Do you ever feel like something is perceptually just out of reach; just beyond your grasp; find one missing link and you could fold yourself around that idea and it would be yours; effortless to use from then forward? I can feel my mind stretching; just lend me a few extra IQ points for a few minutes ‘til I get this, please!

I love perceptually reaching; I do my best to experience it every day. It also makes me never an expert, as I leave the last to reach for the next.

I observe people spending a lot of time trying to perfect structures and mechanisms; automatic clockworks to take care of us and our business. I’m fine with that if the mechanisms are built to watch the shop while we’re reaching for something higher, just out of our grasp. Unfortunately, it seems the mechanisms are often built as an end unto themselves, under the assumption that our perfect existence could be built from a collection of perfect systems. This, it seems to me, is one of the themes underlying industrialism; perfect the machine, turn the gears, and open the doors to paradise.

Please don’t quote me the second law of thermodynamics, increasing entropy in systems, the arrow of time, and all that. Here’s the difference: selected systems can move toward perfection over time, decreasing entropy by displacing it to other systems, sort of like the way your refrigerator creates a bubble of coolness by warming the rest of the kitchen. Can we build a bubble of technology around us, exhibiting decreasing entropy, increasing perfection, over time? Yes, but somewhere the price is paid for perfection; we are externalizing the costs.

If I haven’t lost you yet, I’ll send you around one last bend as I reach for something else just out of my grasp. The loss of our own vitality is the worst price to be paid for system perfection. I believe there is a relationship between time and system perfection, a simple-minded cousin to the Theory of Relativity.

Here is my theory: as systems approach perfection, time slows. At system perfection, time stops. It’s “Groundhog Day” meets Einstein’s rocket ship clock. (From the Theory of Relativity to a Bill Murray movie in 4 sentences, and combined the two in one sentence; top that!)

In the movie, the “day” system functioned with perfect repetition, but Bill Murray kept the day vital. He kept time moving forward from day to day by changing his actions every day, even as every other thing about the day repeated perfectly, again and again. No Bill Murray = perfect day system = time stopped.

Our lives are more like Groundhog Day than not, and this is where my theory of system perfection really hits home. We measure time by change and imperfection. Any system that approaches perfection slows the portion of time that was measured by its evolution.

Yes, I know that time does not literally stop. Electrons are still buzzing around, clocks are still ticking. But the uniqueness of experience by which we mark the passing of time is gone.

What does all this mean for me and you?

Because I like to be melodramatic: perfection = death (as in stasis).

Because I like to be contrary: we should not try to build perfect systems, but instead build systems only to watch the shop as we reach for higher goals.

I finally grabbed onto that bag of chips. I’m finished reaching for today.

-Pete

P.S.:  Any system is only as perfect as its maker. I’m guessing time will keep rolling along just fine.

I am by no means an expert woodworker. I am self taught, and I have a care for detail, which has got me through a lot of learning experiences (my “learning experiences” now populate our garage or basement TV room, where few others but my family see my embarrassments). Learning on the job has made me come to my own relationship with the craft. It’s not a storied or conventional relationship, it’s just my own, and it’s taught me a lot.

My learning of woodworking followed the progress of the renovation. Over the years, the scale of the work went from large to fine, and the degree of precision needed gradually increased.  First came the rough stuff: framing carpentry, roofing and the like. Then came the finer stuff: trimming out windows and doors, installing wood flooring, etc. Now I am at the phase with the finest detail, building furniture and cabinetry, re-renovating each room one by one to add the details that truly make our home an extension of our family. This last phase is where I’ve really gained an appreciation of the craft of woodworking, which to me, is all about forming a relationship with wood.

Here’s a bold statement that has become the foundation of my craft: every cut in woodworking is a fall from grace. Everything I make is only perfect in my mind’s eye, before I start building it. No cut is ever perfect, no piece of wood is ever perfect, and no object made is ever perfect. This used to frustrate me, until I learned that imperfection is a basic and wonderful truth in life. Rather than railing against that and embarking on a quest for perfection, I began to realize that imperfection was actually a much richer and worthwhile way to see all things. In a sense, imperfection IS perfection, it is its own ideal. This means I’m working with the wood’s inherent qualities, rather than trying to subdue the pieces into perfection. It’s just me and the wood, two personalities finding a way to come to agreement on things. Everything else falls away in that moment, and the object created is a truthful artifact of the relationship we agreed on.

