The design of your Dream Home can go in any direction and your entry can be as simple or elaborate as you would like.  Some students with more understanding of the architecture process and experience with CAD or presentation software might submit detailed drafted drawings of houses modeled in three dimensions.  While others might prefer free hand sketches, conveying the essence of their house in a poetic way.  Regardless of how you plan to approach the competition, here is a brief outline of my own process to designing a home, to help you get started.

1. Clear your mind of all preconceived notions about a house, to free your imagination to wander.

2. Research the context, the existing conditions of the building site and surrounding features.  Consider how the house design can take advantage of the Pittsburgh skyline view.  How will the various spaces of the house relate to the adjacent green spaces of Grandview Park?  Will the style of your house compliment or contrast with the neighboring houses next door and across the street?  What influence does a long and narrow lot have on the layout and arrangement of spaces in your house?

3. Ask yourself questions, to provide insight into a direction.  How do you live in your home differently than other homes?  What makes your home special?  What would you change about your home?  With my own home, I questioned conventional form, box shape rooms.  What are the reasons for most houses to be built this way?  More importantly, how would it change the feel, perception or use of a house if it was built differently.  For me, these questions led to circular rooms.  Think of something that interests you about your home or an oddity you find curious.  Then question it, to discover the true nature in more depth.

4. Focus on a single idea, the one with the most meaning to you, from the questions you asked.  Simplify the idea to the heart of the matter, eliminating the extraneous elements, reducing to the minimum elements necessary to preserve the essence of that idea.  For my home, it was the right angle that creates box shape rooms.  In a typical room, it occurs in the corner where two walls meet, at your feet where the floor meets the wall and over head where the wall meets the ceiling.  To focus on these areas, I made the walls lean in and out at angles less than or greater than ninety degrees.

5. Develop the central idea to greater depth, by carrying it through other aspects of the house design.  In my home, to accentuate the sloping nature of the walls, I washed them in light from a rope light recessed in a slot I created where the wall meets the floor.  How can your idea change the way most houses are designed?  Layer the house with multiple interpretations of the idea, to strengthen its meaning.  Research green building materials or kitchen and bath fixtures to find ways to reinforce and support your idea.

6. Put pencil to paper, to illustrate all of the ways you have incorporated your original idea.  Sketch in plan or perspective, or maybe just a simple detail, such as how the rope light is tucked into the floor in my own home.  Develop the house design as a whole, relating and balancing different spaces in the house with each other.  Define the spaces by examining the walls, ceilings and floors, adding window and door openings, along with color and texture from finish materials.  Use every design decision as an opportunity to reinforce your idea, to unify the house design.

7. Refine the design, by re-working the house design over and over.  Consider other ways to illustrate and express your idea.  Compare multiple variations side by side to determine which one conveys the idea best, the most clearly.  Work it over, trying to express the idea with as few maneuvers as possible, to make those gestures more powerful.   Continue back and forth, between the big picture for the entire house and the finer details of how the house comes together.  The design will begin to solidify as you feel you have exhausted possibilities and the current design works better than all others.

8. Organize your thoughts by writing them down.  Try to express your idea in words, summarizing how your house design achieved your idea in different ways.  Once they are identified, prioritize them, giving more weight to the ones that have more meaning for you.  Examine your drawings, to identify which drawings express your written ideas best.  Arrange those drawings on the presentation sheets to reflect it, by placing the ones with more importance in the center of the page or by enlarging them in scale to dominate attention.  Finally, use the style and character of the drawings to accentuate the idea.  Maya Lin's design submission for the Vietnam Memorial competition is an example I frequently use, to demonstrate a central idea conveyed very effectively in written and visual form, with the presentation technique becoming poetic, expressing the idea as simply and clearly as possible.