A Statement of Vision
Architect Louis Kahn once said, "The city should be a place where a little child, walking through the streets, can imagine what he or she would like to be someday ."
Mission
The designers and engineers at POLOZ & MAKRIS ARCHITECTS, Ltd. strongly believe that this statement captures well the kind of village, town, or city we should aspire to create. Healthy, appealing spaces where children can dream those dreams...warm, community settings where neighbors pause for a chat in a local café or in front of a favorite boutique or while stopping off at a bench along a pleasant garden walkway. Comfortable places residents, customers, and visitors are eager to return to. In sum, distinctive spaces designed so well that everyone-shopkeeper, restaurateur, working mom, businessperson, and active retiree-will want to call "home."
Diversity Within Unity
An optimal way to achieve this goal while converting "pie in the sky" wishful thinking into living, breathing "community" is the following: adopt an integrated approach toward urban design from the very beginning in which individual parts relate to each other and mesh together like separate, multi-faceted stones of a fine mosaic or pieces of a complex quilt.
Within a holistically designed community of multiple functions and scope-residential and commercial, public and private, interior and exterior, quiet places and lively—clearly identified and differentiated spaces must be designated. When these are carefully designed and integrated, energy and inspiration flow back and forth. All within the boundaries of a brief stroll.
The Architect's Duty
It is the challenge and collective responsibility of architects to deal with neglected sections of our cities. We must find ways to use our skills, taste, sensitivity and technical expertise to reach out and restore those unappealing, less-than-functional sectors to full health. We need to enhance and enliven them and, by doing so, bring back vital new energy to the tattered urban fabric.
Trends vs. Enduring Forms
Our architecture as is described above is an art, deeply committed to civic culture and human scale, not divorced from it. And our design is not concerned with short term trends or three year fashions, but the crafting of tailored hybrid spaces that thread through a community's past, present, and future in countless ways.
A Word About Parking
In the modern world, parking is a priority issue. But parking doesn't have to mean clumsy, artless lots and ugly structures of asphalt and concrete. Parking lends many opportunities for design ingenuity and even aesthetic treatment.
Priority Objective
Ultimately, the point is to create an authentic, multi-functional community, effective and appealing, which not only relates in positive ways to all its parts but reaches out and draws in the greater community as well. Not to take the easy road and hang a collection of uninspired structures on a gray, lifeless grid, as so often happens in suburban America today.
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