Enigma: Making useful and engaging architecture is not about, or limited to, the logic of problem-solving or service. Engaging form is enigmatic, elusive, open, and hard to know fully. Only the architect who makes an enigma of the solution is involved in making art.

Art: History tells our story. Science explores how things work. Philosophy interrogates our beliefs. Art, as design thinking is the only human discipline that has the power to ask who we might become and how we might be better. Every architectural project requires artistic, scientific, historical, and philosophic means of thinking/work. Any act of design/building has a consistent and pervasive impact on our lives and could be an agent to be critical, therapeutic, and educational.  When we see art as a creative means for the search for public good it ceases to be a personal aesthetic conceit and has the power to build on and make culturally impactful work. We strive to create spaces, which raise questions and awaken us to experience by inviting inductive discoveries. In this way, we strive for form that is enlivening and didactic.

Engagement: Engaging buildings entangle us in a world of difference and description. Explanation and its forces of simplification are necessarily pushed to the background.

Critical Practice: Practice critically. Challenge the simplistic, nominal, and conceptual bias common in our time. Avoid borrowed culture and question the value of precedents. Search for work that springs from the soil, weather, economy, local craft, and social context. Cross boundaries. Create surprise, joy, wonder, and desire for social, economic, and environmental health. Build resistance to the endless structures of authority and instruction that frame social divisions and constrain the power of diversity.  Empower the possibilities of individual growth.

Iteration: Build a practice of repetition and research. Test ideas and materials over many projects. Don’t simply repeat a detail. Increase our understanding of its make-up and performance. Re-make the detail with more refined knowledge. Take the time required to make drawings, models, and mock-ups that raise questions that improve design quality and performance.

Ethic: Make complete and effective construction drawings and specifications that clearly describe the construction, communicate an ethic of quality and craft, and promote fairness in the process.

Ideas: Never proceed without an idea. Architectural ideas are larger and more encompassing than the program or site. They entangle us first in questions of nature and culture, then gravity, light, materials, labor, and use. A formal idea attempts to make the ideal present in the real, the abstract in the concrete. Ideas reduce the infinite possibilities to allow focus. Ideas, when large and compelling enough, envelope the owner, staff, community, and contractor. They become the mission of the work that helps carry all through the tedious and complicated work to make any project real.

Carved Value: Overcome the fragmentary, additive reality of design and construction. Create therapeutic figures/spaces that appeal to preverbal qualities of experience. Avoid modeled assembly and additive work (products and ideas) so easily coopted by language. Search for form that integrates formal strategies, ideas, materials, systems, and products. When confronted with a figure of integrity, we measure our own.

Pragmatic Value: Ideas are valuable when they produce productive consequences. We are pragmatic architects. Search for meaningful form through ideas and material that can be manifest and verified in witness.

Economy: Quality requires economy. It seems essential to avoid additive work.

Responsibility: Practice with integrity and character. Be a leader, responsible and fair to both client and contractor. Be a leader in the process, and work for social, economic, and environmental health. That is our expertise. To maintain this authority, we must be students of the communities where we work, know the costs, and the contractual relationships, and have good design and construction documents. Take responsibility for our leadership.

Resolute: Do not compromise our design effort to accommodate expediency or mediocrity. Be open to criticism and improvement no matter where we are in the process. Never send out drawings or other instruments of service that are not at the level of our intentions or are incomplete.

Wake of Interest: Create a wake of interest. Build desire for our firm and work. Don’t market or sell the firm, let the work serve as an example of our values and passion.

Development: Do design development. Allow time for strong ideas to take hold in schematic design, then do thorough and complete design development to allow the development of the scope and detail for the project in a way that prepares it for the refinement and the translation of the design information into construction documents.

Scope and Detail: Scope first, then Detail. Do details/drawings that define the scope first. Add other details conservatively. Always work toward one detail for many conditions.

Accuracy: Accuracy is faster than speed. Slow down, prioritize, be careful, thoughtful, and sure. Mistakes happen when we rush. Mistakes cost much more time and money than any supposed savings achieved by rushing.

Money and Time: Control the money, time, and scope. Do not start a project if the funds are inadequate, the time is impossible, or the scope is ill-defined. Keep the variables in balance. Budget the project appropriately and check it at each phase.

Trust the Work: Use the drawings and specifications during construction. Check every decision, every question, every time. “Let’s go look at the drawings, specifications and submittals.” Don’t feel pressured to answer immediately.

Be Formal: Follow the contract. (Write better contracts.) Be formal in all aspects of practice, and communication, even on the smallest project. Document the process, make clear submittals, and make and keep notes of discussions and decisions.

Feed the Bird: Feed the bird. Anticipate the construction process. Construction is a long, slow negotiation. Provide emphasis and critical information at the right time to impact and maintain the construction quality. Too early, and the information will overwhelm. Too late, and well, it’s too late.

