It’s ironic that one of my early post starts out advising you to not to focus on your project’s cost. Anybody who knows me, knows that I’m a fanatic about wrangling projects into shape and meeting budgets. They would be surprised at my recommendation.
But, at the earliest stages of a project it’s best to give your architect freedom to create a vision for the project. Good architects will often see things in a new way and bring all their experience and creativity to the project, sometimes in unexpected and exciting ways.
Don’t close doors too early just because they “seem too expensive.” While it might turn out to be well beyond your budget, this aspirational project can be seen as a master plan, possibly to be scaled back or phased over years. Sometimes the promise of a project can generate the energy to actually raise a truly surprising amount of money.
My client—- a small college with an endless list of program needs and deferred maintenance projects, including seismic upgrading of two historic stone buildings abandoned after the Loma Prieta earthquake. These two buildings were the symbolic core of the campus and yet seemed destined to just waste away, vacant. As they had limited resources, they chose to perform a number of modest renovations throughout the campus, what seemed like a safe small bite. However, after careful early planning, it became clear that even this was a mouthful, more than they anticipated. At a crucial early meeting, my client concluded that if they had to spend that much for a small fraction of their needs, they could stretch their fund raising to more than twice what they had planned if they could deliver the two historic buildings. And they did.
However, dream only in the most general programmatic ways and do not commit a lot of money. This step can be very conceptual and shouldn’t involve a lot of complex detailed drawings or engineering studies.
Follow link to:
The Very Early Budget