Succulents, Architecture, and the Beauty of Imperfection

What we want is so rarely what we get. There is no small degree of sadness in that. But there is no small degree of joy in it, too. And beauty is the place where joy and sadness intersect.

I think I can elaborate with a twofold plant metaphor. Stick with me... A few of my coworkers have picked up on my love for succulents. Three separate plants are now making their green little marks on the world of my desk, and each one was a gift. They were chosen when I was having especially bad days, and they were given with a care that is rare and remarkable to me. So the first level of the metaphor is: had I had the days I wanted, it’s improbable those gritty plants would be sitting in front of me as I write. I love them; they remind me of human kindness, the verdure of life, and the endurability of the spirit. I would not have chosen them; that would have entailed choosing the imperfection of days, and we generally lack the clairvoyance to embrace imperfection for, say, the joy a plant might bring.

The second level of the metaphor lies in the plants themselves. One of them lives in a terracotta pot that is a shoddy piece of semi-functional imperfection at best. It was a cheap plant, the soil is rock hard, and water drains straight out of the pot, so I’ve had to use a saucer that belongs to an espresso cup to catch the excess moisture. The larger leaves at the base of the plant are dying or dead. They remind me alternately of old leathery smokers and acne-ridden teenagers. The top half of the plant, though, is smooth and symmetrical and lovely, made even more so by contrast. Another of my succulents is actually an arrangement of five, and the fifth succulent to the far left has grown overeager and sprouted off a shoot that rises a good five-and-a-half inches above the rest. It looks ridiculous. I am annoyed by its autonomous climb, but I admire the tenacity of its endeavor. The damn thing has taken on a personality, and I’m now inspired by something that’s referred to as a “fat plant.” I recognize the absurdity in my begrudging respect and genuine affection for some potted plants, but I also regard it as a small miracle. “There is no exquisite beauty,” as Edgar Allan Poe puts it, “without some strangeness in the proportion.”

At some point these plants will die. I know this because everything does, and also because much as I love them and much as I try, my penchant for pernicious plant-care dies harder than they will. They remind me, though, of what we do and why. Much like a succulent, the spaces we design are meant to last. They are meant to rise up out of the dirt and dust and ash as anchors that will not blow away and will not let us blow away. They are not meant to last forever because they cannot. They have flaws, and there will always be some thing that could have been done better or done differently or that could be added or should be taken away. They are imperfect, impermanent, incomplete things, much like the people they shelter. The Japanese call this wabi-sabi, and they believe that it is beautiful. So do I.

And so, too, does the firm. I’ve said it before with their blessing, and I’ll say it again: the world is a messed up place. Sometimes it’s so messed up that the brokenness feels irrevocable—like it’s all just cracking and splitting and splintering into a shuddering nothingness, and someday all that will be left is the memory of how we didn’t love each other and we didn’t love our Earth. If that doesn’t weigh heavy on you, you’re not paying attention. It’s a sad, heavy conviction that should rest sad and heavy in your bones. But the world is also a remarkable place. A place where plants have learned to store water in their skin so that the scorched, dry earth can’t lick them; where people choose kindness even when it costs them everything; where art and literature and music and architecture embrace those parts of us that we ourselves don’t understand and push us forward, forward, forward until it’s time to relinquish our last breath to the next generation, who will hopefully choose again and again to love their own joy and sadness as a place where beauty has come to meet them.

This might sound like a load of sentimental bull, but it’s the most no-bull thing I’ve landed on so far—the thing we fight to believe every day as we draw and we type and we tear down and we rebuild and we bite our tongues and we hold our breath and we try to find a way to love and make sense of the unlovable and the incomprehensible. We don’t do it perfectly any more than we design perfectly. But this, too, is wabi-sabi, and it is beautiful.

—Emma Hamblen, Executive Assistant

The Wisdom of Humility

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.”

