environments as prompts
spaces are mirrors for who we want to become
Belief in the significance of architecture is premised on the notion that we are, for better or for worse, different people in different places, and on the conviction that is architecture's task to render vivid to us who we might ideally be.
Alain de Botton
I recently brought back my favourite books from my family home to my new flat; books that have deeply influenced me over the past decade. Some I deeply enjoyed for the prose, others drastically altered my world view and some left me sobbing uncontrollably, knocking me out emotionally for weeks. All of them have copious marginalia scribbled on the worn dog-eared pages, letters from my past self to my current self; a snapshot of thought in time.
I never considered myself sentimental about objects or attached to possessions, but I'm realising maybe I am. Like Marie Kondo, the modern day animist preacher reminds us , objects hold memories and valence; when we touch them they may bring us 'joy' or stories.
When I glance at Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse, I'm brought back to the 19 year old self that found something beyond words in those pages. Or at Pico Iyer's books, reminding myself that home is a place we carry with us rather than a fixed destination. Or recently, David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity and the necessity of optimism. I'm whisked back to the plane/train/bus journeys where I became absorbed and lost in those words, those worlds, where time lost all its power and the self was nowhere to be seen.
Those are the stories, the memes, the ideas that have shaped the lens through which I see the world. The authors who I've had silent conversations with, sometimes lasting years and now decades. The same themes emerge ; how to live in a world of impermanence, how to love, how to let go.
All of this made me think about how your environment and architecture shapes you. We know that when you walk into a relaxed cozy living room, you can feel a sense of ease, or you walk into a cavernous ornate Gothic cathedral and are left in awe. Colour, light, plants, music layer dimensionalities onto space ; music being how we decorate time.
They all act as prompts for behaviour. As Churchill observed: "We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us." In leaving books scattered around my flat, I find myself picking them up in the evenings, lost within those words once more. By having plants in my space, one outcome is that they brighten the room, but the other is that they turn me into the kind of person who gives time and attention to small things. They make me more attentive.
One gripe I have with reading on kindles is that you don't get this tactile physical reminder. It's all lost in the digital ether, intangible and weightless. It's one of the reasons, I think there has been a reversion back to analogue physical technologies. We want to hold the art that moved us. We want to be reminded how a couple of sentences in a song tore a hole through our psyche and left us irrevocably changed, or how a book shaped who we are today. It's why I buy all of my favourite books as a physical copy even even if I read them digitally first.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying the obvious : your environment shapes and prompts you, what kind of routines and habits you inhabit, what kind of thoughts, moods and outlooks you cultivate. So a reminder to myself to give a little more attention to this.
This is probably part 1 of a series of thoughts I've been having on design. Next: how design is a bottom-up iterative process—an unfolding, rather than a top-down final destination you arrive at.
This is an attempt to pick up writing more essays, shorter and faster (wrote this this morning) - inspired by Sasha Chapins 30 day - an essay day challenge