There’s a reason architects almost never completely retire: there is simply nothing else they can do that is so interesting and rewarding as helping other people realize their dreams through shared creative projects.
Architects design houses, they don’t design “homes.” No one can design, build or sell someone else a home. People and families create their own homes. A talented architect designs the stage, the props; their clients bring the drama to life.
Protecting the Environment
My approach to making environmentally responsible architecture is to first and foremost to design buildings that fit their unique site, community, and climate. I generally favor starting with passive approaches that use the orientation of the building, and the characteristics of the site and local climate, to minimize energy consumption and damage to the environment. Much can be done with careful attention to admitting daylight, sheltering from prevailing winds, or arranging spaces to promote natural ventilation.
These are two of my favorite quotations about how a place becomes home:
“That people could come into the world in a place they could not at first even name and had never known before; and that out of a nameless and unknown place they could grow and move around in it until its name they knew and called with love, and call it HOME, and put roots there and love others there; so that whenever they left this place they would sing homesick songs about it and write poems of yearning for it, like a lover…”
- William Goyan, House of Breath
“Of course, thanks to the house, a great many of our memories are housed, and if the house is a bit elaborate, if it has a cellar and a garret, nooks and corridors, our memories have refuges that are all the more clearly delineated.”
- Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space