Notes on Practice

Maintenance

The rhythm of seasonal attention. Reading surfaces for early signs of change, the difference between repair and replacement, and the quiet accumulation of care across years.

Longevity

What makes a building last — not material strength alone, but legibility, redundancy, and the capacity to be understood and repaired across generations.

Solar Orientation

The most consequential and least reversible decision in a building's life. How a fixed relationship with the sun shapes every room, every season, forever.

Insulation and Thermal Mass

Two strategies for managing heat that work in opposition and in concert. Resistance versus absorption — and the observable difference across seasons and decades.

Ventilation

How a building breathes. Stack effect, cross-ventilation, and the permanent design decisions that determine whether air moves or stagnates.

Landscape and Shelter

The ground around a building as part of its thermal system. Deciduous canopy, windbreaks, evapotranspiration — the slow work of planting and the generational payoff.

Adaptation

Reading an existing structure and working within its logic. The practice of bringing old buildings forward without destroying what made them durable.

Passive Cooling

Heat management through building form. Thermal mass, shade geometry, courtyard effects, and night ventilation — strategies embedded in structure rather than machinery.

Daylighting

How light enters a building and what happens to it once inside. The aperture as both opening and barrier, overhang geometry, and the seasonal shift between welcome and excess.

Water

Water as geological force — groundwater pressure, surface drainage, the roof as catchment, and the long question of a building's relationship with a resource that is always moving.

Energy Generation

The building as energy collector. Photovoltaic surfaces, geothermal exchange, solar thermal — minimal systems embedded in the structure, following the same seasonal arc as the sun.

Dissolution

What happens when a building is beyond repair. The threshold between maintenance and ending, the careful work of taking apart, and what the site becomes afterward.