Coexistence

I have been working on a communal living project and thinking a lot about what it means to live together.  One might say there are two attitudes to take for coexistence:

1.      The vitality of each individual is the business of everyone.  One looks for the spark in others and looks to foster it or account for it in one’s own actions.  At its best, this attitude creates a harmony that is in the air between us, rather than living in any one constituent.  At its worst, it is everyone being up in everyone else’s business.

2.      Each is responsible for their own vitality.  If someone’s boundaries are crossed, the violated individual steps into the violator’s business to take control and “put things right.”  At its best, this attitude fosters empowered individuals.  At its worst it leads to selfish domination.

As with most perspectives, the ideal is probably a view that paradoxically makes both true at the same time.

In my project, I am not responsible for designing the social structure that will maintain the site.  However, it is a collaborative project and I find that the attitudes with which we work shape the character of the project. I see these dynamics at play in our team, and when I keep looking, I also see how these dynamics play out in other relationships in our community and in the way I design.

In architecture school we were trained to make use of the “design concept” to focus our work and establish a unifying sense for our designs.  In design firms, typically the older members would choose the concept of a project which the younger architects would then manifest through material details.  As a young designer, a piece of me rebelled against the design concept.  It felt at times arbitrary and confining to a project—shouldn’t a project’s identity grow out of its parameters rather than be pre-determined?  As I grew up it dawned on me that elder architects, experienced people, can see more quickly than youth the architypes of projects, the patterns of human need and character of architectural materials, and often have developed a wellspring of aesthetic inspiration that can then inform the concepts they apply to projects.  The concepts are not, then, arbitrary: they have their roots in life beyond just the project at hand.

In my designs I look to use each part to bring out the best in one another, skewing perhaps to attitude #1 per my descriptions above.   In the practice of this, however, I find that the clarity of each part (what it is, whether site condition or design goal, and what it offers) is critical.  In other words, attitude #1 cannot happen without a degree of attitude # 2, per above.  The conscious individuation of each aspect of a project (design intent, architectural components, site conditions, etc.) is critical for the conscious bringing together of the parts.