WE BELIEVE GREAT DESIGN IS ABOUT YOUR LIFE
Reaching Out
My name is Daniel Lee, and I’d like to tell you a story.
When our phones ring in our Alexandria, Virginia, offices, I often pick up the receiver myself. May I share with you about one such call?
"I want to build a French house," the caller said. "Not an American interpretation of a French house. Do you know the difference?"
I laughed. Yes, I knew the difference. I had grown up in France and count French architecture among my many professional passions."I have the simplest of tastes. I am always satisfied with the best." - Oscar Wilde
That gentleman's home is complete today, and his family's love of France is evident in every room. Their home feels authentic because it truly is authentic – in its materials, details and architectural form. Even more importantly, their home fits their detailed needs, life story and aspirations to perfection.
Every project begins when someone reaches out. When you have explored our site, you may have questions. Please don’t hesitate to contact me personally.Mutual Learning
I have a hand-written note framed on the wall of my office. It says in part,
“I longed for an old-world feeling, but I didn’t know how to create it. Daniel, you came alongside me and helped me create my life-long dream.”
I worked closely with this client. We traveled, dreamed and worked together for three years, taking her project from concept to completion. We had continuing, engaging conversations about her tastes and reactions to the design throughout its evolution.
"When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece."— John Ruskin, 1819 - 1900
Like many of my clients, she brought her own passionate, personal view to the project. That passion, with ours, became a great shared sense of achievement as she grew to see a new work of architecture reflect and become an integral part of her family’s life and enduring legacy.
Mutual learning is an essential time for us to share visions, aspirations, concerns and hopes. Ultimately your project will reflect intangible goals or aspirations. For homes, we usually identify the key character of a client’s inner life. This is why we must both learn from each other in the process. Looking within, helps our firm shape the space that will surround you. You may find this process one of the most gratifying parts of working with our firm.
Research and Visualization
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."— Albert Einstein
"I had no idea it would be so beautiful…." I hear this from every client when they see our first visual suggestions for their project. Like a sonogram of a child in its early development, visualization gives all of us a glimpse of the road ahead and provides proof that the client is part of an important creative process. We can take what you have imagined and make it almost real, using handsome freehand sketches, watercolor washes, detailed scale models – even animated cutting edge computer visualizations.
With our visual suggestions we aim to evoke deeply emotional, even mythical responses from you, because we believe the creation of architecture, the distinguishing of one’s place in the world, is a strong human need. This is why we make sure you see the directions we’re going together, so we can refine or change key elements of a vision to make the project truly your own.
"Art does not reproduce the visible...it makes visible."— Paul Klee
To capture the right spirit and detail in these renderings, we sometimes travel as a firm with our clients to see the architecture that inspires them. Many clients choose our firm precisely because of our renowned expertise in various styles and attention to authenticity, and our ability to transcend style to meet unique personal needs.
This unique approach provides all of our projects with a fresh but timeless spirit, appropriate to their owners. A great home has heart and can tell a great story, through its vocabulary, supporting form, details and proportions. Likewise, memorable public spaces welcome people into a place of appropriate public spirit – perhaps one of dignity, majesty, strength, whimsy, humility, serenity, conflict, and civic discourse or, in the right circumstances, even holiness.
Whatever story, sense or spirit you wish to convey through your project, our firm employs unmatched, meticulous visualization and research to help define and carry that message.
Careful Instructions
Once your project’s personality is confirmed through visualization and research, we prepare careful detailed instructions for the artisans and technicians who will give your project its final physical form. These instructions normally cover all disciplines, with their preparation consuming the largest block of time prior to construction.
This is the single most important step in assuring that the finished project’s design and quality will fulfill or exceed your expectations developed during the visualization process. All architectural, electrical, mechanical, structural, interiors, ornamental, decorative, landscaping and other specialty disciplines are documented at this time in full detail. These instructions form the basis for negotiation of final pricing and construction contracts with selected general contractors. Composed of many detailed drawings and comprehensive specifications, they are called the Construction Contract Documents.
Advancing Construction
After construction contract negotiations a big day has arrived, and construction begins. Construction Documents from the previous phase serve to guide and control all construction in the field until the project is fully completed. The documents assure that you get the results you expected.
Daniel Lee and the firm remain very active throughout the construction process on your behalf. We continually assist the builder as he seeks to fully understand and complete his work. We monitor his compliance with the detailed instructions, evaluate his requests for payment, and review in detail all shop drawings and other quality control submittals for consistency with the design intent of the project.
"A great building must begin with the immeasurable, must go through immeasurable means when it is being designed and in the end must be unmeasurable."— L. Kahn
If you to wish to change the direction of the design midstream, we assist you in determining the precise details to be adjusted, modify the Contract Documents, and coordinate with the builder to mitigate impact of the change on schedule and costs.
