Timothy E. Alatorre, Tim, has been practicing architecture since 1996. This is not a new gig. It is the same job with a few unusual chapters in the middle.
Most days the work is a house here in the Rocket City: a new one, an addition, a renovation that has been put off for years.
The other assignment
Along the way, Tim helped design the Voyager space station and sent payloads to the ISS and to the Moon.
Those were not houses. They were environments with no slack in them. Complicated systems with a multitude of constraints. Details that had to be right before they left the ground. Planning that could not be finished later with a change order.
None of that hardware is going into your kitchen. The habits and lessons learned are.
What that looks like on Earth
Understand the whole environment first. Get the details right. Finish the thinking while it is still cheap to change your mind.
Then put on a VR headset and walk the house! Stand at the sink. Walk into your bedroom. Move the window, shift a wall.
Thirty years of practice, plus a few projects that had no patience for guessing. That is a decent way to decide how your family is going to live.
Not only buildings
The office also writes software at Torreon Labs. The same brain that likes a clean detail likes a clean line of code.
When the drawings are closed, Tim is the organist at his church and leads the children’s music. A different kind of room. Still about getting a bunch of moving parts to land at the same time. We all know that walls are sometimes easier to move than children.
Here
Based in Huntsville, proud Alabamian, Christian, husband, and father, working in the communities that we all love. Licensed architect, AL 8877.
West Coast work still goes through Domum in California. If you have a project in California or surrounding areas, let us know!