Saving the world with architecture

One of my love/hate relationships with this profession is the seeming inability to be able to "turn off" thoughts on architecture when the work day is done. We've all probably heard the illustration that when we as architects, designers, and theorist get our vacation photos developed we are always surprised to find 4 rolls of film of buildings and details, and a sum total of 3 shots of our family. During dinner at an upscale restaurant, I find myself enumerating to my wife the laundry list of ADA violations I just counted in the bathroom. A sidenote to all of the men: do not attempt this during dinner on your wedding anniversary - trust me on this one, guys. So here I found myself at nine on a Saturday morning, unable to turn Bickford off in my head. I think somewhere in Chapel Hill I hear her laughing at me. So lets then examine Herb's next question: what can we as designers do to affect social change?

Let's start with an easy one, a small step for man if you will. I'm going to borrow something from Herb's blog that has struck a chord with me. To paraphrase: buildings should be helpful and fair. I think if we can address that issue each and every time we design we can - dare I say it - make a real difference. Within the discussion one someone's blog a few days ago, Herb suggested that architects have a responsibility to not only address the client's needs, but to really understand human behavior and analyze how we actually use a space and in the end, we create better spaces. I think we can all identify with the client who comes to us with their specific program - X rooms needs to be Y s.f.; 1 needs to be next to 2; delta needs to have her own bathroom, but gamma and theta don't rank that high - and then we just fit the rest in where we can. The extra handicapped restroom required through our code research is tacked on at a corner, as is the separate means of egress the plans examiner requires, and the result is many times a frustrating space for the end user. How might it be different if we use tools of psychology and real user needs studies to enhance the space from the onset of design? In the end I'll argue a much more helpful and fair space for all. We can even expand this to the scale of the site and its context. Rather than calculating how big of a building can we fit on the site and still have the required parking, what if we go back to the seemingly lost concepts of analyzing not only the building for the client's needs, but in the context of the larger neighborhood and its impact? It is a tough sell at times but one I think worthy.

I don't discount Bickford's argument that through the proliferation of suburbia the damage is done. But what can we do to handle the mess we have? Can we take pieces from days gone yore - pieces that worked then - and apply them to our current mode of development? Neighborhoods breed avoidance and separation through because of the lack of disconnect. Gone are the city streets where the social gathering spot was the stoop in front of the buildings, or the inviting front porches where I may join my neighbor for an afternoon iced tea as we watch our children bike down the street. Now we may nod to our neighbors as we pass them taking the trash out, or talk to them once a year when we need to borrow their chainsaw. Our definition of community has shifted to those we deal with in our professional lives miles away, and not who we share our streets with. The private realm of our houses are needed, but we have lost the public spaces to share. Good fences don't make good neighbors. We need to consider how to layer this shared public claim back into our neighborhoods and the active front porch is a great start. My dorm in college, although not the hallmark of good design, effectively captured this through a series of increasing larger public lounges. Each wing shared a small lounge for gathering of six or seven dorm rooms, then each floor shared a larger collective lounge and finally the first floor had the largest space to accommodate all the residences and a connection to the outdoors. It fostered a wonderful sense of community - of all ethnicities and classes - through a series of increasingly larger collective spaces, and yet still maintained the "safety" of the individual. These public spaces become more and more scarce congruent with more and more development and less and less real estate available. Let's appreciate these spaces again, and expound their values to our clients.

The last item I'd like to touch our are spaces that create and foster a shared experience of emotion. I'll be touching on these with our studio assignment in Enno's class, but in a nut shell there exist spaces and architecture that generate a shared emotion that cuts across all socio and economic boundaries, and that is what I call the "memorial space" The memorial to the OKC bombing victims at the site of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building is located in the heart of downtown Oklahoma City, surround by a redeveloped downtown of bars, restaurants, retail, and the convention center, as well as some of Bickford's fear generating classes. Through my observations, the experience of the memorial creates a solemnity and reflection that everyone, regardless of their connection to the bombing itself, shares. The spaces manages to strip us away to virtually our souls and we are all connected in grief, sorrow, praise and respect as we experience it. I have found the Vietnam memorial in D.C. to generate a similar feeling, and I suspect the WOTC memorial upon its completion will do the same. Perhaps we can learn from these somber memorials and understand what it is about the spaces that disregards class, race, gender, and age to make us all experience them equally.

When I tell the tale of my career choice to my friends and relatives I always start the story the same way, and tell me if this sounds familiar: throughout my entire, idealized undergraduate education my classmates and I all knew that upon our graduation and entrance into the work force that it was WE who were going to make a difference. We all had hopes and dreams that we were going to save the world with architecture. Five years of redlines, door jamb details, finish schedules until our eyes bleed, and countless EIFS over metal building panels later, that hope seems to have quietly left me for the more fertile minds of the next class of undergraduate students. Does Dr. Childress dare suggest that this hope may be still alive and within my reach? Maybe, just maybe it is.