Some may see woodworking as a mechanical process; woodworker or CNC machine, doesn’t matter; just get me the cabinet I ordered. However, I attribute great meaning to everyday tasks, woodworking included. I see them as vehicles to think about my relationship to things, to look for basic truths, like the truth I found about relationship and perfection. A relationship is built from the tiniest details, even as the tiniest details are so important in any piece of furniture I build. Our attention naturally goes to these details: the grain of the wood, how it feels when touched, how the pieces meet and the type of joint, the care took in its assembly. Relationships, either my relationship to the piece I am making, or my relationship to you, cannot be characterized accurately at a large scale. It belies the complication of any true relationship. Every person is a collection of intricate traits, and these intricacies only reveal themselves after I form a complex relationship with that person. Sounds crazy, but to me understanding a piece of wood follows the same path as understanding a person.

The increasing complexity of my relationship to wood has changed the type of wood I work with. I rarely work with purchased wood anymore; I work with wood that has meaning to me instead. I have a lifetime’s supply of wood in my barn salvaged from my house and old barns, and I have wood my father and I have cut from our forest. Some of the pieces I work with are 400 years or more old and are a part of my family’s history. That means a lot to me, so much more than a piece of wood grown overseas and shipped to a big box store somewhere.  I want to look at the completed object and read its history through the materials it is made of, as in “That table was once part of the floor in the old parlor.” This is more emotional than rational; it is much easier to work with purchased wood that has been kiln dried, selected for lack of defect, is straight, etc. The wood I work with has none of this. The qualities others would call defects reveal the true character of the wood, and force me to learn how to work with its defects rather than excising them with the saw.

My life at home, as always, affects my work. I see architecture often treating wood as if it were a dead material, but I think that wood has life even after the tree it came from dies. Its life is in its character, that every piece is different, that it moves seasonally, and that it ages. Too often I see wood being used as a manufactured material, homogenized through grading and matching processes and finished so that it cannot age naturally. I think architecture is much richer if it works with the life of its materials, rather than subduing that life, or subverting it to the designer’s minds-eye view of perfection. I wish more designers would form a personal relationship with the materials they use, as I have with wood.

Henry is three years old, fascinated with all things that roll or float, and quite a resourceful little guy. I imagine his resourcefulness is a product of having two older and more vocal sisters. Henry is also one of the finest observers I have ever met.

Our garage is behind the house and a short sidewalk connects the two. At about the same time every summer and only once each summer as far as I have noticed, tiny ants cross from one side of our sidewalk to the other; really tiny, about an eighth of an inch long.  This is a journey of about four feet (a few miles in ant-distance?). They take every thing they own, which is to say themselves and their young, and they go from the left side to the right side of the sidewalk. There are thousands of them, so many and so small that in passing they look like a dark stain on the sidewalk. I have never seen them cross from right to left, nor do I know if they are really the same ants year to year. I also do not know why they do it; I guess I’ll just chalk it up to their believing, as many of us do, that the grass is greener on the other side!

This takes all day. The sidewalk is made of concrete bricks, I imagine not easy for something so small to navigate. Henry will stand-sit, as only little kids can, with the flats of his feet and his butt on the ground at the same time, watching them. Henry, being three, does not stay in any one place for long, but throughout the day he remembers what the ants are up to and comes back to check on their progress. No trace remains of the ants’ journey when I walk the sidewalk to the garage the next morning.

My wife, Hilarie and I would never have noticed this event without Henry. Henry is teaching me something with many dimensions of importance in my relationship to my surroundings, but only if I am willing to take a breath, linger, and see as he does. This last part is so difficult! When Hilarie or I walk the sidewalk, our minds are usually fixed on the larger goals of that small journey. Physically this is either the house or the garage; making dinner, or the next trip to work or on errands. Mentally we have already jumped ahead to the plan for the next hour, day, week, with a mental check of travel times, potential obstacles, and expected outcomes.

