Charrette Sessions
The intense, sharp focus of our charrette design sessions produces impressive results. Provided as part of our complete house design approach, charrette sessions are a design-based, accelerated, collaborative project management system involving all project decision-makers and our team in one location for a specific length of time. These concentrated planning sessions eliminate the delays caused by back-and-forth decision-making efforts among the client’s team while helping to contain costs.
Concept Design
Architectural design solutions are achieved by listening to the client and incorporating the needs conveyed as essential elements in a residence that creatively expresses the design criteria and fulfills the aspirations of the homebuyer. Our process consists of the following steps:
• Schematic design – This first phase begins with the development of a building program, prepared based on interviews and conferences with all involved members of the client’s team. The document will establish space relationships and circulation needs, in addition to determining specific design criteria. Upon approval of the program, schematic design documents that illustrate the scale and relationship of the project components will be prepared.
• Preliminary Design – Upon approval of the schematic, a preliminary design concept will be established which identifies the structural limits, character and major building components. This phase will also feature the structure’s exterior image, development of site utilization, floor plan requirements and building code compliance.
• Construction Documents – Upon completion of preliminary design development, we will prepare documents defining the components of the structure, which include: site design and development; architectural design development; plumbing design; mechanical design; electrical design; ADA compliance; Florida Building Code compliance; and charrette sessions.
Floor Plans and Elevations
LBB’s unique complete house design concept permits an unprecedented flexibility in creating floor plans and elevations that give production homebuilders a marketing advantage, with technology that saves builders a significant amount of time and prevents costly setbacks due to repeated errors in plans.
For each home model, we design a base plan with variants. The base plan allows the builder to use the same foundation and framing to support different elevation design options – for example, window, entryway, garage and porch locations. Floor plans are designed with a selection of space allocation options to best suit the homebuyer’s lifestyle.
Our custom Sheet Selector application provides time-saving technology by allowing project team members to use an automated project-based method to create Design Web Format (DWF) books. The same application also offers batch DWF book creation, so that books do not have to be created individually. Because the base plan for a model house may comprise more than 100 different drawing sheets, the DWF Sheet Selector allows us to pull the sheets needed for a lot-specific house under construction.
This customized system allows the engineers to make changes to a drawing while dynamically keeping the construction set up to date. All sets are made available to LBB employees through our company intranet, and to clients 24/7 through our Web-based project management system. The ability to maintain drawing sets – for example, one model with three different base elevations – enables a client change to be made in a matter of minutes instead of hours to configure each related elevation book. By keeping drawing sets coordinated for our clients, LBB also minimizes the number of costly construction problems that occur on site as the result of poorly orchestrated drawings.