Homes need to stir the soul, not just house the body
“My house is my refuge – an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience,” wrote Mexican architect Luis Barragán in 1948. These words – which I first read when I was at university about 65 years later – stuck with me as I set out to create a home of my own following graduation from design school. I spent the better part of a decade trying to inject some of myself – my own emotions – into the various residences I called home.
Places have been furnished with the colourful painting of an eagle that my partner and I picked up at a street-facing gallery in Amsterdam, a Renzo Piano sketch of the Centre Pompidou that the Italian architect gifted to me while I was reporting on his work, and Zig-Zag chairs of questionable provenance purchased from a quirky Dutchman in Surrey. The stories attached to each of these elicit strong emotions: feelings of love, pride in one’s work and a sense of adventure, respectively. But in reporting for this issue, I realised that I’d missed Barragán’s tip: the idea that the architecture should be eliciting emotion and not just the furniture and objects within it.
It’s something I’ve since addressed – or rather researched – with our reportage. In a world where we seem to be trending towards aesthetic sameness (visit any new development from Stockholm to Sydney and you’ll see the same colourfully-clad mid-rise mixed-use buildings), Alison Brooks outlines why it pays to tap in to the spirit of a place. This can be done, she says, by building in a way that pays respect to nature: homes can tug at heartstrings when they work with the slope of a site (rather than levelling it) or incorporate natural features (why not embrace an existing boulder or tree in the design?).
But perhaps the most informative note I’ve picked up from our reporting is the need for architecture that invokes pride too. Take our residents at the Mar Vista Tract. Inspired by their compact houses, they have banded together to form heritage protection groups, united by a shared appreciation for how the architecture encourages them to live a particular lifestyle built around community. The love that they have for their four walls is proof that residences can be so good – to the point where the Mar Vista crew won’t even sell, despite gargantuan offers – when actual architecture elicits powerful emotions, such as pride, and don’t simply provide a vehicle for living.