By way of this story, I am proposing that the first step in forming a meaningful relationship with the things that surround us, be they people or not-people, is to personally know them. Henry is learning his world moment by moment, encounter by encounter, in the present tense. And he is learning it at a very fine, small scale, through the things he can experience with his own senses. Thus, every relationship he makes is genuine and true to him; no one told him the ants were an unimportant detail in life, and no one is telling him to believe a certain way other than the opinion he forms through his own experiences. The subjects in our environments, people or not-people, are not commodities, not extensions of ourselves; not chess pieces we forecast the movement of to win the game. They are subjects with which we form relationships.

My work life, separate from my experiences at home, is in stark contrast to what Henry is teaching me. And I worry that the modern, large-scale world, when it does intrude into Henry’s subjective view, will teach him to forget some very important things he is learning. Personal knowing substituted with the experiences of others, places turned into destinations and backdoor sidewalks turned into landscapes flying past a car window. Days spent in clockwork and on planning for the future. Ant watching? Let me check my calendar.

These things that our work-lives are teaching us change our view of our surroundings radically. I find it hard to snap out of it. It reminds me of a passage in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan, where he describes the way one’s vision changes when foraging for wild mushrooms. One moment the mushrooms are not there, and the next moment the mushrooms reveal themselves. It’s not that the mushrooms suddenly appeared; it’s the view of the observer that changed.

I will help my son to stay true to his own experience when the modern world comes crashing in because this view, Henry’s view, resonates with a cliché I hold dear. A stubborn independence to meet the world in your own way, according to your own experience, is a rural value sometimes seen as stemming from ignorance. It has, in my opinion, nothing to do with ignorance. I think it’s actually a product of a fine scale of view, and a favoring of what you yourself experience over what you are told is the proper reaction to the issue at hand. I see this in my opinion of much of modern architecture, which has little to do with the most meaningful parts of my own personal experience, and which I am told – through some fairly torturous explanations – is the most genuine view of architecture in this age. As you can guess, this opinion gets me into trouble sometimes.

This knowing, through your own eyes and at ant-scale is also something I bring into my work as an architect. Its connection wasn’t obvious to me until an insightful participant at a visioning workshop for a nature center project characterized a “wandering” experience of nature that he had seen in his own children, and asked how we could encourage that experience in our project. Typically classes visiting nature centers follow structured tours, “stop here, look at that, move to the next display, then back on the bus.” Sort of like nature as a set of museum exhibits in different rooms. Very much unlike Henry’s experience, and not a way I think children should learn about the natural world. (As a side note, Henry would be the one that jumped the walkway railing and went off to look at a rock or a bug somewhere!)

We are developing a non-linear and present-moment experience of nature in this project. I am confident it will also promote a small-scale, personal view of nature, because that’s the way kids meet their environment if given a choice. One idea is to just let the kids go, experience an outside area on their own terms, and then have them bring what they saw/learned back to the group to share their stories and to allow the center’s staff to help them link their experiences together into larger views of their environment. I like this idea. As a designer, it means I am designing an experience not along any preset sequence (ex: sidewalk to front door to vestibule to corridor to elevator, etc.), but rather have the job of encouraging people to get up-close and personal with nature on their own terms. At the nature center this is easy: give them a safe area in which to roam and make sure that area includes the unique features of the site’s ecology. But in and around any building I can do this as well, connecting people with nature’s many present-moment experiences by letting the architecture and the site design “stand back,” so we can watch the ants.

I can’t wait to show my son what I have learned from him.

I experience the world emotionally. Reason may kick in to confirm or change my emotional response, but the emotional response is the first and most permanent reaction. I have matured to trust my emotions.

I have a strong emotional reaction to the ways the things we make meet our natural environment. Lately I have been focusing on how trees are treated in urban environments. Take a look the next time you are out walking in the city. You’ll find trees are treated many different ways where they meet the ground. I see each case as a small expression of our relationship to nature. Paving running right up to the tree trunk! A tree girdled by the hole in an iron grate! Trees in the city seem like animals in a zoo. People tell me this is “a proper urban use of natural elements.” Hooey! This is just the tip of the iceberg of my larger opinion of plants’ treatment in the city. These symbols of our attitude toward nature are very important to me. I wonder whether others share that opinion.

