When Ali Reza Honarkar faced conservative college professors in the 1990s, who emphasized the importance of honoring architecture’s past in his designs, he felt conflicted. He understood that a historical foundation was important, but young Honarkar also felt unduly confined by the approach.
It was during these formative years that his desire to stretch the limits and do things differently was born, and it’s a trait that remains central to how he and his team approach projects today at Division1 Architects in Washington, D.C., which he co-founded in 1994, as a provocative response to both a failing economy and what he viewed as the stagnant design culture in the Washington metropolitan area.
“I always had to defend my work in school,” says Honarkar, laughing as he recalls instructors who perpetually questioned and dismissed his ideas. “But they did me a favor. While it frustrated me back then to have to justify my concepts, our firm’s presentations benefit today because I better anticipate the questions clients may ask, and I know how and what to present through drawings, renderings, and other visuals to communicate our team’s vision.”
While Honarkar’s desire to blaze a new path has led to an impressive scope of work, he speaks humbly about his firm’s wide-ranging accomplishments, and a conversation with him is much like sitting down with an old friend. “Everyone should live a regular life,” Honarkar implores. “You can’t put time on design-you can only focus on ensuring good design, and it has to feel good. My philosophy for our team is simple: if it feels like work, don’t show up that day.” This is an approach Honarkar insists that his design team adopts while forever stretching the limits of high-quality design.
A Design Philosophy Emerges
The firm’s portfolio is far-reaching, touching single-family and multi-unit residential buildings, commercial spaces ranging from offices to retail shops, restaurants and nightclubs, as well as branding and apparel.
A distinctive design that recently earned the firm industry recognition is its work along DC’s U Street corridor-an area hit hard by riots in the 1960s and subsequent neighborhood decline. But the area has undergone a rebirth, thanks, in part, to Division1’s high-end, 26-unit condominium building, The Lacey. The building sits on the former parking lot of the Florida Avenue Grill, a legendary soul-food restaurant, and earned Division1 a 2012 residential architect Design Award (RADA) in the Multifamily Housing category.
Praised by RADA jury members for its transparency and industrial elegance, The Lacey’s concrete walls, solid steel framework and transparent glass panels combine to create an intriguing 24,000-square-foot, four-story structure complete with an interior atrium in which hallways seem to float. The inside combines form and function. Units embrace an open plan design, providing the freedom and flexibility to facilitate better living through architecture.
When meeting with Division1 to conceptualize The Lacey’s design, the Florida Avenue Grill’s owner sought something different from the brick-and-mortar tenant buildings of the past.
“The owner wanted this to be a forward-looking landmark-something that engaged the street,” says Jeffrey Roberson, a principal at Division1, who is based out of the firm’s New York City office. “We therefore had to come up with a building that had its own personality and stood on its own-all while showing respect to the neighborhood and its history.”
Designing with Vectorworks Software
Division1 uses Vectorworks Architect with Renderworks software during the design and planning phases of each project to create concept studies, presentation boards and all contract documents, including plans, elevations, sections, and details.
Today, digital and analog worlds co-exist within Division1’s walls, where designers work cooperatively, sharing a passion for each project they complete. The team often starts by sketching on paper and then drawing the plans, sections, and elevations in the software, even adding in people to get a real sense of a design’s scale. They appreciate the way the Vectorworks platform allows them to draft with lines, arcs and circles just as easily as they can model with building objects like walls, doors, windows, roofs and slabs. The program also provides reliable comparability between what they see in their minds, on paper, and on the screen.
These vast capabilities give the firm confidence to be selective about the projects it works on and focus on distinctive designs that matter. “It’s not about the contract fees or the size of a project,” says Honarkar. “Each project matters, and we take each one seriously whether it’s big or small. If we had the philosophy of just cranking out work for the simple sake of the bottom line, the firm would make more money, but I couldn’t live with myself, and I wouldn’t enjoy the process. Remember our philosophy: if it feels like work, don’t show up.”
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Julie McClure has more than 15 years of experience as a writer, editor and writing instructor. She currently writes about architecture and design for Columbia, Md.-based Nemetschek Vectorworks Inc., a provider of intuitive, powerful and practical CAD and Building Information Modeling (BIM) software solutions. To learn more, visit www.vectorworks.net.
Photo credit: Photo © Debi Fox Photography/www.DebiFoxPhoto.com