—T. S. Eliot, “East Coker”

A few weeks ago, the Dallas AIA invited Mark Hoesterey to speak at a Knowledge Forum about residential architecture. We were given some minimal guidelines, but after reviewing them, it became clear that he could pretty much talk about whatever he wanted to talk about. This kind of liberty inevitably begs the question: What can you possibly say in half an hour about an entire field that’s worth saying?

Here were our loose parameters:

-Address current trends in residential design
-Share the joys and pitfalls in this area of practice
-Discuss how to incorporate green and sustainable design initiatives
-Explore case studies of collaboration with other professionals

This really does cover, in many aspects, the entire scope of what we do on a daily basis. Four of us met to take an initial stab at putting a presentation together. We knew we wanted to address the four main topics in some way. We knew we wanted listeners to walk away having learned something about life, not just architecture. And we knew we didn’t want it to be all about us. But it was hard to know where to begin. So we took it to the firm, and Mark asked everyone in our Monday morning staff meeting what each person considered to be the greatest joy and greatest pitfall of the profession. Joys included things like:

-The ability to move at a slower, more thoughtful pace
-When clients trust us
-When, at the end of the project, the client feels like family

Pitfalls included things like:

-Fewer people enjoy the spaces we design (as opposed to commercial architecture)
-When clients don’t trust us
-When decision-making becomes difficult because we’re working with the actual user of the space

Because I’m what the office jokingly calls a layperson (in relation to architecture), I held off from answering these questions until the very end. Mostly I observed. And what really jumped out at me as everyone offered up the joys and pitfalls of their vocation is that residential architecture is an incredibly humbling field. Our architects spend hours and hours and hours designing and redesigning spaces that are beautiful and functional and meaningful, and at the end of it all, only one family gets to regularly enjoy and appreciate what they’ve done. And sometimes they’re designing for people who are really difficult to work with—people who don’t trust them, who can’t make decisions, etc.

The trends question was an interesting one, primarily because we don’t adhere to them. The firm’s goal is to create timeless architecture by using universal principles of design. At its core, what we do isn’t sexy—it’s human. What I mean by this is that we’re not designing spaces to showcase the newest gadgets, bells and whistles, etc. (though our projects do often feature these); we’re designing spaces where people live. Spaces where people are born and people grow up and people grow old and people die. Spaces where children create their earliest memories and parents learn how much they didn’t know. Spaces where plates and bones and hearts are broken. Spaces where time tears at the seams and spaces where time stitches them back together. Spaces where the stories that form the most essential parts of who we are unfold into being.

If we really stop and think about the impact of what we do, we have to admit it’s a high honor. But it’s also humbling. We’re designing relatively small spaces for relatively few people, while also being charged with the enormous task of creating a place for people to be, well…people. People in their fullest, truest, ugliest, most beautiful sense.

While our goal is to create spaces where people feel like they belong, a huge part of that entails a respectful consciousness about the environments in which these spaces are built. In the least mawkish way possible, we have to ask ourselves very earnest questions about, say, the value of a tree, as it relates to both the psychological and physiological impact on the homeowner and the topographical impact on the site. The challenge and the joy of this kind of consciousness is that our work is subject to others’ needs, not just wants, and sometimes part of a cool design gets thrown out for the sake of the beauty in a tree.

Then, of course, it’s a team effort. We’re the designers. But what we do couldn’t be done without the client, the builder, the interior designer, the landscape architect, the engineers, the workmen, the craftsman, and so on and so forth. This, too, is humbling. No one person gets the glory, if glory does in fact exist. And while this is sometimes hard to swallow, I think we can all agree that this is how it should be—that this is right.

The more I think about it, the less I think this is specific to our field. In any profession, the services offered are valued because of the knowledge and experience acquired by the one who offers it. But those who are best at what they do are those who can share their knowledge and experience while still remembering the time before it was acquired, and the long and sometimes painful process by which they acquired it. We all, in other words, have to stand in a place of equal parts knowing and not-knowing. What we don’t know should humble us. What we do know should humble us even more. And I think Eliot is right—that’s ultimately the only wisdom we can hope to acquire, or share.