My emotional response to the world is the source of my motivation for undertaking any difficult endeavor. Let me be clear here: Motivation is rooted in emotion that originates from within me and no amount of prodding from another person can really motivate me, past satisfying their demands minimally, unless it sparks an emotional response.  I wish people concerned with getting others to be more environmentally responsible would focus on that prime motivator more often, instead of spending their time crafting sticks. We have to deeply believe, at an emotional level, in what we’re doing, that it promises a better existence for us and our loved ones.

Finally, I believe the solutions to our present troubles lie in the relationships we make with each other and with the Earth. The objects we make, the social and economic systems we perpetuate, and the technologies we develop are products of those relationships. I feel we must get to the source and do work on the relationships themselves. I need to know the other in the relationship, I need to appreciate their differences and create common ground, and I need to value them as an individual. This applies to people and not-people; I see the Earth as a collection of subjects that is not limited to humanity.

I did not come to these beliefs about emotions and relationships quickly. I have slowly stripped back the layers of the onion. I now see that the most meaningful things in my life were the result of emotional decisions I made and the importance of my relationships to others and my environment. Some of these flew in the face of reason. When I moved back to my family home it had been vacant for 20 years. No one said salvaging it was the sensible thing to do, but it is the most important thing I ever did. Now who I am is intertwined with this place, the energy of it: family and rural life, history and connection. I am an extension of it and it of me. Loving a place and caring for it as yourself is one heart of our future, not just for me, but for us all.

I presently feel somewhat isolated by these beliefs. The world does not seem to be going in my direction. The world prefers efficiency, disposability, centralization, and placelessness. It’s not that any person I talk to prefers this; the mechanisms exist beyond any one person and behave inhumanly.

I am further isolated by the type of discussion I would like to have. I would like to focus on seeing the world in emotion and relationship, and many others would prefer to work on the same problems from the world of technology and empiricism. I do not disagree with the value of the empirical, but I do disagree with the almost complete absence of the subjective and emotional in such discussions.

Given my assertion that we must discover more healthy relationships between ourselves and this planet, we should be doing work directly, explicitly, on those relationships, and teaching others how to come to a new relationship.

In order to be actionable, this talk about the importance of emotion and relationships has to be grounded in something. I admire the thinking of Buckminster Fuller, not especially his vision of the future, with flying cars and geodesic domes, but rather his opinion that you cannot talk about abstraction purely, that it must be grounded in the physical or in experience for it to be understandable. When he talked about theory, he always included what he called “artifacts” that evidenced the theory. The things he designed: domes, houses, cars, were artifacts, or physical representations, of his view of the universe.

I agree with Bucky. If I can characterize these emotional reactions and relationships I am interested in, then it should follow that I can create artifacts of these relationships. In other words, I should be able to create a house, a piece of furniture – almost anything – that speaks of and teaches about a particular view of the relationships between ourselves and our universe. And I think I can find other types of artifacts of these relationships through stories about things I see. I can express that relationship to you bit by bit, artifact by artifact.

As you’ve grown to know me on this website, you know I do not care for things that can be simply defined. I like wiggle room. Good things happen when we are wondering; exploring what lies in that room of wiggle. Even so, here is a short definition of what I am up to:

“Investigating a dynamic and perpetual relationship with each other and the Earth and creating artifacts of that relationship.”

Seems like there is plenty of wiggle room there.

More to come…

-Pete

There is no stasis, no single arrangement to be sustained. There is only our harmonization with the ebb and flow of the systems surrounding us. A relationship is sustained and always in transition, rhythms searching for synchronization.

Rhythms move me; I am a passenger in transition. Though I long for my favorite phases in rhythm, I know they cannot be distinguished in stasis. The approaching solstice’s darkness darkens me. I don’t want it but I need it.

People tell me to flatten the rhythm. We can fix that now; leave the darkness. But I have reasons for letting the rhythms take me. The light is informed by the darkness, and the darkness by the light.

The world speeds toward homogenization. Find the optimal state and hold it, remove the peaks and valleys. Freeze appearances; stop the rhythm. Make a place the same as the other place and hold it in time, new. Accelerate toward timelessness.

