The Start of a Plan
An earlier post on here closed with this: "The question we keep returning to as designs evolve remains: how do you go from a bunch of words to a building, a house, a home?"
Last fall we started going from words to drawings. We'd written down our program. We knew we wanted a lot of river views. We wanted fireplaces. We wanted a cheery, informal, workable kitchen and commons as a gathering place. Guest bedrooms for family and friends. A snug library. Eight pages of wants--a first-world house for sure.
Our next step was a bubble diagram, another architectural term of art that, on reflection, is pretty much self-explanatory. Every big functional area or room is a "bubble." How do they fit together? What, in the words of our architect, are "the adjacencies?"
We were bold enough to take a stab at drawing a bubble diagram ourselves. The first pass up top had lots of rooms facing the river. A one-floor plan. No garage.
Rooms started moving around pretty quickly, and up and down as a second floor entered the discussion.
We quickly cobbled up an over-designed bubble diagram system with rooms color-coded by more public or private uses. And just to confuse you, in the upper picture, the house faces down to the river; in the bottom shot, the river side is up.
It was with a bunch of bubble diagram drawings and photos like these that we started the design process with our architects.