“...So he went to marching up and down, thinking, and frowning horrible every now and then; then he would hoist up his eyebrows; next he would squeeze his hand on his forehead and stagger back and kind of moan; next he would sigh, and next he’d let on to drop a tear. It was beautiful to see him. By and by he got it. He told us to give attention. Then he strikes a most noble attitude, with one leg shoved forwards, and his arms stretched away up, and his head tilted back, looking up at the sky; and then he begins to rip and rave and grit his teeth; and after that, all through his speech, he howled, and spread around, and swelled up his chest, and just knocked the spots out of any acting ever I see before. This is the speech—I learned it, easy enough, while he was learning it to the king: To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin ...”   

— Mark Twain, from “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” 1884

Dake Wells Architecture is a herd of 29 earthlings, diverse in our backgrounds but like-minded in our curiosity and our drive to actively affect lives through design. We do not dress alike; however, we do think alike and talk alike, and sometimes we don’t talk at all, and even that we do alike. Are we a Southern firm? We practice in Missouri, which is pretty much in the middle of America, so perhaps we could be considered a Northern Southern firm. That would explain the deep pride we have in the modest opinion we hold of ourselves. That said, we reckon we could also be considered a Southern Northern firm, which would explain our earnest quirkiness and our problem-solving skills. Either way, we value the pragmatic spirit of our hardscrabble agrarian ancestors, who sought to solve everyday problems with limited means, while never compromising their attention to craft in the process of making. For us, design is a discovery process. We search for the circumstances, for inspiration, for the right diagram... and the right design solution seems to emerge. Rather than following the trend toward specialization in a particular project type, we specialize in design as a cross-pollinating discipline, applicable to a variety of architectural challenges. We are like a hive of honeybees in this regard, zipping around from project flower to project flower. That said, we are also like a society of mad scientists, messing around with DNA in the lab. Making use of analogies often helps us to clarify our own design work, while assisting us in explaining our work to others. In some instances, these analogies provide a framework for design decision making but are simply too ludicrous to propose to those outside our office. In other instances, the analogies provide a useful tool to communicate proposed solutions in a way that everyone can relate to, including our clients. Design is like storytelling—sometimes the challenge lies with developing the most apt analogy to spin a yarn to our clients. Sometimes the challenge lies with keeping all the analogies straight. That’s the bare bodkin.