Architects can do more than just design your building. If you get them to believe in your project, they can help you raise the money to get it built.
It turns out that those renderings that architects do, sometimes for free, sometimes on spec, can be powerful tools to get developers, backers and government agencies interested in a project. When Tony Azevedo wanted to build
a seven-storey condo in his old neighbourhood on Dundas West, for instance, he got
Richard Witt, then with
RAW, to do up an attractive rendering package, and it was on the strength of that package that Azevedo was able to make enough in pre-sales to actually start digging.
They can be even more powerful when the project is not-for-profit.
"
Eva’s Initiatives, which provides housing and training for underhoused and homeless youth, are on Ordinance Street," says Janna Levitt of
LGA Architectural Partners, who spoke with
Yonge Street after speaking on a recent panel about design and social change. "They’re getting kicked out because of condos. They got a new location [city councillor]
Adam Vaughan helped them find, and we’ re working with them to develop packages to go out and get funding."
It’s a skill some firms, such as LGA, have developed over time as they realized the power of the rendering to make a project seem more real to potential clients.
"I would say that at this point we have the expertise," Levitt says. "It became one of the things that we realized we were doing quite often. In our case, it was because the people we were doing it for were really forward-thinking people who had ideas about the way a certain program should run and didn’t understand it would cost additional money to do that, or who were just going out on a limb."
Levitt sees it as a way for architects to be "agents of change."
"You can, through your work, effect change on a whole lot of levels with every building," Levitt says, "and that’s very exciting."
Writer: Bert Archer
Source: Janna Levitt