An empirical and systematic approach to design could mean engaging and allowing an experience to take precedence over an presumptuous aesthetic and that all approaches to design or the method to arrive at a design is informed by many actions that follows the first emotions. Given that nearly all of our internal design processes have become a familiar pattern, we have started to examine these protocols and relearn them where necessary and draw maps that can be read and understood by everyone we employ OOR work with in the studio. The theory is always more interesting than the actual product but then again it is nearly always that the product of a tested technique or a learned and familiar method or protocol can be designed to be examined more closely so that the final intended or prescribed or known aspects of the method is in the first place tangible,and the final output we believe tend to be more satisfactory than if it were not. Drawing inspiration from Nature, reflecting on many different aspects of architecture and consciously engaging the visual arts, cinematic arts, literature and the performing arts has become one of our adopted and specified methodology and routine. Also unique to our studio is how we reexamine the clients brief almost to the point of redesigning it from scratch. This examination and inquiry is made well in advance, before embarking on the actual design of the building. This precedent strategy is a style we adopt and has become our design approach which is our DNA or process genealogy. Such is deeply rooted in our ethos and psyche and we know by advancing these thinking processes into the higher realms we can begin to approach the ultimate experience and the unknown propositions with more certainty and better control. Not only do these techniques help us develop a rapidly branching methodology it also challenges us to try new ways of construction and designs never before thought possible for some of the most basic criteria set down or proposed by our clients. In designing bathrooms for example, we took the conceptual approach that sanitation and cleansing activities were like purification activities carried out in temples of water, or that a private garden or an outdoor terrace can be seen as a living room. And so we embrace such phenomena with enthusiasm and unfettered zest. zeidler&lim
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