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I just finished my first term as a masters student in architecture at the University of Oregon. The last time I designed a building from the ground up was in 2000 during my undergraduate, so this term was a challenge for me. In my interiors practice I worked within constraints such as already built or designed core and shell spaces. Building form and elevations were not in my scope. I liken architecture to sculpture making, while interior design is carving negative space. The thought process is different. The project was to design a 鈥淕eneration House,鈥� a building with daycare and independent senior living in the Goose Hollow neighborhood.

At the beginning of the term I struggled with form making, attempting to design from the outside in. After eight iterations of garbage, I decided to give up and design how I knew best: inside out.聽 After all, Frank Lloyd Wright said buildings should be designed from the inside out. I employed my already honed skills in space planning to get a better idea of how much space each element of my program would need. Utilizing knowledge of human interaction in space, standard space needs, and scale, I solved the complex problem of laying out a daycare and apartment building on a site that sloped in two directions. The layout of spaces informed my building form. By breaking up the program into smaller pieces, I created a building that is a city block long, but divided into smaller scale parts in a rhythm that is more in keeping with the scale of the residential part of Goose Hollow. The inside informed the outside. Not to say that architects should not design from the outside in. In his 1991 Pritzker Prize acceptance speech Robert Venturi noted that the site context is just as important. Architects must design both from the outside in and the inside out. Some of my classmates designed from the outside in and struggled with laying out spaces within difficult geometries. I struggled with the elevation of my building, which ultimately was the weakest part of my project. A two-fold approach and perhaps a little more time would have yielded a stronger solution.

The question I am left with at the end of this term is should architects study interiors or should interior designers be involved earlier in the design process? I say both. Just as it is important for interior designers to have some basic knowledge of architecture, as required by CIDA accreditation, architects should have an understanding of interior design. Interior designers should also be involved in the early planning process. It is like utilizing a mechanical engineer early in the project to create a more efficient building.

I have designed tenant spaces in a variety of buildings in the Northwest. Some, I felt, had been designed without much knowledge of what will work on the interior. These buildings have odd bay depths where I ended up with a 7-foot hallway in the tenant space, or where a less efficient layout is required to avoid having a column in the middle of a conference room. One building, in which we were contracted for the FF&E package, had offices that were only seven feet wide. Another building had such a narrow south bay depth that the tenant spaces had to be enlarged beyond what the program required to get the required second exit. This creates a more expensive space for the tenant. Having an interior designer involved early, especially for buildings that will have tenant spaces, can help create better rentable space. Architects and interior designers, while having knowledge overlap, do think differently. We can inform one another to create a stronger, more successful project.