Services-master planning

Services

Master Planning

What is Master Planning?
Growth is an integral part of every successful business. Managing and directing that growth through an organized plan is the essence of Master Planning. Encompassing the goals and mission statement of the client, a Master Plan is one of the most important services an architect can provide.

Master Plans must balance the client's needs of today while projecting future needs. Particularly essential for organizations diversified by departments, locations or priorities, spatial needs of the entire group are defined by quantity, location and projected time frame. Planned flexibility and phasing accommodates contingencies.

Growing facility needs may not always dictate new construction. Sensitivity to traditions and reuse of existing resources may mandate updating or adaptive reuse of existing facilities instead. Coupled with infrastructure planning, renovations may be the wisest choice given an institution's traditions, maintenance, operations or capital funding concerns.

What steps are required to produce a quality Master Plan?
Master planning is a four step process requiring:
inquiry, discussion, design, and presentation

Inquiry involves the identification of needs and goals, research and analysis of the existing environment, and dialogue with the "client" in the largest sense. Discussion through structured interactive meetings between the planning team and the client, often brings together a governing board, administrators, department heads, staff and other users of the facility. The common goal is focused upon -- building consensus of the program and facility needs and desires of the organization. This information is synthesized into a simplified design format which includes possibilities, phasing, images, and issues. Presentation includes not only a communication of this information to a larger audience, but also the production of a tool to help the client implement these goals -- a "work" book that becomes a valuable document for use by the client after the planning team completes its task.

What makes a Master Plan Successful?
Too often, good intentions create a Master Plan which is favorably received, yet promptly forgotten. As part of PDG's commitment to accountability, long range plans are considered successful when they provide the client with usable information which addresses practical and aesthetic challenges regularly encountered throughout the growth of the business or institution.

When our clients find that they can avoid the ubiquitous "two steps forward and one step back," only then do we feel that we have provided high quality planning services.