Greetings, everyone.
Welcome to a continuing presentation on design disciplines, and
today we will talk about architecture.
According to the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada,
architecture is defined as, The practice of architecture consists of the provision
of professional services in connection with town planning as well as the design,
construction, enlargement, conservation, restoration,
or alteration of a building or a group of buildings.
So you can see in this definition that it's extremely broad in the way
architecture is defined.
You can start on a very broad scale with the notion of town planning,
also referred to often as city planning or
urban design, down to a single building or a group of buildings.
And what happens in terms of the practice, it's a design, so planning and
coming up with something new.
Construction, so actually building it.
Enlargement, so extending an existing group of buildings or a single building.
Conservation, so looking at a historical building and conserving or
protecting what's there.
Restoration, same thing where you have a building that might be in bad shape
to restore what it needs to be repaired.
Or alteration, changing an existing building into something new.
So all of these activities, with relation to a single building, a group of
buildings or an entire town or a city, can be referred to as architecture.
So you can see that it is a really broad definition for the discipline itself.
Let's talk quickly about the process.
So according to the AIA, which is the American Institute of Architects,
they define the process of architecture as one that consists of the following steps.
The first step, the first stage in the process,
is what they refer to as originate.
In this case, what happens is there's a client, which might be an individual or
an office or a group of people, that might need some architectural services, so
they originate, or start, the process.
Step two is focus.
This is where the definition of what exactly is needed is put in place.
The client might hire an architectural firm or an individual architect,
this is the focus.
Step three is when the architectural office or the firm or
the architect starts designing the building.
They start coming up with plans, ideas, concepts, etc., for the structure itself.
Step four is building it.
This is when you go from the stage of design or
from the drawings into an actual physical building.
And finally the last stage is occupy.
So this is when the individuals who have assigned the project to the architect
actually move in and occupy the building.
There often also is something called post-occupancy evaluation.
Very often at the end of this stage, the building is evaluated and
the process of design or redesign can often start at that stage.
So this is the overall process of architecture as defined by the AIA.
There's an architecture firm called HMH Architecture in Colorado.
They have a more detailed process of how architecture happens.
So now we can see in this diagram it starts on the left with the research.
This is the initial phase when the program is defined as to what the building
needs to do.
There's an analysis of the budget.
There might be some zoning requirements that may be looked at.
