We must strive for quality of life before quantity. Quality of life is affected largely by the environments and spaces that surround you. Space is everything around me. Nature creates fantastic spaces. Quality is always there in nature's designs, it has been filtered through hundreds of years of development. Man must create spaces to live and work, but his practical resources are very limited when compared to nature. Cities, like nature, improve with time. When they reflect the process of hundreds of years of design and development they look, feel and work much better. Cities and buildings, similar to nature, work like living organisms. They live and die when their time comes. 

Standard primary and secondary education does not include concepts of design, space or architecture. Most people do not study cities, buildings or their history. Everyone studies history of people and politics, sociology, physics, biology, math, languages and as a last priority, some art.  

Here I will try to provide a concise guide of the basic principles for the design of buildings and establish a method of building design analysis so everyone can improve their contribution to the design process they are already commanding in most cases.  

Many persons still see architecture as some kind of decoration of buildings with a particular artistic style. Architects have acquired the reputation of being artists who spend other people's money building giant monuments to themselves. The case more often is that architects are forced to make a compromise between the impossible dreams of clients and the real budget. 

Costs are frequently increased by the lack of understanding of the design process by the owners. Most are not willing to involve themselves at the beginning stages of design when foundations are laid for this process. The farther into design or construction you go, it is more costly to turn back.  

Building design is more encompassing than architecture because it includes other professionals who help create our environment like city planners, facility planners, space planners, interior designers, engineers and most importantly ourselves. 

The Importance of Design 

The creation of habitable spaces is the only purpose and reason for the existence of buildings. Thus, the design of habitable spaces should be the steering force of the design process. The process of designing a building is confusing because of the many variables that we must consider. We need to separate the basic reason to build, creation of space, from other variables that help us in the design process.  

Economy and technical engineering aspects are very important but second to the design of space. The design and distribution of space is the primary variable and starting point for the design of buildings. You need a minimal amount of space to execute certain functions, from there on you add technical requirements, techniques of construction, use of materials and finishes. The first analysis for a building design may be based on the budget. How much space can I get with a certain budget? Then you must define your minimal need of space in each area. In the design process you will analyze the possible economies of space and you can try to reduce costs using inexpensive materials for the finishes. Economy of space is only acceptable to a certain level, depending on the user.  

Once a lady came to seek my advice on a house she wanted to build. She said that there was this prefabricated house that was offered to her a very good price and with the number of rooms that she needed. She was making the decision to buy one of the most expensive items she had ever bought based on a plan and a perspective of the exterior of the house. When I analyzed the design I saw that these spaces were all proportionately smaller than what you would normally desire and it would be impractical. I explained the size of these spaces comparing them to other existing areas in her house and she immediately understood that this was not only a very bad design but also a space she would not be able to live in.  

We live most of our lives within spaces that should have been designed according to our needs but most probably were not. Our house, our places of work, study, entertainment, exercise and worship should specifically address our design needs because we spend almost all our lives in them. Inadequate building design affects us every day of our lives, it reduces our productivity, deteriorates our state of mind, influences negatively our creativity, costs us extra money in maintenance, lighting, temperature control and it could even hurt us physically. Everyone has the obligation to influence the adequateness of the design in space they live. Only when you are educated in the design process, you are able to positively add to the process. You have to learn the basics of the design process and the design variables, you have to learn to organize your own environmental needs and express them in writing, you need to learn how to evaluate alternative solutions, and you need to learn the basics of graphic communication.  

Experience tells me it is much better to erase and redraw a mistake in paper than it is to tear something down and rebuild it. People often complain that the designer failed to understand their needs when they use the final product, but in a great part this is caused by the lack of understanding of how much and how soon the user must become involved in the planning and design process. Most importantly is the need to understand that his involvement must occur very early in the planning and design process.  

Presently only designers are trained in design evaluation, and designers mostly lecture and write books for other designers. In a way I feel that we, designers are talking to ourselves but nobody's paying attention. We need to educate everyone on the most basic principles of the design process and through this method make them capable of doing better design evaluations. To do this we need to speak in simple terms and try to reach as many persons as possible. First of all we need to communicate the need and importance of design. The importance of design is intimately connected to our perception of the permanence of its product.  

Our world changes so rapidly that we loose the sense of permanence of things and thus the importance of their existence. If we tend to do this eventually we loose the importance of our own existence. Techniques of rapid demolition and construction have enabled us to view construction as an instant disposable item, very different than the way buildings were understood until the 1900's. However, the cost of new construction and the growing need of basic shelter for more people will eventually be the moving economic force for the conservation of our available resources, existing buildings. It is true that many times it is cheaper to demolish and start over than it is to remodel or restore, many buildings will be demolished in the centuries to come to build new ones, but it is impractical economically to assume that this will be the case for every building. We need to go back, when planning a new building, to the assumption that it may last for decades and maybe centuries to come, and give the design and planning process serious thought. 

"We have to get people, states and buildings thought-built."  
Frank Lloyd Wright.  

