This project represents the creative integration of the client’s culture and personality. The existing structure was an old florist shop originally designed as a 1960’s Modernist box with storefront widows. Typical of Modern design, the original design used planar surfaces and the volume of the building entry as the aesthetic without any decorative elements. The building was also unsympathetically added on to in later years.

Because the original building was Modern in is original form, to cover it with a traditional façade would have been disingenuous and not real architecture. Thus, the design utilizes a new type exterior cladding technology of composite wood skin. This was used to refine the volume of the original building and not fall into the typical reductivist aesthetic that Modernism is correctly criticized for by Architectural Historians. Also, different colors of the exterior cladding are used to reveal the two tenant spaces carved from the building’s 5,500 gross square foot area. The cladding also solved the issue of covering the exterior in an economical way.

The client’s idea, scale and means were successfully integrated into a cohesive whole.