Every new project at Strata starts the same way: two to four weeks with no drawings, just a small team on site documenting sun angles, drainage patterns, soil conditions, and how people already move through the land informally.
Clients occasionally push back on the timeline. It feels, understandably, like delay. But the Meridian Civic Library’s stepped section — the thing everyone remembers about the building — came directly out of a site reading document that flagged the nine-foot grade change as an opportunity in week one, months before a single massing study was drawn.
We’ve started publishing selected site reading documents internally so the whole studio can reference how a past project’s constraints became its defining move, rather than treating each new site as a blank slate.