Documentation of Site Opportunities

Once you've gone through and figured out all the sort of basic goals, especially regarding sustainability issues, it's important to document those in some way that you are creating a tool for the conversation. So the conversation is partly between the design team and the owner, the conversation might be useful for the owner to the funders, it might be between different parts of the design team, but you need to have the tool by which you can have that conversation. And so some sort of documentation of the goals that have been set, and the opportunities that are there on the sites.

So, for example, you might be thinking about, alright, here's our location of our potential project, alright, so it's just a simple idea of a location in place. And we start thinking about it in plan, and we start saying, alright, well here's the run of the sun, so we have potential for morning light issues here, we're gonna call that out in one way, we have afternoon light in other ways, which maybe we're a little worried about, so we're worried about the heat gain that's gonna come from that.

So maybe we start thinking, well this is the logical place for our protection, so we're finding ways to block the sun with trees, or with structures or trellises or something, and so we're kind of graphically showing that in some way. And maybe we're thinking about, well, the prevailing winds are coming this way, what issues can we do with that? Do we need to find ways to block it?

Do we want to find ways to actually accept it and turn it into a positive, like maybe create wind energy, something like that? So this is that diagram that would start to run through all of those issues. Alright, we're talking about geothermal. Well, where is the opportunities for putting those pipes in the ground? Are we gonna run them horizontally or vertically? Where would we put solar panels? Are we gonna put them on the roof, and so there's a logical location there, or is that not a good location for whatever reason?

What about it graphically can we use to explain the positive or negative of that location? So we're just finding ways to document all of those issues. And you're documenting them graphically so that there's a very clear understanding. You're also gonna write notes, and maybe a report and all of that, but there needs to be a graphic documentation of this as a set of systems.

So this is not necessarily a site plan, this is the idea of, this is sort of more sort of conceptual idea of what you're talking about. So it's graphic in nature, it's not hard-lined in that sense. It can be made out of any, you can do it in a program, you can do it 3D, you can do it, whatever you want. It can be a model you take a photograph of. But the idea is that you're creating a tool that is a conversation starter so that everybody can agree, alright, this is gonna be an issue here, should we put a series of trees there?

Maybe this is a place for a grove of trees. Or maybe, instead of that, we're gonna do a series of trellises that are gonna be a place where people could sit underneath, right. That kind of design thinking comes out of this sort of graphic tool. It's the step before you actually get into designing the actual thing, the actual object. You're not designing yet, you're talking about generic issues, and how those generic issues impact this particular site.

So all of these different way of thinking about it will find some sort of a way of approaching it. I've been doing it in plan, but maybe a section is more appropriate, depends on what the issues are for that site, and that way that you're thinking about it. Maybe both are needed. Maybe some 3D model would be appropriate. You could start looking at sunlight over a span of day, so you see where the pros and cons are of how much sunlight we're getting, just basically onto the site and in this place.

You could start mapping where the shadows are from buildings next door, or large trees, especially if I'm doing something like a school, say, I might think, well, the sun in the morning is different than the sun in the afternoon, or the sun from this big building is blocking this one area, let's not put the playground there, let's put the playground where it gets mostly sun all day.

So you're sort of mapping these big ideas, but you're not designing anything yet, right. This is that early phase of schematic thinking before you really get into the design. This is what sort of that programming phase. The whole idea of programming is you're getting really detailed in what you want and what the goals are and what the analysis is, but you're not designing yet. You're using that flit from programming into schematic design as the moment where you go from what's the idea, to what's the design idea.

What's the thing that backs up the issue, like we wanna block the wind, we wanna accept the wind, we wanna block the sun, we wanna accept the sun. Whatever it happens to be, what those issues are, you're talking about them abstractly, but you're finding graphic tools for representation, and then when you get into that schematic design, now we're actually designing in a way that matches to those ideas.

The whole point of this is, if you start designing too early, if you actually start into a site plan too early, you lose opportunity to think about these things abstractly. You might just kind of get in your head, oh, that trellis, I really wanna do the trellis. Well, maybe the trellis is a good idea, maybe it's not a good idea, maybe it's one of those things that if you were thinking about it abstractly first, you might find that it really didn't need to be a built structure, maybe it could just be a tree or something, and you just have a tree planted.

Or maybe there's already a tree there, and you can find a way to position the building near that tree. So you're finding the design after you've thought about these things from this sort of general sense, and this sort of graphic, simple way of describing it. The whole point is to be able to have that conversation, and then the design comes out of the program, and out of this sort of site analysis. So you've done all that work, and then the design comes from it. If you design too fast, you design before you've done that, you're making decisions before you really have any of the information, and you're losing those opportunities for more kinds of input.

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