Original Avec Studio

For the original home of Avec Design+Build, we took this design challenge as a wonderful opportunity to showcase our individual personalities as well as our workflow as a design build architecture firm.
This early 1960s, mid-century modern office building was a great candidate as both our new office building, and our first design+build project. The relatively small footprint of the building in the fringe of downtown Ames, Iowa lent itself perfectly for a small startup design firm, challenging us with opportunities to make the most of every square foot while utilizing fantastic daylighting and an excellent pallet of materials.
Nearly all furniture components are designed and built by our own hands, not to mention the walls and spaces in which they are placed. All of this gave us an amazing chance to not only conceive of a design idea as a team, but to also “evaluate” our ideas through actually using the space we made and operating on the surfaces we created. Our design scope for this project ranged all the way from interior framing and layout, to landscaping and interior finishes, forcing us to engage in all phases of the built project and enhancing our ability to “think through” as many design challenges as possible.