Fawley Bryant Architecture 5391 Lakewood Ranch Blvd N #300, Sarasota. 941-343-4070. https://www.fawleybryant.com/

In the March 2023 edition of SRQ Magazine, we interviewed Steve Padgett, Managing Partner, and Stu Henderson, Owner and Design Architect, at Fawley Bryant Architecture as part of our In Conversation feature about Lakewood Ranch. Below is an excerpt published in the magazine in which Padgett and Henderson shares their insights with SRQ readers on living and working in Lakewood Ranch.

For a long time now, Lakewood Ranch has been one of the fastest-growing communities. Suddenly, it feels like all of Florida is growing like a Lakewood Ranch. The growth is at a pace none of us could have imagined after the last two or three years. From what you guys get to see in terms of future planning, and future opportunities, what does that mean, and how has technology has affected things from your perspective?

Steve Padgett

Well, I think one of the benefits that we have is that, with technology and remote work and other ways to collaborate, people can pretty much work where they want to be and not where they have to be. And I think this area's been a major attraction for people that are getting out of areas that they don't really want to be in. Whether it's because of family, because of weather, because of the job, or whatever it may be. So I think this has been a major attractor that's been planned for 15 years. So right time, right place. And that's given us a lot of flexibility and freedom with the work that we do. They're public places in most cases. So sports work, government work, education, those are things that are going to support the people that live here. And that placed perfectly into our portfolio and the services we provide. So a little bit of a win-win. 

Stu Henderson

I'll look at this from two sides. Our response to the technology and being more remote, it plays into our strengths that we had already started anyway. So we had already started with teams and video conferencing and working internally with that software, we had already used virtual reality to communicate with our design team and our internal review of a building, to walk through it before it's ever been built. That translated into communicating with clients in much the same way. So it's allowed us to have our first fully-remote teammate and collaborator as a project manager, not just sort of an admin role where they might be able to do tasks but to communicate and work. And I think, by and large, that focus on the technology that we utilize and how we collaborate has, in a lot of ways, created better buildings. We're able to visualize them, walk through them, and communicate about what we see, not just internally, but with our clients. So the technology of the buildings feels like it could always be more sustainable. We could do a lot more with that, but budgets and first costs are very expensive for some of the sustainable materials that we would like to use. So in a lot of cases, they get removed. But I think that there are deeper, more fundamental strategies to sustainability that we employ that are not a green roof or photovoltaic, but they may have to do with energy conservation, they may have to do with building orientation and location. And all of that stuff, again, is the overlay of technology that allows us to understand those technologies and those strategies before the buildings are even built.

Fawley Bryant Architecture 5391 Lakewood Ranch Blvd N #300, Sarasota. 941-343-4070. https://www.fawleybryant.com/

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