Home:Make

HomeMake

Our studio is embarking on an exploration of seismic shifts that are redefining the nature of “home”, and we’re hoping you—our past, present and future clients; our design chums; our collaborators—will engage with us in this timely work. Here’s the story of how we’re beginning.

8 a.m. Tuesday, weeks into this pandemic, our Santa Monica studio is silent and shadowy. The virus lurks outside, our west and east coast staff works from home, we each carry on in isolation. Every day, I still arrive to this beautiful room that's my foundational creative space, designed for collaboration, now a solo studio. I sit at my desk, and I get down to work. It’s what I know how to do, even behind curtains drawn closed on our big Pico storefront window.

We’re all turned upside down by this.

On Zoom, our staff talks. We ponder what life will look like after Covid-19. We ponder how this crisis will compound forces already at work, changing how we live, how we want to live, how we need to live. What will be the new nature of public space? Most interesting to us as architects who love to design houses, what will our homes be like? How can we respond to the changing physical, programmatic (think: working at home), and psychological needs we require of our homes? How do we create “place” that’s nurturing and artful?

Our goal is to make our practice more than just relevant. Our goal is to lead a conversation about the inevitable evolution of home, and what it means to dwell—that deeply layered word explored so well by philosopher Martin Heidegger. From his Building Dwelling Thinking, written in the wake of WWII nearly seventy ago, and yet so relevant today:

“What is the state of dwelling in our precarious age? On all sides we hear talk about the housing shortage, and with good reason. Nor is there just talk; there is action, too. We try to fill the need by providing houses, by promoting the building of houses, planning the whole architectural enterprise. However hard and bitter, however hampering and threatening the lack of houses remains, the real plight of dwelling does not lie merely in a lack of houses. The real plight of dwelling is indeed older than the world wars with their destruction, older also than the increase of the earth’s population and the condition of the industrial workers. The real dwelling plight lies in this, that mortals ever search anew for the nature of dwelling, that they must ever learn to dwell.”*

This will be a multi-faceted exploration, with several threads that we’ll be exploring simultaneously. We’re beginning by refreshing our commitment to sustainability as a firm. We’re looking at the thorny problem of providing housing for a bigger slice of people in the east and west coast communities we primarily work in. We’re exploring how we might better accommodate activities inside our homes that were once part of what we did outside in the public realm. We intend to do our very best to continue in a tradition thousands of years old, taking the parameters at hand—climate, materials, culture and personality—and use them to create homes right for this time.

We expect it to be a messy, imperfect project, perhaps without a decisive conclusion. But we know that it will propel our practice and our goals to be the best we possibly can be at what we do. We would love it if you would give us your comments, your thoughts, your own musings about this topic. There are a couple of ways you can engage: Follow us on Instagram for some of the loosest, most artful explorations of these topics. Follow this blog on our website, or simply reply to our email and we’ll give you regular updates.

Sending our best wishes for health and happiness.

* Martin Heidegger. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Collins, 2001.

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