I resist; I need the dark and the light. I want to be reborn with the spring, dream when the sun’s high, fall inward, and let winter’s low load the catapult for a new year’s arc.

Age wears the sharp edges. When I was new I scraped the edges and knew I was alive, but experiences repeat into oblivion and the edges become smooth. What is left? There is no life in the optimal condition.

Rhythms remain, overlaid on one another, creating infinite combinations. The world is new.

You may have noticed a change in the character of recent posts, and I have some explaining to do. The last three posts especially: Material Matters, Good Design, and Energy Landscapes continue a theme that has been evolving since last summer and break BD away from a rigid structure and toward a topical exploration.

There are several sub-themes that have been at work since last spring’s posts about higher purpose. The discussion about our relationship with the earth is always changing, and I feel two main trends are occurring. We are learning to have better non-empirical, non-quantitative discussions to complement the prevalence of scientific and analytical views of our environment. In my practice, this distinction is best seen between metric driven things like LEED, energy modeling, etc. and design as an artistic endeavor. This may seem a schizophrenic thing – to address both at once – and their synthesis is very important. We need to understand how to assimilate, synthesize, what may seem like two sides of the coin: the qualitative and the quantitative. This is most definitely not a case of one or the other, science or spirit, as is sometimes felt (I just saw a presentation that discussed how to balance passive design with aesthetics; you can imagine my reaction). There has been much discussion about this lately, and I find that Resurgence is handling it as well or better than anywhere else.

The second trend (and this really ties in with the first) is we are learning to have more sensitive discussions about the motivations and value sets underlying what we do and the choices we make. All the scientific evidence we have has limited effect if it is not complemented by a spiritual motivation to change the way we live and what we value (take a look at today’s political conversations for sterling examples of science’s limited persuasiveness). This undertone inhabits many discussions I have with those involved with design, and lately all the discussions I have with building owners about the nature of what they construct. How to have that discussion without seeming crazy is a work in progress!

The third theme going on is more unique to my experience. My firm has many projects now in the early stages of design, where we are seeking to implement not only the quantitative aspects of passive design that BD was founded on, but also the more qualitative topics explored over the past year in Building Bridges. Here we are developing real-world case studies of seeing both sides of the coin in synthesis, held within the framework of an industry that prefers to see the quantitative as necessary, and the qualitative as optional. This is a wonderful struggle to be engaged in; that of changing the conversation! It also means more feet on the ground BD mechanisms are being developed on the fly, in projects. Most notably, the importance of pre-design visioning per the Good Design post, and the translation of philosophy to reality via the “zone of mediation,” first being implemented around the Control & Variability topic explored last spring. Sometimes our efforts at convincing others are successful and sometimes they are not, but we always learn a tremendous amount from the exploration, and this always gets carried forward into future work. It is a heroic thing for everyone involved to change the conversation in this way!

Blue Design continues to tie itself to larger and older ideas. The Koan post was a sort of breakthrough; a way to loosen the tightness of BD’s structure and help others understand its nature & how to interact with it. We have been inspired by other architectural firms whose work speaks of control and variability, and by concepts including the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic and the lucid & passionate discussions I see occurring in Resurgence and even in my own firm.  

Finally, I need to thank some people who work with me that have a great impact on BD’s development. Nicholas Williams, who is responsible for much of BD’s graphic identity and has the most difficult job right now of its translation into project environments (navigating the zone of mediation!), and Anitha Deshamudre, who is working with me to understand how to convey BD holistically and how to integrate the quantitative concerns of sustainability and building design with BD’s vaporously qualitative character. And I cannot thank the leadership team at Ashley McGraw enough. We are together through thick, thin, and especially, through obscure. The conversations I have with them always propel us off into some new and better direction.

Even as the days grow shorter, we look toward a bright future.

