#215: WHO DO WE SERVE?

November 28, 2025

(photo by Michael Sy)

As architects, who do we serve? As a client business, we serve our paying customers. As licensed professionals, we serve regulatory standards and safety codes. As community members, we serve society. As creative individuals, we serve an artistic agenda and the zeitgeist.

What happens when an architect knows that a client request is not right? Do we serve the client or the project? Is the customer always right, as the trite retail truism suggest?

There is a difference between serving those who pay for our services vs. recognizing the end users. For example, a school district may sign our contract and pay our monthly invoices, but the educational buildings we design support the students and teachers—the end users.

In an unfortunate example, a colleague architect focused their attention on how students would learn at a new high school—serving the end users. The paying client felt the architect’s service—and loyalty even—were not prioritized appropriately. This architect was fired.

As state-licensed experts, architects are bound to ethical and professional responsibilities to “protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” When designing a theater for example, architects are required by building codes to design the appropriate number of emergency exits. Let’s say three exits are required, but the client wants only two. Here, we serve the safety and welfare of the theater-going audience, not the client.

Architects also serve the environment, as stewards of this planet. Whether a project’s goals prioritize sustainability or not, architects are charged with minimizing negative environmental impacts. We are responsible to consider the lifecycle of a building and its energy efficiency, waste reduction, and green materials. Though a project may be for today, architects’ decisions serve future generations of the planet’s inhabitants.

There are fixed values that architects also serve, some mundane and some obvious. As a manager of a project’s delivery, architects are beholden to a budget and schedule. Also, science forces a framework around our creative decisions. Our ideas are bound by constructability and the laws of gravity. Though we may envision a dramatic cantilevered structure off a cliff over the ocean, rules of engineering require reality checks.

Circle House, Three Lakes, Wisconsin, by Poon Design

For better or for worse, architects also serve their ego. We apply our skills to shape a world vision that buzzes around in our brains. If Frank Lloyd Wright generically served the client who sought a weekend retreat house in Pennsylvania, there would be no Falling Water. Wright’s ego—and even arrogance towards the laws of gravity—delivered the dramatic three-story residence that cantilevers over a small waterfall. (I mention arrogance, because as impressive as the design is, ignoring the laws of science has resulted in a home plagued with sagging terraces, sinking floors, cracking concrete, and water leaks.)

Falling Water, Mill Run, Pennsylvania (photo by Anthony Poon)

So yes, architects serve a creative agenda whether a personal one, a movement like Post-Modernism or Mid-Century Modern Revival, or current themes of the industry, such as AI, prefab, and resilience. Amongst such interests, we also serve our clients and projects, society as a whole, end users, the environment, and our present and future. And gravity. Juggling all this is no easy task.

upper left: St. Coletta School of Greater Washington, Washington, DC, Post-Modernism by Michael Graves (photo from ludosici.com); upper right: Mid-Century Modernism, Palm Springs, California (photo Peter Thomas on Unsplash); lower left: Modular prefab house, by Poon Design for ReMo (photo by Anthony Poon); lower right: Fire hazard, Bintan Island, Indonesia (photo by Thomas Ehling on Unsplash)

#206: HOUSE OF LEAVES | AN ARCHITECTURAL READING

May 23, 2025

It’s not something I usually do—review a book, that is. Critically speaking, I wouldn’t call this a book review. It is more of an architectural observation. Reading and experiencing Mark Z. Danielewski’s 2000 debut novel, House of Leaves, is an encounter through space and time. Yes, a physical phenomenon—much more than simply turning pages.

Of this bestseller translated into numerous languages, Amazon states, “The mind-bending cult classic about a house that’s larger on the inside then on the outside. A masterpiece of horror and an astonishingly immersive, maze-like reading experience that redefines the boundaries of a novel.”

House of Leaves is difficult to summarize. More than a tale within a tale, it is a fictional story:

about a man, Johnny Truant,
who is reading an academic critique by a dead man named Zampano,
about an autobiographical documentary film, The Navidson Record, about a haunted house,
created by photojournalist, Will Navidson.

