Hi there I’m Timothy Burgess, welcome to how to design a house part one, the brief. The brief is something that all architects will try to define prior to starting any design solution and what it is, is effectively a clarification of the problem or the issues because without a clearly defined brief, there won’t be a good solution. You need to really understand what it is you’re trying to solve before you design anything and that applies to hospitals, schools or houses.
Now, in writing your own brief, your own house, the most important place to start is thinking about how you live in your house which won’t necessarily be the same as how anyone else lives and certainly won’t be the same as how we use to live4 a hundred years ago. Now I say that because if you live where I do in London, the chances are you live in a hundred-year-old-house and so we have rooms with certain labels that we recognize, living room, dining room, kitchen and they tend to all be separate rooms. Now, that’s all very well if you live like a Victorian but of course in our modern lives, those descriptions and those separate rooms may or may not make sense to us now. So before we start any kind of design solution, we need to think about how we actually live now.
So rather than using just most traditional labels, it’s sometimes more helpful to think about you have so much living space and that living space has different uses at different times of the day and different kind of characters and what I mean by that is if you think about your space in terms of some particular spaces would be noisy and messy, it might be a family space or children space, then that’s a particular type of place, or there might be spaces which you want to be quiet, more tidy, more formal and there would be particular sort of spaces. And if you think about your house and how you live in that kid of way, you might end up with a better description or a better brief which you can come up with a much more inventive or—design solution which works for you. And so what I’m really saying is if you try to run a brief in that way, it allows you to think on a more strategic battle about the way that you live and therefore, more strategically about the design problem. So rather than thinking, well I live in this house, it might be easy to move that door a bit there or open up that window. It’s much, much better if you can write a brief which describes how you live before you start thinking about what you might do because the solution might be much more kind of radical. Or it might be a completely sort of a bit of lapse of thinking rather than just adjusting something you have.
So, to sum up, clarify the problem to start with in writing a brief and think about how you live now rather than using traditional language and then think about things on the biggest possible level you can, the assort of most radical or the most open before deciding what it is that you’re going to do and that way, you’re likely to come up with the best solution for you, your house and how you live now.
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