12 NOON, Wednesday May 21, 2025 WPKN 89.5 FM wpkn.org

We are used to thinking that homes are just buildings: but are they different in the way we design them?

Gaston Bachelard, in the 1958 book The Poetics of Space, wrote, “If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house. I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.” Before he built his idyl, Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote about his friend’s home, “I that found all his peculiarities faithfully expressed, his humanity, his fear of death, love or retirement, simplicity, etc.,” then proceeded to erect his own.

Nothing has changed since Thoreau, Bachelard, and Pollan. But every human wants the place they hope for and feel they need. Because our homes are a mirror of who we are. So we try to make ourselves in our homes. When designers are part of that creation, the intimacies of those we design with could be seen as part of “just doing business.” 

Those unchanging shared intimacies of hope and fear and faith of home creation go beyond the transactions of most other things in our lives. Unlike the episodic encounter with a chef or a fashion designer, the continuity of an architect’s incorporation into the lives of our clients is more akin to a psychotherapist, one who knows both the origin story and the life evolution of those who bond with each other to make a home. But like a priest or rabbi, the designer sees more than the individual. The spiritual expression of faith in the future a home embodies is a gift given to us.

Either by design or circumstance, we make our houses. When architects help birth them, the places we make often outlive us and the histories of what we make. In the rough-and-tumble world of construction that beauty can be forgotten, but it’s why we and our clients are alive.

Architects who have designed many types of buildings but have focused on homes join us! Please join me and Architects Robert Orr of New Haven and John DeForest of Seattle!