The Creative Process for Designing Buildings and Space 

How do architects and designers go from a-ha idea to finished product? We asked the experts.

A flurry of demolition and renovation projects are underway across the country, as well as a few new construction projects—for a total of 12.7 million square feet of office space across 58 markets, including Manhattan, Washington DC and Houston.

Sometimes it’s hard to imagine that— whether it’s buildings, interior designs or office spaces—each of these kinds of projects began simply as an idea. It could have started as a drawing on a scrap of paper, a sentence in a conversation, or an ah-ha idea walking through a space, and those concepts evolve through a creative process to completion. 

How does something come from nothing? 

“Where art comes from is mysterious,” writes Adam Moss, author of the best-selling book, The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing. He set out to uncover that process in the book and compiled more than 40 interviews with artists, architects and designers who discuss their process from start to finish.  

In his book, Moss interviews architect Elizabeth Diller about the process behind the Blur Building, built for the Swiss National Exposition in 2002, which has been described as an “architecture of atmosphere,” and a “man-made-cloud.”  

Sketchbooks and doodles

Diller says she would keep sketchbooks and doodle and draw or sketch something in her brain. In the case of the Swiss exposition, there was no particular brief. She and her team were given a location and asked for an idea for a large-scale installation. 

“Our early early inspiration was about the water: can we atomize water? Can we block off our vision? Can we problematize it in a kind of beautiful way? We got a vision of the cloud bank. Just like that. It was partly surreal. It sort of popped into our heads,” she says.

The result: a temporary media pavilion built for the Swiss Expo 2002, that creates an immersive environment using water and fog.

“To be an architect, you have to be a mind reader. You have to be an archaeologist. You have to be a psychiatrist and psychologist. You have to be a dreamer and a poet. You have to be a politician also,” she later told Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. 

Limits and inspiration by square footage, deadlines and budgets

Not every architect and designer has the luxury of conjuring up clouds. Most are bound by more earthly concerns: square footage, zoning laws, costs, deadlines and needs of a client. Constraints can either spur or limit creativity, depending on what they are, according to research by Harvard Business School professor Teresa Amabile. Time pressure, evaluation, surveillance and excessive controls reduce creativity. But material, budget and site limits, paradoxically, spark originality.  

“For me, the design process starts with figuring out what the hard limits are, especially in terms of dimensions, location, and budget,” says Jonathan Palley, CEO at Clever Tiny Homes. “From there, the rest tends to flow naturally. Once I’ve got a basic shape down, smaller elements will come into focus. It feels a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.”

Interior designer Terri Brien starts the design process by finding out how clients want to feel in a space, and then a picture starts forming in her mind’s eye. Mood boards and Pinterest boards help her visually align ideas and then more thoughts start popping for her. She also travels, listens to podcasts and keeps a running inventory in her head of things she comes across, whether it’s what a product looks like, a kind of tile, the feel of stone, or the color of a piece of furniture. 

Designer Ana Li enters a space before she lets the juices flow. “I observe atmosphere, patterns of light, and even sounds. I like it to be a sensory experience that informs what I design, to allow my mind and body to take hold of some qualities of that space,” she says.

Design as Narrative

Toronto designer Johnson Chou says his process involves listening carefully and delving beyond the words of what a client wants and needs to see what they’re really saying. It’s the physical manifestation of the client’s brand, their inspiration, culture and the image they want to project. He calls it the spatial brand.

“It’s a careful balance, a dance, because you’re dealing with people’s desires and wishes and personalities and you have to be creative yet judicious with how you interpret their ideas,” he says.

After initial conversations, there’s a lot of sitting and thinking—mulling it over in places like the shower and letting ideas distill. “It’s a hundred percent intuition,” he says. “It’s about telling a story, a portrait of a brand.”

For Chou, architecture is about the creation of narratives, manifested through heightened sense of ritual and metaphor. For Red Bull’s Toronto office, he designed a floating soundproof space divided into various-sized meeting rooms for informal and formal gatherings for Red Bull’s athletes and artists. The silver cylindrical space also reflects back the brand’s iconic energy drink cans.  

Taking a Cue from Movies

For interior landscaper Shane Pliska, the creative process is like directing a movie. His Detroit-based firm, Planterra, has transformed corporate workspaces and event venues with live and artificial plants, living walls, and large-scale horticultural installations. He looks to convey the same kind of emotion that someone has when watching a movie and begins with inspiration boards, putting screenshots from different movies along with architectural and garden images. 

“I think, ‘How would this look if it was in a movie?’” Pliska asks. “What would the opening shot be? Which path would the view take me down? How would the light work look? How would the light hit the floor in this spot? What would draw the eye? What would I be attracted to?” 

In the case of famed architect Frank Gehry, inspiration starts with fluid, expressive sketches and evolves into complex, three-dimensional forms. He has designed the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Fondation Louis Vuitton Museum in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao.

“I function in my architecture with my talent—making mud pies, I call it, and they’re personal mud pies that are a reaction to what’s around me, to a client, to a budget, and to a social condition,” Gehry told Interview Magazine in 2012. “I get excited about combining these elements and coming up with some kind of formal construct, hands-on, with all the materials.”

Even Gehry says that the process of nothing to something is filled with insecurity. “Each time I sit down to design a building, it’s a new challenge, a new insecurity. I just went to look at a building of mine that’s under construction. Right up until the other day I thought it was the best thing I’d ever done. But it looked terrible. It’s just in that stage. I go through this all the time. I’ve learned that I’m not in control of the stuff around me, but still, in a larger sense, I am.”

The process of idea to finished product is not a straight line. It’s intuition. It’s constraints and budgets and square footage. It’s about listening and mulling. It’s about embodying culture and brand and emotion. Every process is different, yielding a unique twist on each and every finished space.