Today we have thousands of buildings in existence and in use from many centuries ago. Many of the buildings we make today may survive for centuries. The empire state building was built in about one year, the beginnings of instant construction, but it may well last several centuries. The existence of instant construction leads us to believe that there exists also the possibility of producing instant building design. I welcome instant construction but we must avoid the danger of believing that instant design could be possible. The only possible instant design is a bad design. It is much more difficult to find a bad design for a mass-produced object like a car, a pen or a briefcase than it is to do a bad design for a building. Mass-produced articles are usually well thought and designed before they are repeated hundreds of times. These mass-produced objects have usually a short lifespan that has much less influence and importance in the quality of your life than the building in which you live or work.  

Construction is also available as a mass-produced object. One problem is that these structures cannot respond to the many variables of design required for each specific place, function, and user. Standard prefabricated building structures are usually conceived as a design for an "average" person.  

"The average person doesn't exist, and so by designing buildings for the average person one is designing for non-existing people."   
Aldington and Craig   

The housing industry is the most important example of design for the average. How can we influence the design that is ultimately decided by banks as the average house throughout the country? This is the most difficult task of all and it takes more time.  

Everyone who buys a house directly influences the designs of the houses to come. All of those involved in the housing market also influence the design of houses, people talk to realtors, developers and bankers and eventually many of them influence each other in their approach to design. I believe that one approach in houses is to leave flexible and unfinished as much of the space distribution as possible. The final owner will complete and adjust the design according to his needs, as they usually do but with fewer limitations.  

For example many persons like small kitchens because they do not cook much but they would rather have a larger living area, while others really need and use the kitchen in a way that it becomes part of the living area. You could build and sell a house without a division between kitchen, dining and living and without kitchen counters and let the owner complete the design according to his needs. There are many standard steel prefabricated structures often built with the justification that they will be used only as temporary buildings. There are hundreds of thousands of temporary buildings today that have lasted for the past 25 years, ugly and rusted. The practical reality is that they eventually become a permanent eyesore and a limitation for the image and physical development of the users.  

Many architects have to design the empty shell of a building and leave the design uncompleted. In the design of many office and commercial buildings open interior spaces are left vacated for future rental. The spaces you live in become the stage to your life; the need for them to be of the highest quality transcends your own existence. I am concerned with the design of spaces built to be lived in. These spaces should be designed to be habitable in the broadest sense of the word. Your habitat should be more than your place of living it should be your refuge, your dwelling. The user is the protagonist in this stage. 

The User 

Users are what differentiate an artist or sculptor from a building designer. In recent years designers have tried to gain input from the users or future users of a building by different methods. Typical methods were those imported from the social sciences of gathering information from the users by interviews and questionnaires. 

The results have not been encouraging and most professionals have abandoned the ideas for lack of practicality. Some designers came to believe that since the social sciences are inexact the information we could gather from the users was not useful. Many conclusions just took too much effort to come up with obvious observations that any designer already knows. Other designers complained that the user's replies showed that he did not understand the problems and their input was neither serious nor valuable. Obviously many users did not know what was being asked from them and gave inadequate replies because of the lack of education in the process of design. In general there was the intent of integrating several research and psychology professions with architectural design for the first time and many were asking the wrong questions to confused people whose answers were misleading.  

In spite of these natural blunders of developing new processes, many designers continue to work in the development of new ideas and methods to integrate the psychology and social behavior of people into the design process. We, the users, will live our lives inside buildings we help create directly or indirectly. More than anyone else, we users need to appreciate and understand the importance of integrating the user's psychological needs into building design.  

A building should reflect the personality of both the owner and the user. Many times the building owner is not the user or the only user. A large corporation or a government agency that needs a design has probably many owners and many users who have often conflicting needs. Although the final decision is usually taken at the top of the chain of command, there are many design decisions to be taken along the way and many ways to influence them. Persons who sincerely get involved in the design process can really make a difference in the final product by helping managers and supervisors think of the problems and needs that will help shape the design program.  

I find myself everyday trying to do the insurmountable task of explaining what the design process is to everyone whose input I need to produce a design. Designers needs as many people as possible to understand the process in order to make better products. Only someone who can understand your needs can appropriately design a space for you, but only you can explain your needs to the designer. It is very important that the user, the manager and the owner are able to communicate their needs. This is the first step towards a good building design. I feel that in many cases inadequate design surges from the lack of education of the user in the process of design and lack of communication mechanisms to create a true involvement of both the designer and the user. Sometimes bad design is a direct product of a person uneducated in design. It is easier and more useful for most people to learn to analyze building design than to try to learn to design a building. It takes years of education and practice to learn to design a building.  

Architects, Interior Designers & Space Planners are specialists in the design of habitable spaces. A product designed by a professional knowledgeable, educated and who practices regularly is no guarantee that it will be adequate but given the right input, the probabilities of success are greatly increased. 