For our clients who travel extensively or have heavy work demands, we offer to be their sole point of contact or single source for the project, if needed.
To assist in a quality outcome, we are involved and focused on your project until construction is completely finished, every step of the way. And we are always available to serve you after you move in, during the warranty phase and beyond as you wish.
Managing Resources
Protecting your time and money is a stewardship of equal importance to creating a great design.
Responsible stewardship of your resources is itself a craft. What if you have fresh ideas after work has begun? What if we find the right materials but they are halfway around the world?
We help you balance time, resources, and ambitions so that as compelling ideas evolve into built form, you fund them and any inevitable changes, under an agreed stewardship plan. Our mutual priority is to manage the project responsibly, keeping each other fully informed at each step.
From information intake to visualization, design to budgeting, project scheduling to monitoring the actual construction, we walk with you through every step of the project’s stewardship. Our experience and guidance gives you the practical insights you need for a successful project. You will be as pleased by the management of the project as you will be by the impact it has on your family or organization.
Going the Distance
At Daniel Lee Architect, our commitment to architecture and to our clients leads us to undertake extraordinary measures in the pursuit of design excellence and personalized service. We regard the creation of architecture as a sacred trust and responding to the needs of our clients as a calling in life. With Daniel Lee Architect, your needs will be tended to by a carefully selected group of designers, specialists and collaborators, whose ambition will be to create a work of design that reflects your story.
We invite you to read about and visit architecture with us, to experience architecture first hand, whether the styles you want us to see are at home or abroad.
By engaging with us in developing your own understanding of how architecture speaks what has been called the eternal language of the soul, we can build into your project elements and spaces that surpass technical achievements. A legendary car designer expressed our approach this way,
“Strive for perfection in everything you do. Take the best and make it better. When it does not exist, design it.” — Sir Henry Royce
Architecture created in this way has been, and will be, treasured by generations. It is our goal to create a space for you with enduring character.
BUILDING TO LAST
A Whole Greater than it Parts
C.S. Lewis, the noted Christian author and Chair of Medieval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge, once said,
"We do not want merely to see beauty... We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with that beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it."
Architecture ultimately is not merely a technical métier. We believe great architecture pursues something beyond beauty by creating good buildings for good purposes in context. The Eiffel Tower would look wrong in Brooklyn, the Sistine Chapel is more than a ceiling, and the Mona Lisa is not simply about a smile. They each came to life in a context that made their beautiful elements meaningful. But their creators transcended also those contexts by pursuing something deeper, to be united with the source of beauty‚ which is why we still appreciate them today.
“The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.”
— Michelangelo
With our projects, we aim to do the same.
Great architecture renews our sense of nobility and dignity, reminds us of our humanity, refreshes our sense of purpose and can reveal parts of life — beauty, balance, the spiritual — that are too often hidden.
As I work with our clients to visualize their projects, we become specific about materials, textures, details, shapes, and structures. But we are always pursuing larger ends that transcend the assemblage of parts. Materials communicate in concert with textures and shapes. Structures balance with details.
Taken together, in the context of history, of landscape and of human expectations, these elements can create a vibrant, enduring place. This is why technical proficiency is just the beginning of what makes a fine architect. What emerges from great design is not technical, it is soulful.
Timeless Building
Great buildings are beautiful. But timeless buildings go a step further – they are beautiful and built to last.
Notre Dame, Isle de la Cité, Paris -- Every stone of its construction was chosen, chiseled and fitted by hand to last, for generations, as testament to a priceless living faith. Sunlight that beams through her hand blown glass windows on a March afternoon traces a specific moment that will never be repeated, creating an almost tangible calm that is nevertheless present every day of the year for each worshipper, each tourist, whether young or old, male or female.
Notre Dame’s construction and the play of light across her high Nave, binds together the humans within. Even tourists in the place outside share a common, inspiring experience. These experiences link all of us to the many generations of people who have passed near Notre Dame, or worshipped within her walls, during the nearly eight hundred years since the Rose Window was first completed. And so it will continue.
“…Men in those days had convictions, we moderns have opinions, and it requires something more than an opinion to build a gothic cathedral…”— H. Heine
Such timeless buildings embody truths we hold as essential to an understanding of our shared human experience.
People long to create kindred works, true and timeless, even today. We are here to help.
A Sense of Place
Real architecture is meant to create what architects call a sense of place, enriching our cities, by enlivening and anchoring the landscape it rests upon, creating homes and urban places that transcend the notion of pure property to become inspirations.
Whether you experience a building from outside or within, it should be consciously designed to engage you or its occupant in a language that makes sense for that place in that time, and for all time.
