Happy national #LibraryShelfieDay! We love the digital world, but there’s nothing like holding a book in your hands. Often our passions overlap with our professional lives and we have book collections to prove it. Sometimes our books are an escape a place to rest and recover from our professional lives. In any case, our bookshelves are almost always a reflection of who we are and what we want to become. Today we celebrate book lovers in a fun way.
Celebrate #LibraryShelfieDay with us by dropping your own #libraryshelfieday photo in the comments! Or, if you’re camera shy, feel free to just spend a little extra time appreciating your books today.
Adrienne (at home)
Adrienne (at work)
Deborah with Christmas decoration debris in the background
Gaines Group Architects has elevated four new partners to the leadership of the firm: James Halstead, Deborah Smith, Adrienne Stronge, and Paul Tassell. They join Raymond Gaines and Charles Hendricks in the leadership of the firm. Raymond founded the business in 1987 and Charles joined as a partner in 2008. This leadership expansion provides resiliency and stability. Charles says, “This is a huge step forward for the business allowing us to better serve our communities. I am very excited to continue to work with each of our new partners for many years to come. Ray has set up an incredible partnership model for how to do business as friends while serving others. This was an obvious next evolution for the firm.”
About the firm: Gaines Group Architects is a firm that has a commitment to designing for the future. We have assembled a remarkably talented and experienced team of professionals to pull all building elements into a single elegant and functional design. Integrity, budget control, effective and timely communication, and a thorough knowledge of current technology, construction methods, and materials turn our promise and your dream into a delightful reality.
Mission statement: Gaines Group Architects is committed to designing for the future and having a positive impact on the lives of the people who live and work in the communities we serve.
Why we do it: Because we want our clients to have comfortable beautiful healthy spaces to live, play, and work.
We loved celebrating together in 2022 all the architecture fun things, special days, and events! We are a small team and many of us have been together for many years understanding the overall goals of the firm and joining together to achieve them. We look for ways to infuse fun into every project while supporting our community and each other.
This year several of us kicked off the new year by attending the Young Architect Winter Series. This gathering of like minded designers focused on making us better people so we can be the best architects possible. Read more here.
While most of us around here are swept away in the excitement of this holiday season, we playfully enjoy airing our grievances in honor of Festivus. Our new years resolutions are being carefully crafted but in the meantime, it sure does feel good to get some of these grievances off our chest. Let us know if you can relate to any of these or what else is on your list!
Deborah: “I only have two hands, so I can only walk two dogs at a time…or else I’d adopt a passel of them.”
Annie: “three words; Ticketmaster & Taylor Swift. Also worth mentioning, can the tripledemic be done now and why is self-check out at the grocery store seemingly the only option these days?”
Charles: get ready for a long list! “Supply chain brokenness, can we just go ahead and fix it already? Left lane slowness, I have places to go, move over people. Why is daylight savings still a thing? Starting work before dark and finishing in the dark makes no sense. As always, lack of good design is at the top of my grievances, plain and simple, hire an architect. Air permeable insulation is a waste of energy, vapor barriers in the wrong places is just wrong- let it dry out. Lastly, anyone who doesn’t love grumpy architects because we are the best. It’s outrageous, egregious, preposterous!”
Adrienne: “Toddlers who ask for food to then only take one bite and say ‘ew, yucky’, especially when that food is at a restaurant and you paid for their dinner. Dogs that act completely blind and deaf in the house but then coincidentally know exactly when a neighbor is walking a block away and needs to sound the alarm and bark! Also, our cars, for constantly giving us new reasons they need to be replaced, but also being so expensive to purchase right now. Lastly, I’m looking at you Netflix. Why do you give me an option with ads that I sincerely dislike but am too frugal to pay more to get ride of them? Oh and one more, laundry, because it’s laundry.”
Carla: “Bloop tone (not the frozen yogurt store) and robo calls. A forecast of snow but then it rains will always be at the top of disappointments. Lastly, when your car thinks there is someone in the empty passenger seat and the fasten seatbelt warning comes on. Enough!”
Not sure about you, but those of us who aired our grievances feel like we took a big exhale and are ready for both the exciting opportunities frustrating small moments ahead. Give it a try and let us know what is on your list. Happy Festivus from the rest of us!
Discussing the differences in architecture design versus drafting allows us to share the value an architect brings.
A common question we receive from potential clients is “Why should someone hire an architect versus a drafting service?”. We love this question because it gives us the opportunity to share about our training and experience and highlight the value we add to construction projects.
To understand the difference between drafting and architectural design, it is helpful to think about a project as a 3-dimensional complex building system to be approached with a level of expertise that delivers healthy, functional, and sustainable results. Beyond providing construction documents, architects approach a project through a holistic lens that considers building science, budget, flow of space, and aesthetics. As visionaries, architects guide the design process by considering the life clients want to live in a space. We are experts on the entire scope of a construction project and are often involved in all stages from envisioning and planning, design development, construction budgeting, and even observation over construction.
Drafting is the translation of a design to technical drawings. Drafters focus on documentation and the delivery of construction plans. Unlike an architect, drafters are not required to have a specific education background and do not hold a license. All architects are drafters; all drafters are not architects.
Architects lean on their education and years of training to serve as visionaries and provide expert oversight on projects. The journey to becoming a Licensed Architect involves 5-7+ years of higher education, an internship process under a licensed professional, and the successful passing of rigorous licensure examinations. Training covers art, science, math, psychology, sociology, and we infuse this blend of knowledge into each design. Additionally, architects hold a license once they successfully pass a series of exams and therefore hold liability for each of their projects.
If you already have a design and need to make a few simple changes, a drafter might be an appropriate option. Either way, feel free to reach out and discuss your project. We are happy to answer questions and help you understand the value we bring to a project.
It’s common to catch our team members focused on work while silently humming along to familiar tunes in our ears. Working in a studio environment gives us the ability to easily collaborate and join forces on our design work, but we collectively enjoy the inspiration and mood-boosting effects of listening to our favorite tunes throughout the day.
We have varying tastes in music throughout our team, but we enjoy recommending both our old and newfound favorites to each other. In honor of #UniveralMusicDay, we are sharing a compiled playlist of the go-to tunes we turn to.
To check out the playlist, it’s free to access and play HERE on Spotify. Bonus points to anyone who can guess which songs were suggested by which team members!
February 17th we celebrated kindness on 
