Building community

What do we mean by building community? To us the term embodies a variety of efforts at all scales in the practice of architecture in our continuing efforts to strengthen, expand, diversify a number of different communities:

• The community of our own firm: building a staff who bring talent and experience from a wide range of backgrounds and cultures, enriching us as colleagues working together on a daily basis.
• The community of the architectural profession: working to expand awareness of the profession by informing and working with students, youth groups, educators, and others to spark interest in design and “building things” so that the field of architecture expands to more closely represent the makeup of our society.
• The community of a campus or neighborhood: designing buildings that fit comfortably into their context, contributing to an impressive, cohesive, and enduring built environment that instills pride in the institutions or communities of which the buildings are a part.
• The community of people who use, inhabit, and visit a building: creating a design that accommodates all constituencies and promotes collaboration and interaction among the building users, as well as members of the larger campus or neighborhood, welcoming them to discover what’s going on inside.