Months ago I was contacted to do a design proposal for a friend, and by chance I had requested to visit the site before embarking on the job after the survey was provided. This is against the new norm which is just requesting for the survey and proceeding from there.
Fortunately for me it was discovered that I will rather need a topographical survey which would have provided me with an accurate depiction of this property and a site section to fully utilize this landscape. With an elevation of about gradient of about a metre from the main access point in the front to the back, one will appreciate the importance of conducting site inventory.
Site inventory and analysis are considered to be not only valuable but also the first step in the design process, and by now is not a necessary consideration or requirements by most practicing architects on this side of the world. Most of construction requirements that ought to have been well thought of at the design phase are now decided on sites which do not always fully address or really solve an impeding situation.
Back in the days in school, you hardly can make a presentation during jury without your site inventory and analysis even though majority of such are repetitive or “copy and paste” like I used to call it. Can you blame the students for producing a repetitive site inventory and analysis for different abstract sites when their lecturers are also too lazy to outsource and provide real challenging sites to aid their teaching? In fact, to some of us, we considered those first two sheets (inventory and analysis) as add-ons to enable us have more sheets pasted on walls for presentations not because we actually believed that our designs are supposed to evolve from data collected from conducting a proper site inventory.
Information gathered from this particular site fueled the site analysis of the existing conditions and features that were later used in integrating both the natural and manmade systems on the design process.
A split level design solution was considered to help capitalize on the site strengths while minimizing negative effects from site weaknesses and constraints.
It is good to note that the adjourning property already considered using a bulldozer to excavate his own plot there by making the property sit uncomfortably and unprofessionally below the natural ground level. In fact, he will need a retaining wall again round the fence to prevent it from falling over. We approached our design from a technical point of view with a site section across the 1200 meters gradient, which revealed a 6level split levels will best address the constraints. Another restriction is the fact that the client had initially stood against having just too many steps, so we had to design the steps across the horizontal split levels making the slope not ambiguously noticeable on the interior except for the changes in the headroom which can also be kept at a constant level if we both insisted.
In the end, we were able to win our argument of not having to use bulldozer to excavate the whole top soil, saves additional costs that would arise at every stage of a bad and not carefully thought process. With this we feel it is important to share and encourage prospective clients and colleagues in the industry to ensure site inventories and analysis are embedded in our requirements before a design is done.
Also maybe our schools have different definitions but visiting a site is a site investigation, the result (on paper/representation) is a site inventory/analysis. They need to do more by enforcing a site visit before any design proposal is developed.
