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 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

Succulents, Architecture, and the Beauty of Imperfection

The Wisdom of Humility