Craftmanship: Teach craft. Often the architect knows more about the quality of craftsmanship in materials and construction than the contractor or subcontractor specialists. This is the result of contractors becoming managers of low-skilled, low-cost labor. There are few journeymen. The ironic thing is that an architect’s knowledge is secondhand (head knowledge without handwork). But by teaching the value of craft and holding the requirements of quality during construction, we help the contractors, laborers, the industry regain the search for skill, and achieve quality for our projects.

Chemistry: Chemistry is important. A great project is only achievable if the architect, client, and contractor work together with mutual respect and patience. Don’t take the project if the chemistry is not right. It’s not worth it, and it won’t be a successful project.

The Machine: Don’t borrow money. Work to achieve high quality buildings within the funds available. Plan carefully and be efficient. Raise fees. Keep the overhead low. Pay staff at the highest rate possible. Maintain a studio that can choose the next project. Don’t create a machine that needs to be fed.

Time: Take time off. Travel, take field trips, and experience cities, buildings, landscapes, and ideas outside of our familiar settings. Keep the practice in perspective. Don’t overwork. Protect creative time by controlling the schedule. Protect time off by controlling the schedule.

Collaborate: Maintain a teaching studio. Enrich the project with diverse points of view. Grow a studio of individuals who become excellent generalists.

Collaborators: Develop relationships with consultants, suppliers, and fabricators. Trust them and challenge them. Be loyal to them, and they will be loyal to you.

Avoid Novelty: Build on your experience. Limit the palette (ideas, materials, and products) to allow depth and greater performance over time. Keep it in the family (of ideas, materials, and products). Avoid novelty for its own sake. There is no surprise in novelty.

Origins: Always start/return to square one, the square you have not thought about in a while but the square that the person you are talking to may not have thought of at all. Restate the obvious. Review the origins.

Mock it Up: Plan ahead, use a mockup as a tool to engage and structure the team and work, record the search, evolve design presentations, deepen design development investigations, and build complete construction documents with all components and assemblies.

Listen but Lead: Listen carefully. The client knows more about the program than you do. The consultant knows more about the systems than you do. The contractor knows more about construction than you do.  Listen carefully to the details, the implications, the relations. Enter the world of each discipline, but lead the process, because we know more about the whole of the process and design than the client, consultant or contractor.

Success: Measure success by our clients’ satisfaction and joy not by awards programs.

Servant Leader: An architect does more than provide a service. An architect is a servant leader, which for us has come to mean, a teacher.  A teacher reveals the public good when others cannot see it.  A teacher explains the value of durability when the prevailing interest is in superficiality.  A teacher strives for seriousness in a time of triviality. A teacher promotes diversity equity and social and environmental health in the face of forces of division and exploitation.

Discipline: Principles are most important when they are hard to hold.

Research: Learn through experience and research. Be aware of tangible and intangible character and qualities of a place and its people. Allow your research to teach. Instead of simply asking a question or identifying a problem, research the issues and propose answers or solutions for discussion.  Keep clear notes of your research so that others (and you, after it has faded in your memory) can learn from and expand it.

Institutional Memory: Institutional memory is the keeping of records (in digital and/or paper files) of anything we do in our daily tasks that will be done again or referenced again in order to improve business efficiency and in order to harvest knowledge from past projects to produce better future work. Everyone’s basic responsibility is to utilize and maintain this institutional memory to avoid re-inventing the already invented, with the greater goal of innovation. All of our work is valuable beyond the task at hand if we record it clearly and make it accessible to others.

Entanglement: We need only consider our own breath to understand how we ground existence within the infinity of time and space. We take in a breath from the infinite, and it gives sustenance to the finite. Neither can be made more or less by the interaction, but it is the interaction that brings life. We are all involved in the maintenance of the process. We either promote or suppress it. Our breath is space and time, and in breathing it, we dwell in it. If our lungs cease to support the interaction, we die.  In art and architecture, the things that we create should promote the interaction. The concrete must breathe the abstract. The known must breathe the unknown. The present must breathe the future and the past.

Innovation: We innovate. Precedent can be valuable, or it can be binding. When a problem (from a design problem to a technical detail to a procedural question) seems like an exception to the rule or like a thing that has never been done, recognize the precedents so you can criticize them and foster innovation. Force the consideration of how the present condition fits into common knowledge or is like something done before. If this consideration does not spark a solution, it will at a minimum, help illuminate the scope of the problem.

Consequences: Architecture is public work. Over the past 158 years, we have seen the profession evolve from civic art into a service business influenced by private interests and priorities. The movement towards service has also been a movement away from risk, public leadership, and relevancy.   Architects now ask how to regain public value. Value cannot be claimed, it has to be created.  This means risk and leadership. We should measure our work not on accomplishments of service or appearance, but on the public effects and benefits in the community. The public consequences of the work are a much larger and truer measure of the value of practice. We ask ourselves, “What are the effects and qualities that we create outside the lot lines?” This is a path to relevancy.

