Click here to read our manifesto of lyrical sustainable design.
The manifesto is in three parts – together they describe the principles behind our work, the techniques we use, and an excerpt of a parable of lyrical sustainable design called “The House of Four Seasons.”
Click here to read about Northwest Romantic Modernism.
More recently I wrote another manifesto of sorts that describes the kind of houses we’d like to design, once in a while.
Why a manifesto?
In the late seventies, as a student in architecture school at the University of Toronto, before each project we were asked to write a “manifesto” outlining our personal and architectural aspirations for the project at hand. Our professors would then use these documents to check our progress and evaluate our designs. I returned to that idea before opening my practice in Seattle in 1992. I coined the phrase “lyrical sustainable design” to suggest my interest in the ethical, technical and poetic aspects of green architecture. That document has formed the basis for our work since then. To give credit where credit is due, I was inspired in good part by Bill McDonough’s 1992 Hannover Principles, Peter Prangnell’s teachings at the University of Toronto when I was a student there, and the writings of Kentucky farmer and essayist Wendell Berry.