Sure, the fact that this book is about a house makes it inherently architectural, but the story explores many themes in the design lexicon, e.g., labyrinth, Piranesian space, Escher’s loops, size and scale, signifier/signified, palimpsest, material sampling, chiaroscuro, compression and contrast, zeitgeist, mazes, and so on.

But it is the book’s graphic design that will confront the reader initially, starting simply with the word “house,” always printed in bright blue. The book’s design evolves from there with text in red but then crossed out, diverse fonts, a standard page of text vs. only one word per page, illegible paragraphs, upside down words, even music notation and Braille in graphic form. Several pages require the reader to turn the book in a spiraling pattern to read the words.

These graphic elements may appear at first indulgent, but they challenge the norms of book publishing and printing, testing the gravity of what we expect. Disorienting the reader, the presentation intensifies the terror of the story about inhabitants disappearing within the walls of a seemingly innocent small house. Within this home, hallways are miles long, a staircase descends forever, walking across a mere room can take days, and darkness is shiveringly cold. Yet on the exterior, the house is a conventional house. For example, page 122 reads, “It is not surprising then that when Holloway’s team finally begins the long trek back, they discover that the staircase is much farther away than they had anticipated, as if in their absence the distances had stretched.”

The tale is replete with footnotes, citations, interviews, and exhibits, all appearing rigorous and real (Stephen King, Jacques Derrida, Anne Rice, Stanley Kubrick, Hunter Thompson), but actually fictional. With the house suggested to be older than the Earth, I am enveloped, confronted even, with matters of risks, life and death, husband/wife love, family and children, obsession, ambition, fantasies and lastly, paranoia.

#192: “DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE”

August 30, 2024

Colby Residence, Los Angeles, California, by Poon Design (photo by Hunter Kerhart)

On July 25, 2024, I was interviewed for Josh Cooperman’s podcast, Convo by Design. About his forum, Josh explains, “A podcast dedicated to promoting the ideas of architects, artists, designers, tastemakers and those making a difference in the way we live. Design is personal as is a good conversation.”

At the Los Angeles showroom of Design Hardware, Josh introduced a thesis, “Architecture is an art form that also serves a primary function, that of shelter, workspace, centers for learning, social spaces and gathering places. This is a form of art with a language all its own.

“Long debated is which comes first: form or function? But that’s not quite the right question to be asking these days. A better question might be, for whom does architecture serve, and how can the space serve individual needs, both now and into the future.

“American society has learned to move to a new shelter space in the same way that a hermit crab moves to a new and bigger shell. We’re not hermit crabs, and this model has only served to increase costs and decrease availability of housing. Let’s think differently about how architecture can achieve different results.”

My edited responses to a few of Josh’s questions:

“Hi, my name is Anthony Poon. My architecture and design company is Poon Design Inc. We are awarding-winning architects and designers. We design houses. We design schools, religious projects, commercial, restaurants, bars, hospitality, university projects. We do it all.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Photo by Cansu on Pexels)

“My personal take on design is driven by my background as a musician. I love jazz, and I am a classically-trained pianist. I like bringing musical ideas and philosophies into our work. I like looking at how discipline and improvisation can come together and drive the architectural process.

“There’s the famous Goethe quote, that you probably know. ‘Architecture is frozen music.’

“Or some has said, ‘Music is melting architecture.’

“It’s fascinating to talk about both. Thelonious Monk also said, ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture.’

I think the overlaps are very clear, with things like rhythm, ornamentation, measure, beat. For example, the beat in music is like gravity in architecture.

“My fascination with jazz is about how jazz is made—improvisationally, impromptu, spontaneous—and whether such ideas can influence the way architecture is made. Architecture is a slower, sometimes tedious process compared to jazz. Architects deal with engineering. We deal with city codes, budgets, client, etc. It can take years, sometimes decades to complete a project.

“What can we learn from jazz? How can we learn from that kind of music—to look at our creative process to find inspiration from one field of study to another?

“In fact, I am the type of artist that doesn’t separate the different fields of studies. I think of it all as one creative force, one endeavor under one artistic umbrella. I like music. I like painting. I like writing. I like architecture. And I don’t separate the four. It is one force moving together at the same time.”

Tag Archives: GRAVITY