Home:Make 2
HomeMake 2
Given the current reminders of injustice & inequality that still surrounds us today, more than ever, we’re thinking about the very essence of home. We believe that home is a basic human right which everyone should have in a country as wealthy as this one. Although we’re aware that architects cannot solve some of the biggest problems this country is faced with, we know that it’s our responsibility to contribute—to whatever degree we can—to progress and forward movement toward a more equitable and just world. Doing what we know and love—designing living spaces—is one way that our studio can contribute.
This strengthens our resolve to continue and deepen our commitment to our home:make project that we launched last month. And so we continue the conversation.
We recently sat down (virtually, Zooming, of course) with a group of our Maine residential clients who have also become friends. Some of these projects go back over twenty years, when I was still part of the team at Elliott + Elliott. They represent a diverse range, from a tiny 400 square foot house to large new homes. They include ambitious restorations, houses with difficult sites and demanding parameters. (Example: a site with absolutely no available water…..) Some had restrictive budgets; some were generous.
We sat down with these clients to ask them to help us envision how our homes might change in the future—whether because of Covid-19, or changes in how people live, or emerging global challenges that must be faced. We barely got the conversation going in the hour we had, and we wandered (as you might expect from a very smart and diverse group), but three important things came out of it for us.
First, almost all of these clients expressed a passion about sustainability, and even those who used some of the most sustainable strategies of the day when they were doing their projects, now wish they could have done more. Even more intriguingly, there was a huge range of how people thought about sustainability, from bottom-line statistics about how much energy a house used, to realizing that although it might be possible to build that pond that they dearly wanted, it would mean fighting the natural character and sustainable tendencies of the site.
Second, there was the start of a conversation about how people use the spaces in their houses, and the recognition that we each have different needs and desires. From this arose the remark that many younger people—families included— determinedly want smaller, want less.
Finally, at the end, for the briefest of moments, there was the mention of houses that inspire, and how important it is for each of us to live in spaces that propel us to be our best (and, by extension, contribute to a better world).
This conversation has already fed into our first big research project: thinking fresh about houses and housing in New England, with the goal of developing sustainable prototypes for a bigger demographic swath, while doing our best to inspire. The image below is a quick peak at some of our first sketches.
More to come soon. In the meantime, all of us in the studio would love to hear your thoughts on our exploration.
