Loving downtown

After decades of stagnation, with lots of empty buildings, Birmingham’s City Center has made a dramatic comeback recently. Architect Dan Taylor, a native, is thrilled.

“Birmingham is coming into its own again,” said Taylor, an Auburn University graduate who works at local firm bDot Architecture.

And bDot, including Mississippi State graduate and company founder Brian Roberson, is making its own mark downtown.

The company, with a staff of three, occupies a renovated 3,250-square-foot space in the historic Tillman-Levenson Annex building at Second Avenue North and 12th Street. Formerly located at Pepper Place, bDot moved to the new location in late 2016 but didn’t fully complete the space until this September, according to Roberson.

“Once we moved in, it was a continual process of designing things in the office,” he said.

And the small but passionate bDot staff — including Roberson’s wife, Beth, who serves as the company’s marketer and office administrator — also enjoy managing a diverse portfolio of projects, experimenting with new materials and challenging themselves to grow with each new venture. 

And they profess to always put the client, and the client’s personal story, at the heart of their design process.

The space bDot found in the Tillman-Levenson Annex was perfect for the firm, according to Brian Roberson.

“The wide-open nature of this space was important,” he said. “It was important to the way we design. It just had great bones.”

He and Taylor also managed to define the space without using walls, since they like to keep the office flexible.

“The majority of our furniture is on wheels,” said Brian Roberson, who built much of that furniture with Taylor.

The building, like many existing structures downtown, is a tremendous asset, Brian Roberson said.

“Birmingham has an enormous number of incredibly boned buildings,” he said.

And those buildings give designers a valuable aesthetic context.

“It’s not destroying those to create something new but using them as the background, as the chord structure — musically speaking — to improvise on top of,” Brian Roberson said.

He and Taylor certainly have ample opportunities to experiment.

In addition to buildings, bDot has made furniture and created installations, photographs and drawings.

“We’ve designed some fairly large and complex projects, and our work covers a vast spectrum of scales, from pencil holders to a 26,000-square-foot medical office building and conference center,” Roberson said.

Other project highlights include their revisioning of an old furniture store in Homewood as a multi-tenant retail center, completed early this year, and their transformation of a 30,000-square-foot, 1970s-era commercial building into corporate offices for Birmingham-based American Family Care.

Taylor enjoys the variety.

 “Being able to jump around different things is refreshing,” he said.

And architects always learn from the “nuances” in different projects, from schools to homes to coffee shops, according to Roberson. “Our education is not over after school,” he said.

The men also continue their education in the workshop at their headquarters.

“We are hands-on architects and designers,” Roberson said. “We’re not afraid to mix concrete or run 2-by-4s through the table saw.”

“When we have a question about a joint or how materials connect, we can theorize about it, but when you put your hands to it and start to work with it, you can find the problem or the solution,” Taylor said.

One of the materials the architects experimented with is concrete, which they used recently to improve the neighborhood around their office.

Taylor and the Roberson noticed that people waiting for buses at a stop on Second Avenue had nothing to sit on and were making do with pallets, crates and old chairs.

After a few months of observation and experimentation with materials, Taylor and Roberson installed concrete stools at the stop.

“It has less to do with architecture than being human and seeing a need and responding to that need in the best way you know how and with the abilities and talents you’ve been given,” Roberson said.

Their practice in general involves a similar process. “We are trying to figure out what the owners need,” Roberson said.

This focus on the client allows them “to put characteristics of a client into a work, be it a building or an installation,” Roberson said.

“People are going to live with this project, so we want to embed their fingerprints in the project and make sure it says something about them,” Taylor said.

“It is customized to them,” Beth Roberson said. “Nothing comes from a cookie-cutter mentality.”

This intense focus on the client makes for better design, according to Brian Roberson.

“We use our client’s story to break our own preconceptions about what a solution is,” he said.