Architects’ jobs are to design buildings. Most would consider this to be true. However, many times our jobs go beyond that. For the past several months I have been working on a master plan and programming a new intake facility for the county jail. This project isn’t just about the building, instead it’s about learning [...]

One of the top ways to really be sustainable is to find ways to reuse buildings instead of just building new ones. It is this reason that I get excited to see municipalities that are leading by example for building reuse. The biggest example in San Antonio is the Haven For Hope project that is [...]

Of course the buzz around my office, and I’m sure many other architecture offices, lately has been the new Burj Khalifa which opened last week in Dubai as the world’s tallest building (CLICK HERE for related article). At a height of 2,717 feet, it crushed the previous record holder, Taipei 101 which measures 1,671 ft. [...]

Back in March I spoke of how things really haven’t slowed down too much in San Antonio and that our biggest hurdle at that time was all the competition we were seeing from out of state firms that were all looking to Texas for work. Nine months later though we are definitely starting to see [...]

Last week I got to see something really awesome on a business trip to New Orleans. No, it wasn’t Bourbon Street although I did make a stop there, too. What I got to see was one of the oldest federal buildings in the South – U.S. Custom House that began construction in 1848. The building [...]

First, before I move onto my topic for this week, I just have to announce that as of Monday I can officially call myself an architect. I received my license to practice architecture in the state of Texas. For a while it felt like the day would never get here, but now that is has [...]

When I began looking back over my previous blogs, I noticed that two of my main topics have been Building Information Modeling (BIM) and sustainability. So it was kind of ironic when I went to a seminar last week that merged these two topics. The presentation was about two of Autodesk’s newer software products – [...]

I just wrapped up the Design Development phase of the library project I’m currently working on. It was amazing to me what happened when we started value engineering after the schematic design came in quite a bit over budget. As we began to make changes, one decision would effect several other parts of the building [...]

It’s been a while since you guys have heard from me. Things are still super busy here in San Antonio. I could hardly believe it when I got a notice for my annual review which means I’ve been working for three years. At first it just seemed the time had flown by but when I [...]

In this Sunday’s edition of the San Antonio Express News there was a very interesting article that discussed the lost art of hand drafting. There’s no denying that computed aided drafting (CAD) has helped the profession grow in terms of production speed and accuracy. It does however lack in feeding the creative process. In fact, [...]