“Architecture aims at eternity.”
– Sir Christopher Wren
This sense of place is possible because we bring to our experience of buildings a sensibility that is specific to the present and also universally human. When buildings have a sense of place, they often inspire us to reflect.
The East Garden Court of the National Gallery of Art, in Washington DC., was created for such reflection, and is one of our nation’s finest architectural treasures. Designed by the great John Russell Pope, and commissioned by Andrew W. Mellon in 1935, the court is never used to display paintings or other works of art. It exists simply as a place of great beauty, and for our pure enjoyment alone. Using a carefully proportioned Doric colonnade in cut limestone, and open to the sky above, it contains perhaps one of the most beautiful baroque putti fountains. Visit it and you will have a keener concept of the place itself, and of the sense of place as a goal in great architecture.
A Life with Architecture
When I was a teenager living in France, many years ago, I became close to an international executive with Procter & Gamble and his family. P & G graciously had provided my friend with a car and a home in the western suburbs of Paris.
I remember walking into their home for the first time as though I were there today. A grand home, built of limestone, it had a coolness to the foyer and a clean, clear smell. The ceiling was so high I couldn't help craning my head to look up at it. And the doors between rooms were tall, too, covered with mirrors that made the home seem larger and more luminous.
Straight ahead was a huge staircase (probably made of walnut, now that I'm remembering) that wrapped upwards to the second floor. Behind it was a window that looked out onto a garden that was lush without interfering with sunlight that washed into the foyer.
The house was full of other details burned into my memory: parquet floors, a white bear skin rug, delicately crafted wallpaper featuring Asian garden scenes. But the most magical element of all was how the garden was themed: Faux ruins lay around it, evoking history, collective memories of past empire, and wise words of great thinkers that might still echo if you just listened hard enough.
Architecture has become part of my spiritual, aesthetic and even ethical life. Just as the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul captured the wisdom of an age in architecture, so wisdom is a partner today in my pursuit of responsive and responsible architectural design.
“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.”
-- Ernest Dimnet
My first awakening impression of architecture emerged when I was about six years old. My family moved to France, crossing what seemed to me to be an endless ocean of foreboding, aboard the SS United States, towards the Old World - which became for me the dawning of a New World. We disembarked at Calais and traveled past Paris deep into the sunny center of Southern France. I saw towns, villages, churches and homes of all kinds pass by the windows of our car or train. They had beauty and grace.
Thus began an intensive immersion into the art, architecture and life of France that would change my life.
My first task was to learn French. My parents set up our home in a crumbly old stone house in the Loire Valley, with over-scaled keystones, quoins and high-beamed ceilings. These were wonders to me. And the homes I came to know in those years had a very strong sense of being the possession of the grape arbors, apple orchards, and rolling pastures that surrounded them. It was a land of enchantment for a young American.
“Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.”
-- Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe
Our old house stood some distance from a remote country road, not far from the small Renaissance chateau Azay-le-Rideau. In the night her floors would move. The wind in her eaves howled. I thought of the other people who had heard these sounds in this house - it was my first sense that a home might have a legacy that should be protected. Under those eaves and in that countryside I began to have reveries about architecture, grand spaces, dramatic events, and choices of long-lasting consequence.
As a boy adventuring about and touching old buildings, bridges, fences, chateau walls and stone cottage doors, I started to get the sense that what humans build can capture time in a special way. Here were the works of people long since turned to dust but who built these artifacts for future generations. For me..
Imagine my satisfaction, then, when the phone rang on a recent Monday morning. A client and his wife had just spent the last forty five minutes in the garden we created from the home we had built for them. He said he had been sitting on a wall looking back at the house, taking in the details: the sculpture that made up the pediment, the artistic and personal themes on the house's ornaments. The view, the home, and that morning moment meant so much to him because it evoked his own memories of his life journey, and of France, a country he loved and which he visited as often as he could.
As he told me about his special time in his garden, I was suddenly a teenager in the western suburbs of Paris walking into the home of my executive friend from Procter & Gamble, pushing at a tall door that swayed open onto my future.
Need vs. Desire
Shelter fulfills basic practical need. But as human beings we act on motivations far deeper than need. Architecture is about those motivations, capturing imagination, spirit, promise, story – even love. Think of the Parthenon, the Holocaust Museum, and the Taj Mahal.
Underneath these motivations lies that eternal wellspring called desire. Capturing the deepest desires of our clients is fundamental to our vision for our work. Toward this end, we continually apply our professionalism and judgment to creating places that are meaningful and timeless, with great style.
Do you share these values? If so, make real what you desire – a life with timeless architecture!NEXT STEPS
There is More . . .
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