Stop 2 of 8 · Weekly
Brief to concept
The client brief, the site notes and the existing conditions plan in; a concept narrative, a space plan checklist and the questions the client has to answer before anyone draws.
What a brief actually looks like
Nobody hands Nadine a brief. She gets an email with a paragraph in it, a walkthrough where she wrote six pages of notes on her phone, a lease exhibit, and an existing conditions plan exported out of AutoCAD or Revit that says more about the building than the client ever will. The concept has to come out of all four, and the parts that are missing have to come back as questions the same week.
What changes when Claude does part of this is not the concept. It is that the read back happens in four minutes instead of at the end of the first draft. You find out that nobody has said how many exam rooms, or whether the corridor is a means of egress the tenant shares, before you have spent a day drawing around a guess.
The three documents that come out
| Document | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Concept narrative | Two pages the client approves, written around the constraints |
| Space plan checklist | Every room, its adjacency and the thing that governs it |
| Open questions | What Nadine needs answered before schematic design starts |
The third one is the one that saves the fee. Send it as a numbered list with a date next to each item, and the client who does not answer question four owns the delay.
Here is everything I have on a new tenant improvement: the client brief, my site notes and the existing conditions export. [paste the client brief and attach the notes and the plan] Read them the way a project architect would on day one. First, the programme as you understand it, room by room, with a count where a count was given. Second, the constraints you can see in the site notes and the plan, marked structural, mechanical, egress, landlord or code to verify. Third, everything a schematic design would need that none of these documents answers. Do not fill a gap with a typical value.
Write the concept narrative for this project in my studio voice: two pages, no adjectives I did not give you. Open with the programme in one paragraph. Then the three constraints the plan is organised around and what each one forces. Then the design idea in plain language, room by room. Then what stays and what goes. Mark any statement that depends on an assumption from your read back with [confirm] and list those at the end.
Turn the narrative into a space plan checklist. One row per room: room name, approximate area if the brief gave one, who or what it serves, the rooms it must be next to, the rooms it must not be next to, and the governing item, which is one of daylight, plumbing, egress, acoustics, equipment or none. Label the source of every adjacency as brief, site notes or assumption. Excel.