—Emma Hamblen, Executive Assistant

The Story We Tell

It’s probably safe to assume that all of us, on any given day, are inevitably caught in the thick of wondering what the hell we’re even doing. We’re staring at the cursor blinking mid-sentence in an email that seemed really important twenty seconds ago, and suddenly we can’t even remember who we’re sending it to. Or we can’t remember why we opened the web browser, or we can’t remember what kind of music we like, or we can’t remember what we think is interesting, and it’s all just so banal and painful and meaningless. And then the gears grind and shift and we’re not asking what anymore, we’re asking why.

“We live in an extraordinarily debauched, interesting, savage world,” David Mamet writes, “where things really don't come out even” (Three Uses of the Knife). Which is true, right? I suppose that living where we live, it’s sometimes hard to remember. But we live in a world that’s falling apart all of the time—it’s unraveling, really—and nothing is fair, and anything beautiful or meaningful or worthwhile starts decaying before its conception. So what’s the point? Even if we knew what we were doing—or at least, what we wanted to do—why bother? What can we actually do about the injustice and futility and decay?

One of the singular advantages of working at an architecture firm is that every day, I am surrounded by people who are in the business of beauty-making. And it’s not just some haphazard, flailing attempt at beauty. It’s slow and thoughtful and purposeful, and it requires skill, and patience, and undoing and redoing, and collaboration, and ingenuity, and the ability to look at things from more than one angle. It is, from what I can tell, rewarding work; but it is also hard work, and even here there are murmurs of “What am I doing here? And why am I doing this?”

Of course, as David Foster Wallace points out, I is at the center of these queries, and we’re hardwired to instinctively see the world and its people first (and sometimes only) as it relates to ourselves (This Is Water). Reality as I know it is only reality as I see it, and if I don’t choose to consciously fight this hardwired way of thinking about things, I won’t be able to, as Wallace says, “consider possibilities that aren’t pointless and annoying.”

Wallace submits that the value of education is, at its best, learning “[h]ow to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default-setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone, day in and day out.” In other words, education does what it is supposed to do when it equips you first with the knowledge that your hardwired settings are haywire, and second with the tools to consciously resist those settings. I would argue that this is also the real value of art.

Humanity and its Earth are constantly slipping back into a state of chaos, but they’re also always straining against it. And I think maybe that’s what good art should be telling us over and over and over—that things are bad, broken, ugly; but not hopeless, and not irredeemable.

So a few weeks ago when my boss and I had a conversation about the firm’s philosophy on architecture, and how we’re always either adding to decay or restoring beauty, it made sense to me. Everything tells a story, and what we have to decide every morning when we get out of bed (whether we’re architects or stock brokers or baristas) is what story we’re going to tell, and how. We have to decide if we’re going to add to the decay, or restore beauty.

Robert Schumann says that it is “the duty of the artist” to “send light into the darkness of men’s hearts.” To consider an architect being charged with such a task might inspire a heavy dose of eye-rolling, but I could name several buildings on my alma mater’s campus in Oklahoma—let alone those scattered all over Europe—that accomplish just such a feat. They restore order in a world of chaos, they embrace light in a universe crushed by darkness, they inspire peace in a time defined by violence. We are quieted by them, we are delighted by them, we are even comforted by them. They are the places we go when we need to feel ourselves—safe and whole and unafraid.

SHM has many projects that do this in one way or another, but currently, my favorite project is also the one that I happen to think does it best. St. Francis Chapel in Breckenridge, Texas, is indeed sacred. Not just because it’s a chapel, but because it says something about the world and it says something about human nature.

It admits to the imperial loneliness of human existence. Nestled on top of a hillside overlooking the surrounding landscape, everything—even the visible homestead—feels far away. It’s pretty much just land for miles, and that is simultaneously calming and terrifying. And seeing all of that space makes us ask ourselves some intensely uncomfortable questions. Where would we go if we had nowhere to turn? What would we do when we realized we were alone? So the chapel makes us ask the questions, right, but it also provides answers. “You’d come here,” it says. “You wouldn’t be alone here.”

