Approach | Praxisma

How we work

The plan is a conversation, drawn until everyone can see it.

We do not arrive with the answer. We arrive with questions, instruments, and a drawing board, then work in the open until a plan emerges that the people who will live with it helped to make.

The method is consistent across every scale and sector: read the place carefully, design it with its community, fix the intent in a pattern book, and stay close through delivery.

The charrette at the centre

An intensive workshop where the place gets drawn in the room.

A charrette is a focused, multi-day design workshop. Planners, architects, the client, public officials, and residents gather around the same table, and our designers draw in real time as the conversation moves.

Ideas are tested while everyone is present, trade-offs are made visible, and consensus is reached around a drawing rather than a document. People leave having seen their own thinking take built form.

FIG. 03 / The table: many voices, one drawing

The method

Five movements, analysis to delivery.

01 / Analysis

Reading the place

Before we draw a line, we read the site for what it already is: its history and grain, its markets and movement, its ecology, its public life, and the constraints that will shape any plan.

Produces: site analysis · market study · movement & ecology mapping

FIG. 04 / Overlaid readings
draw review revise repeat FIG. 05 / The iterative loop

02 / Engagement

Designing with people

Through charrettes and workshops we bring residents, officials, and stakeholders into the drawing. Each cycle of draw, review, and revise narrows difference into a shared direction everyone can stand behind.

Produces: charrette · workshops · stakeholder facilitation

03 / The Plan

Giving the consensus a form

The agreed direction is resolved into a coherent plan: a framework of blocks, streets, and open space, tested in section and perspective so that the experience of the place, not only its geometry, is designed.

Produces: illustrative masterplan · framework plan · sections

FIG. 06 / Framework plan
FIG. 07 / Street wall elevation

04 / Pattern Book

Carrying the intent forward

A plan is only as good as the buildings that follow it. Pattern books, form-based codes, and design guidelines translate intent into clear, usable rules, so the place holds together as it is built out over years and by many hands.

Produces: pattern book · form-based code · design review

05 / Implementation

Seeing it through

We phase the work into deliverable, fundable moves, test feasibility against the market, and stay close through delivery and design review, so the place that opens is the place that was promised.

Produces: phasing strategy · feasibility · delivery support

P1 P2 P3 P4 FIG. 08 / Phasing over time

What holds the method together

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Bring us a site, a brief, or just a question.

The best plans begin as conversations. We would be glad to start one with you.

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