Understanding the Process  

Design is a process not a product. Hopefully, architecture is the final product of the building design process. Persons who think they can design a building, but really do not know how, usually draw the first thing that comes to their mind and if it more or less works, they are done. This is just what a design is not.  

Design is a process of juggling with hundreds of alternatives at one time, coming back and forth, every time improving on the previous product. Design is a never-ending process that at sometime is frozen and built only to be continued sometime afterwards. At some point in life you will probably be asked information necessary to design a space according to your needs. You should be prepared to give the designer the necessary input to produce the spaces you need. You will also need to know how to evaluate if the planned process and product reflects what you really want or need.  

Usually people do not pay much attention to the beginning of the design process, determining their design needs, they just seem to need a product. At a given time many people seem to think exactly what they want, and later they completely change their minds. This reflects the lack of serious involvement in the design process. If they had thought more profoundly all the available alternatives, they would feel sure of their decisions and would be less prone to make changes. Design decisions are not to be taken lightly, they are long-term decisions. Your grandchildren will probably have to live on the mistakes you build today. It is of utmost importance that most people be able to understand and analyze the process of building design that can substantially affect the quality of their lives. 

I believe that most persons can and should be educated to understand the process of design and evaluate its product at a basic level. I would not try to teach people to design buildings for themselves like Christopher Alexander once suggested, this is not practical. People who are not designers dedicate time in their life to other objectives, few would have the necessary time or inclination to become designers. Vitruvius, the ancient roman architect wrote that an architect needed to learn of history, physics, geometry, music, art, astronomy and even some medicine; things have not become much simpler since then.  

Today most people are completely uneducated in the process of design, although they may have been involved for many years in the building industry. Many persons are used to build the first thing that comes to mind and then just keep on changing it along the way. This is the least economical method and most probably the one that will make your life harder. Typically, education in elementary and high schools do not even touch the subject of design. Even in universities the subject of building design is only studied in architecture and interior design schools and in much less detail in some engineering schools. Most engineering schools' curriculums do not address the subject of design much less the subject of spatial design nor the design process. 

Design Analysis 

No building design is perfect; a design can always be improved. Only through the comparison of alternative design solutions has the architectural profession traditionally evaluated the product of design as being better or worse. But sometimes this evaluation itself lacks the process and order that other disciplines have developed to evaluate a product on it's own merits. Architectural design competitions are typical examples of how difficult it is to evaluate a design. 

"No competition ever gave the world anything worth having in architecture. The jury itself is picked average. The first thing done by the jury is to go through all the designs and throw out the best and the worst ones, so, as an average; it can average upon an average. The net result of any competition is an average by the average of averages."  
Frank Lloyd Wright 

It is very difficult to evaluate design solutions, especially for someone not knowledgeable of the process of design. Yet, people who make the final design decisions are the owners, users, managers and politicians who usually lack the knowledge of not only how to produce a good design but more importantly how to evaluate a building design. It would be impossible to establish a totally planned process of producing a design. Many great designers through history have been trying to find the perfect method to develop a design. 

The very nature of design presupposes the need to juggle with more alternatives than any computer could analyze, opening the way to the random creative perception, which combined with an incredible amount of hard work, can produce a good design. It would also be impossible to develop a method to invariably determine which design is better when compared to another, this would solve many of the teacher's problems at design schools. However, we can develop an educated method that helps us to consider all significant variables, to then determine which design is better from a particular point of view. It is conceivably possible to establish a method to analyze building design. This would not be a method of design, only a way to help you analyze the product. It seems necessary for persons without much design training and convenient for designers.  

A designer is trained to constantly reevaluate his design, going back to the drawing board. A methodological process that would help evaluating the designs would help in the redesign process. I would like to analyze mainly habitable spaces, spaces were people live, not spaces for special machines or equipment that should be designed more for the machine than for people. Spaces designed for machines should be designed mathematically and with the process overtaking the human priority. This is not saying that these places can also be designed more humanely, but that their reason for being and thus the organizing center for design is the machine.  

Also I would like to analyze the beginning of the design process, where most basic decisions are made. It is of utmost importance at the beginning of design that the widest range of options be studied. We must be able to evaluate design solutions both comparatively and individually by their particular merits. To make this analysis I will divide the parameters in two categories related to the design of space: physical and perceptual. In most cases you should start to analyze a design preliminarily in terms of space and then analyze the technical engineering issues required.  

Spatial issues shall be analyzed separately from the technical issues so they can be understood more clearly. Technical issues, which directly affect the use of space, should be given priority and must be analyzed by including it in the space program. 

Design Variables 

In the physical category I will include traditional functional elements like: budget, program, existing conditions or remodeling factor, vehicular and pedestrian flow or circulation, entrances and exits, utilization of space, physical relatedness, adaptability, use of materials, maintenance, security, views, climate and environmental considerations. In the perceptual category I will include the elements related to our comprehension of space like: scale, order, image, sequence and rhythm, historical context, nodes or focal points, lighting, public or private spaces, relationship with nature, permanency, texture and color.