It repurposes what is old and heavy and cast aside into something beautiful and unmovable and whole. It takes pieces of its surroundings—things that wouldn’t otherwise fit together, like organic stone and indigenous timber—and it puts it all together in a magnificent puzzle. Nothing is forced or shimmied or jammed. Rather, everything appears to be restored to where it originally belonged. It’s a new structure, but only in the sense that it didn’t exist and now it does. Really, though, it’s as old as the country it’s built on. It’s made up of old things, discarded things, unnoticed things—things that were always functional and durable and beautiful, but were waiting to be restored.

So, in a world where we don’t belong—where we, too, feel discarded and unnoticed and worn and thin and tired and forced and shimmied and jammed—St. Francis Chapel provides a space that we fit into, that we belong in. And at sunset, as the last rays pierce through the stained glass in the raised mesquite chancel, perhaps a little light really does make its way into the dark cavity where our hearts are defiantly pumping blood.

Which is why we can get out of bed in the morning and choose to consciously fight what feels like ubiquitous pointlessness. Because somewhere, maybe even everywhere, there is light, and we belong, and that is the story we’re going to tell.

—Emma Hamblen, Executive Assistant

Skin

I started my first full-time, post-graduate job at SHM Architects three months ago today. It feels like it might have been three days ago, or three years ago, but not three months. Time is funny like that, and I think we’re always—on some (perhaps subconscious) level—wondering how it got away from us.

Directly outside my window—across an alley that I suppose will always pit itself between my office building and the one I’m about to describe—a development is going up that is to include apartments, shops, and even a Trader Joe’s. When I started, it was nothing more than what appeared to be a parking garage for two stories and exposed lumber poking up out of the concrete like toothpicks starting on the third (my floor). Or at least that’s how I remember it. Who could really say? Time is also funny in that way—it starts at one place and ends at another and we can’t remember how the change happened. We weren’t watching closely enough, and we missed it.

So now, when I look out my window, there’s a whole building, with walls and some windows, and the exposed lumber through the eyes of the building looks more like guts than toothpicks. They’ve started laying brick on the bottom half, but from my floor up, it’s still just sheathed in DuPont Tyvek CommercialWrap D. Last week, a coworker paused as he walked past my desk and observed as the wrap flapped in the wind. He said something about how he loved to watch it move, because buildings are fixed, unmovable things, and it’s strange and mysterious to watch something anchored and still be shrouded in a dance. “It’s the building’s skin, you know,” he said.

And now I can’t stop staring out my window at the flapping, untrimmed edges—the building’s rippling epidermis, waving like a flag in the wind. And I’ve wondered why it matters, that bannered Tyvek. And then it hit me. And what hit me is that everything is so very delicate, and so very durable. And I thought about the skin that stretches itself across our bones—that breakable and unbreakable frame—and how it protects us and how it bleeds, and how it changes colors and textures and shapes, and how it lives and dies on us, but never leaves us, and how the thing that holds us all together is flesh, which endures but is also dust. And maybe houses are like that—maybe everything that keeps us safe and dry and warm and beautiful and whole and alive is like our skin, strung up on the flagpoles of our bones, reminding us of why we needed shelter in the first place.

I am not an architect. I studied writing and literature and film in college, and I was hired to assist the principals, manage calendars, coordinate photo shoots, write proposals, and facilitate marketing efforts at the firm. In other words, although I’m learning bits and pieces here and there, mine is the untrained eye, the unskilled hand, the woefully non-esoteric arsenal of words.

But I wonder if buildings are not more like bodies than anything else. They are alive and beating, and we are their heartbeats. They were nothing, and then they were something, and they will probably be nothing someday again. But in the meantime, they, too, are endurance and dust, light and beauty, stone and wood, and life.

—Emma Hamblen, Executive Assistant