Peter C. Warner, AIA
Building Dreams...
Good Designs: A complete understanding and satisfactory definition may forever be ungraspable, but for me, when we build something, good design is what matters most. The quality of our dreams manifests in the quality of our lives. Constructing a home well, or doing anything well, nurtures a dream for a way of life, and living well fulfills it.
Today we have a developing, changing body of laws, codes, guidelines, agencies, specialists and generalists addressing the issue of how to design and build better, something that appears to most of us that we must do. With so much activity in this area, and so much urgency, it is not surprising that there are many differences in perspective, opinion and approach.
As a designer, here are some of the principles and approaches to design that I believe will do the most good to support and nurture our world, life itself, community, family and the individual:
- The earth really is our mother.
- Community is a living thing; every part needs health, purpose and good relationships with the other parts and the whole. Good design dos not isolate things, it harmonizes them.
- Families are universal in human kind. Support this.
- Everybody and everything needs and deserves unconditional love—and a place.
Currently, these are some of the things that I am doing, or favor doing in designing homes:
- Natural design: I like forms, materials and attitude that reinforcec and celebrate our connection with the earth.
- Be comfortable on the site. A good design will almost look like it grew on the site. It extends to gardens, lawns, woods and sky. It's comfortably self-contained, yet without limits.
- Burrowing in–creating good living space within the earth, as with a ground level under the main floor, lets us use the earth itself to stablize our interior environment, making our entire home easier to keep comfortable the year around.
- Know where the sun is. Let everything have a good relationship with the sun.
- Make good spaces for doing everything. Materials matter a lot, but more important is the quality of spaces, relationships and the ways that everything is accommodated.
- Favor working at home, whatever that may be, for love or for money or both. Make good work spaces and relationships. In fact, the more things that can be done and enjoyed at home, rather than by necessarily going somewhere, the better.
- Favor good family and extended family (and friends) accommodation. It's okay to have a big house; it might have a big job.
- Good outdoor living areas and transitional areas. Even a tiny house can feel grand when it helps us feel our relationship with the whole world.
- Solid wood, solid stone and "real" materials look good, feel good, smell good and just help make us comfortable. Heavy massive materials in a building can generally be used to make it easier for the other systems in a building to keep us comfortable. Insulating materials and heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems can get substantial help from the good use of thermal mass in a building. In contrast, something as light as fabric may provide shade, shelter and color in perfect harmony with everything else.
- Be aware of energy resources; choose and use them wisely and creatively. I don't see any universal solution to needs/desires for energy resources—any inherently good choices. Good design at its most opportunistic can make the consumption of any energy at all in a home simply an option. In fact, energy might be produced to use elsewhere.
These first tier, most important approaches in good design all have something in common: they defy exact definition, pinning down and precise analysis. Their successful implementation in a home, or anything, depends on good designers, good builders, and ultimately on the quality of life shared in the home by its occupants. Good design is a shared creations.
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