Welcome to Plano Base

There comes a moment in an architect’s life when several things converge and push you towards the hard business of starting a company of your own. That moment came to me a good while ago; this is my second attempt.

It is hard not only for the stress of having to step out of the creative plane where I would rather stay, but also because it is like having a child (spoiler alert); it asks for care, for a great deal of work, a great deal of investment, a great deal of patience and, of course, a great deal of love.

I have been at this profession for 10 years, and for some 8 of them I have been trying to build a company and make it work (because within how hard it is to have a company, the easy part is starting it, and the genuinely hard part is making it pay). Plano Base Arquitectos was born into the difficulty the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it; it was born with no projects, which is to say it was born as a project in itself, a piece of work to be developed over time. Even so it was born with the conviction of doing things properly, facing up to the responsibilities that come with deciding to strike out on your own. And that is what it is, striking out: looking for a way to sell architecture to people, because as the adverts for online mentors that Instagram throws at you every 2 or 3 reels put it… "IT IS ALL SALES". However romantic we might like to be about our profession (the one about creating beauty and form, about building spaces out of light, about evoking and provoking, about the tectonic and the stereotomic), in the end you need a client who buys what you are selling, which is a service, but also a product, tangible and intangible at once.

Of course this trade is not cheap. Thinking out an inexpensive building calls for the most precise architecture there is, and that keeps the pool of possible clients who engage architectural services narrower, above all in an economy like the Colombian one, where architecture has historically been seen as something superfluous rather than as something fundamental to developing any kind of space that a human being is going to inhabit in some way.

I believe architecture is not only indispensable for building habitable spaces: it also has a mission of the greatest importance, which is to add value.

A house is worth more if it was designed with care by an architect, and worth more again if that architect is well known. The value added is, to begin with, the technical command and the foresight the designing architect brings; it is also the expression of that architect’s thinking, as a painting or a sculpture is for an artist, and, like any work of art, it is an asset that will never lose its value if it is properly looked after.

That is what we architects do: we add value. And that is the mission of Plano Base: to bring together enterprising, creative, visionary and committed minds so as to make sure we add value on every project.

As that mission goes on, I will be telling you where the road of this venture takes us, a venture that has been maturing since 2020 and is only now beginning to take on form and substance. I will also be telling you how we got here, and why the name; I will tell you about our methods and our processes, because we also want people to understand everything that goes into making architecture, after the pandemic, starting from nothing.

Welcome to this blog. Welcome to Plano Base Arquitectos.