, and examine the use of the space to consider the best design path for good design.

Architecture has always been an adaptive profession, therefore, we must envision the home during the so-called “new normal” as a place where families could live, work and play and should be “quarantine-friendly.”

What we do at our practice is architecture and design, but it’s also art.

Human experience drives our practice.