Form: The practice of architecture today is often overly focused on appearance or ultra-performance, and as a result, it unwittingly falls prey to the most superficial measures of value, and market taste. Form for us is neither the thing nor its consumption. We work for the space, nature, and quality of the transactions between us.

Public Value: The establishment of the service professional has developed as a criticism of the modern utopian project for architecture. This trend has robbed architects of the purpose (value) of architecture. A service architect, working without a culturally critical (educational) position, will be seen as necessary but not valuable. Many architects suffer a loss of “why”.

Community: Communities have origins, stories, and connections to family, institutions, the land, and weather. They function or fail in a particular economy. Effective planning begins with a commitment to listening and research. Communities are complex organisms made up of human transactions, both private and public.  The quality of a community is measured in its resident’s well-being and members’ sense of belonging, in their pride and legacy, in their sense of security and opportunity for growth.  This is the planning goal; to affect these deeper measures of quality.  Transportation, infrastructure, tax revenue, and access to food, jobs, or recreation are systems; tools, and resources to make a better community.  Understanding the deeper needs, stresses, and desires that characterize a community is essential to fostering its healthy revival and growth.

First 10%: The foundations of innovation are established quickly. Ideas flow early from desire, need and opportunity. Most projects are defined in the first 10% of the time of work. Architects are often hired after the project is defined, after the potential for innovation has passed. Sites, budgets, scope and even aspirations are usually defined before an architect is hired. It’s not graphic talent that makes a great project. It’s the planning possible within the first moments of a project that sets the criteria to allow innovation. The quality of a project, its value and its innovations, are planned before they are realized.

Cultivation: Ideas require cultivation, growth, and maintenance. For us, the flow of design work moves from the freedom of proposing, to planning and the iterative craft of making to the care of maintenance.

Imagination: Imagination is the work to make a thing real.

Expand Practice: Why do we use our training on such a small part of the life of a building? Architects are trained to build worlds; full and comprehensive. Architects look beyond the limitations and see the possibilities. We acquire the knowledge to conceive of projects, provide innovative designs, and care for the buildings to extend their life. Expand practice to capitalize on our knowledge, skill, and potential.

Create Value: The design of a building is labor-intensive. Design takes time. Designing great building projects and successful communities requires investment in a rich, long practice and cannot be achieved in a single project.  The architect brings this growing value to each project.  It makes no sense for the value of the practice of architecture to be solely based on the hourly wages that can fit in the limits of the owner/architect service contract.  Create value. Expand practice to be measured by the value created.

Triple Bottom Line: If each building/intervention fundamentally changes the experience of the city, (which we believe) then the question is, “How does each project help shape the public good?” We believe developments are best crafted from the architect’s hopeful perspective of fostering cultural growth. We ask ourselves, “Is a project economically viable, but more importantly, does it contribute to the growth of the micro and macro economies?” “Does the project serve to strengthen and expand meaningful social connections and promote mature diversity and density?” “Is the project ecologically sound and healthy?” Development, for us, is a triple bottom-line calculus.

Mature Diversity: Sustainable communities are best achieved by mature diversity. Dynamic communities include people of different race, gender, religion, economic level, and educational achievement and provide access to a variety of housing types and sizes, recreation, institutions, services, and jobs.

Meaning: Meaning is established first in the architecture of visceral presences, material, light, scale, and human posture. On top of this spatial haptic foundation, use, stories, relationships, and connections can be layered. Feeling first then language. Form: shape and structure first, then content.

Detail: As we get closer to an architecture of quality, it engages us with detail, material life, joinery, ingenuity, and handwork. Too often modern form is conceived from a distance leaving only vapid surfaces where sealant joints become the only details experienced up close.

Embodied Loyalty: Public work is the value of architectural form that simultaneously serves and challenges culture. The site of public work is multivalent. At once we owe loyalties to our most intimate relationships, our partners, friends, and family. Then we form space to teach and grow civitas redressing our loyalties to our streets, neighborhoods, city, and region; then encompassing even larger loyalties of our country, culture, environment, and species.

Public Good: The horizon of our work is not profit or ego, it is public good.

Best Idea Wins: The Best Idea Wins. Innovative ideas are the most valuable asset a creative organization can offer, and as such, Duvall Decker values the voices of all collaborators in the work. Constructive criticisms and suggestions on design solutions, standard practices, daily processes, operations and quality control are expected and encouraged. While employees may be assigned to one project or work primarily for one company, Duvall Decker recognizes the value of each employee’s “Roaming Rights” to voice their ideas about another project, policy or company practice. The value of this practice is in the belief that it is the building and quality of the environment we are making that matters more than any position, authority or ego. We value learning from each other and the collaborative practice of recognizing the best idea from each of us. The best idea wins, every day.