the practice focuses its time on projects with vision, rather than projects they believe to be unnecessary or wasteful. ”When I was studying earth architecture, I traveled to a number of places, and I spent a fair bit of time in some Sub-Saharan African countries,” Austin recalls. “I noticed that the people there could basically brew tea with one tea bag and a block of sugar, and then spend about two hours enjoying each other’s company over the consumption of that tea.” “Subsequently, I went to architecture school, then I worked at a firm designing luxury houses in the Lake Tahoe region of California,” Austin continues. “A lot of those clients I worked for, they had gained a lot of wealth, and they were doing so much to find a similar kind of satisfaction that I saw with those people in Sub-Saharan Africa. They were building their third or fourth houses, and I didn’t think that was necessary to find what they were looking for.” With f2a architecture, part of Austin and Florian’s goal was to help people like that find what they were looking for, but in more sustainable ways. They wanted to design smaller, “more finelydesigned” houses that would meet all their needs while operating more efficiently. At the same time, Austin and Florian also wanted to use their profits and their knowledge to work overseas, in places where they felt like there “was a more acute need for professional help.” And indeed, that’s what they’ve done – for example, after the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal, they made various trips to a hard-hit region to work with an NGO and BC’s Fast + Epp structural engineers to design an earthquake-resistant school of local, low-carbon materials. Since then, COVID has refocused f2a efforts on their local market. They are still looking at projects abroad, but the firm has lately been splitting its time between modular new construction and energy retrofits in B.C. “We believe we can make a real positive contribution with this two-pronged approach,” Austin says. “We believe it’s really important to work with the buildings we have already,” Austin explains. “It’s a lot more sustainable to retrofit an existing building than create a new one. But if a new building must be built, it should be efficiently made, efficiently operable, durable, and adaptable.” THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA
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