Why did we choose that tag line?

June 9, 2011

Posted in: Thoughts on NXL

 By David Lauzon, OAA MRAIC LEED AP BD+C

Jay and I don’t think of ourselves as ‘normal’ architects.  Normal architects dress in black and don’t play hockey.  Normal architects tend to see their buildings as sculpture because that’s how most famous buildings are presented to the world.  Don’t get me wrong, we love these contributions to architecture and we truly enjoy designing the exterior – but our projects always seem to start with what’s inside the walls.                                                                                                                                                                                  

Jay and I were both attracted to a more ‘industrial’ design aesthetic – there is something intriguing about an oil refinery and its rawness and busyness.  We liked that cacophony of parts that when taken as a whole seemed to hang together and serve a process which seemed to pay no attention to aesthetics.  It expresses the function as design and the process drives the appearance. It reminds me of the saying, “Form Follows Function” but on steroids. 

When planning the interior of a building, Jay likes “flow” or how things move through the building and I like “relationships” – having every function where it should be in relation to each other.  We love the challenge of trying to “fit a quart into a pint bottle” and the complexity of designing for a client’s process.  We can well appreciate how engine designers must view their design problems in balancing fuel consumption with power generation.   We’ve always felt a responsibility to make the building ‘work’ for the users rather than leaving them with a beautiful building that didn’t meet their needs.  But ultimately, we want our clients to be as excited as we are about the design of the inside of their building.

We settled on our tagline, “Design from the Inside-Out” because it says to the folks who don’t know us that maybe these guys will care about how my building works.  As a tagline, it probably generates more questions than it answers, but we felt it represented the core of what made us different from other architects.  And we don’t mind being different – or normal.