-Pete

This form of sight began to be enriched by more encompassing dimensions. Making a building is a massive investment of energy far beyond fossil fuels. Every building contains the energy of the expertise applied to it: the combined knowledge and skill of all involved with its design and construction. It contains emotional energy: the passion we bring to the endeavor, the stresses and satisfactions of seeing it rise. It contains the energy of the time spent in its design and construction. It contains the capital (a currency of stored energy) spent in its making, financial as well as political and relational. All these forms are brought from all directions: from the community, from the designers, from the builders, and from the building owners. And all these forms of energy continue to accumulate in the building after its construction is finished. The memories of one’s experiences of the building add to its energy; they are investments made in the building. All this together – along with the more familiar embodied energy of fossil fuels – is the energy landscape in which we build, visible with a little imagination.

We should build with respect for the energy of the place in which we build. Place holds the energy of past memory and future hope. The color of the energy landscape is unique to place and tied to its culture. Too often we wipe the slate clean without respect for memory, and the landscape suffers from it. Places become less meaningful, less particular, and more disposable. Wrecking balls make holes, so much garbage to be pushed into a pit somewhere and forgotten. Memories and energy lost.

Any building is a dazzlingly bright spot in the energy landscape. We should take care in how we spend such energy: fossil fuel is not the only thing that will be in high demand as we look toward our horizon. Is what we are making worth the energy invested? Are we being responsible?

Good design is the ideal; the synthesis of requirements, the highest of which are intangible. Good design is not good design if it is separable from the whole.

Sustainable is not a word of degree; it is both absolute and dynamic. Sustainability is not possible without good design, and good design, of itself, is not inherently sustainable. 

Vision is the overarching ideals toward which a design strives, and good design is a product of vision. Vision is not created from a collection of components; the parts are created from the vision.

Good design is a synthesis of considerations, but sometimes we are tempted to think of it differently: as the satisfaction of a set of requirements laid one on top of the other from most basic to most elusive: the building has to stand and be constructible (first layer), it has to meet code (second layer), it has to meet the functional and space programs (third layer), and so on. At the top of the stack are some intangible things: beauty, power to inspire, ability to influence culture or society, etc. Because of the perceived linearity of the stack, and the implication that things at the bottom are more important than those at the top, sometimes things at the top of the stack don’t get much attention (and at the same time, they are the most difficult for design to manifest). Design in its higher forms, however, is not a flow chart where we meet one requirement then move on to the next, but rather is a synthesis of considerations and the fulfillment of a vision (which I will get to later).

Synthesis is a word of degree: We can exhibit more or less in design. With less skill comes less synthesis; it is easier to pull distinct components from the whole as in, “I’ll have a cheeseburger but hold the pickles! (Or in my trade, “I’ll have a building but hold the solar panels!”) With the most skill comes an inseparable synthesis; this is the elusive ideal. The red and yellow paint mixed become orange. Once orange, neither the red nor the yellow can be “unmixed.”

Sustainable (environmentally, economically, and socially) is not a word of degree. Something is either sustainable, or it is not sustainable. An activity can either continue in perpetuity or it cannot. But the word sustainable also lends a deceiving air of stability to something that must continually adapt and change to continue in perpetuity. What is sustainable today may not be sustainable tomorrow, and what is sustainable in the future may not be sustainable today. Natural systems, technological development, population: all are in flux and interrelated. “Sustainable,” as an adjective, is a moving target, and creates great angst for those oriented toward meeting fixed goals. Pass the Excedrin!

But we often speak of the degree of sustainability, we just forget to add the qualifier “more” or “less.” The danger to the uninformed is their mistaking degree for goal, as in “I am engaged in sustainable design…are the buildings I design sustainable? Not yet, but they’re more sustainable than the ones I was working on ten years ago.”

This was a caution I felt when I started doing work in (more!) sustainable design, that goals are necessary to promote short term action, but in a fast-moving field such as sustainable design, today’s goals quickly fall into the rear view mirror, and there is a temptation to perceive the intermediate goal as the entire journey. I see this happening now with net zero buildings, sometimes billed as the ultimate, but again a qualifier is needed: today’s ultimate. So we need a combination of intermediate goals combined with a sprinkling of the unknown, with the unknown being the absolute and dynamic definition of sustainability, without qualifier.  

All this may seem like semantics; multiple roads to the same end: stacks and synthesis, degree and goal. But the realization of the ideals we promote as designers lies in semantics such as these. I see this best, project after project, via vision.

