Master planning; how to design a resort in Turks and Caicos part 1

The design funnel is wide, but methodical at the start. After doing site analysis of views, heights, constraints and opportunities, the first task is to plot all that information down onto tracing paper over the map of the site. There can be 3,4,5 of these different layers that when stacked up just look like a mess of lines. 

They help the designer to create the first designed network:access. Both vehicular and pedestrian access through a site is key. We’ve all seen those developments where people make their own dirt path because the paths the designers placed were too inconvenient-the task is to make the pedestrian routes around the site as easy and as pleasant as possible. 

This process can take a while, but once done we can start to take the brief into account; how many units, square footages, bedrooms, strata corporations etc. we often use that as a layer too and overlay on the other constraints. This is all done with thick marker pen in different colors. 

There’s probably a little too much to discuss on one post about this, but there is a lot of iteration and ideas that get bounced around, good ideas can get eliminated because they were the wrong good idea. Getting the brief as focussed as possible will make the whole experience for the architects and clients much better, so getting the client to nail their financials and options should be done ahead of design.

I’ve been caught before when this didn’t happen and it added a lot of extra time to the project because things kept getting added and removed from drawings rather than from spreadsheets. Having a project manager on the client side is helpful to steer this task, they also keep everyone to deadlines so that ODP and DDP are submitted. 

It’s a very rewarding experience when you finally submit for planning on such large scale projects.