Vision is a way of thinking to avoid the “stack of requirements” trap, born of projects where sustainable design (and sometimes higher design goals in general) was considered an un-synthesized shopping list to consider only after more basic goals had been met. In Blue Futures, I wrote of the difference between problem-solving and vision, and this is an applied version of that same discussion.

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has conveyed a pre-design green building wish list in terms of the strategies to be applied: “The building should have solar panels, a green roof, and a geothermal system.” While some may think this is a fine way to start, I view this like building carriages with motors instead of automobiles, and giving the answers before understanding the questions. Green building trade publications that describe case studies in terms of their sustainable features perpetuate the concept of a green building as a collection of pieces bolted together. Vision is necessary to shift the discussion from a conglomeration into a synthesis; to change the participants’ perspective from a shopping list to a singular achievement: good design.

Vision is the overarching ideals toward which a design strives, expressed qualitatively. The word “ideals” here means vision is not occupied with things traditionally on the bottom of the stack. Meeting code and being under budget, although always necessary, are not ideals. Ideals must be aspirational: noble and slightly out of reach. Vision is ethereal enough to be broadly inspirational, embraced differently according to each stakeholder’s priorities, and creative in nature. A proper vision should enable each stakeholder to bring their unique talents to its realization.

“We will create a net zero fossil fuel building.”
“Our project will heal the site’s relationship to the river.”
“Our building will explore an ecological material value set.”

A project can have many such statements. There is no mention in each statement of how it is to be accomplished. This is a good way to check whether a statement qualifies as a vision, or whether it has slipped off the tracks into prescription.

What are some cues to take in creating a vision? I think vision creation is mostly intuitive, and that if it were ever able to be mapped as a sort of decision tree or flow chart, something important about it would be lost. Even given this, I do start with some typical categories to get the creative juices flowing: 

• Blue Design’s five qualities (especially the last three)
• The dominant natural characteristics of the site
• The repair of previous ecological damage to the site or region
• The spirit of sustainability unique to the client, related to their heritage or their value set

The timing of project visioning is critical. It should be one of the first tasks, before enough time has passed for team members to form their own literal preconceptions about the project; before anyone has had the time to imagine and subsequently fixate on what the finished product will look like. The parts don’t produce the vision; the vision produces the parts, and the parts should not even enter the discussion until later.

A proper vision statement leaves intentional gaps between it and its realization; investigation is required to understand how to manifest it in a given design endeavor. This is intentional; to make the manifestation more difficult to visualize and to help the project team members avoid preconceiving the parts or the finished product. As (more!) sustainable designers, these intentional gaps are where the magic happens; where we have space to find both good design and synthesis.

Now the trick, and the most angst-ridden portion of this whole process, is the conversion of the vision into reality. There must be some empathy and leeway here, to avoid project team members going insane as much as anything else. There is a “zone of mediation” between the vision and the design’s subsequent stages. In this zone, it is helpful to have some more literal cues to help the realization of the vision gather momentum. Find some clues in the vision to do this. For example, in my statement about healing the relationship to the river, here are some cues that build upon each other: how does the river work? Is its level variable? Is healing about building flood walls to control that variability? What is the natural response of the surrounding topography and vegetation to the river? How can our project work with that response? Can part of the project flood periodically? Can this be used to teach visitors about the natural rhythms of the river? Can visitors actually engage with the changing river levels and the topography’s/vegetation’s response via paths or even via portions of the building that periodically engage with the flooded river?

Some very important things happen as a result of the vision process. At the beginning of the project, we have focused on a positive and broadly inspiring vision instead of a potentially negative prescription of the project’s components (see the electric car example in Blue Futures). We have shifted the definition of success for the project away from any one particular part and toward the realization of a vision. And if we have done a good job at promoting the vision, the project team, including the client and contractors, will be more likely to hold that vision within them for the duration of the project. If certain pieces of the project or particular strategies fall away because of budget or other rocks in the road, the team is more likely to be passionate about finding alternate ways to realize the vision.

And, probably most importantly, focusing on vision rather than pieces has moved us closer to the synthesis inherent in good design, and the synthesis a sustainable future should exhibit.