I started reading the Inhabitat blog eight or nine years ago, maybe. Not long after I’d started writing fiction after a long spell in the trenches of other writing work. I stopped reading back in 2013, because Habitat publishes a lot of content and there simply wasn’t time to read it while working a part-time day-job. That space was taken up by blogs about time management and productivity and how to internet better.
I don’t work a part-time day-job anymore, and as as peeps who follow my twitter feed may have noticed, I’ve picked up the Inhabitat habit again. Their brief to sit at the intersections of architecture, design, and the environment is like crack if you’re interested in how the future may look, and they’ll occasionally bust out truly mind-blowing shit like plans these South Korean plans to build skyscrapers inside of Giant Sequoia’s to keep them from falling over.
But as impressive as that particular idea is, it’s stuff like the tin-shed renovations that actually appeal to me. My comfort reading, this week, is Aaron Bestky’s Architecture Matters where the dean of the Frank Wright School of Architecture traces how architecture interacts with our daily life and why it matters. One of the thing he notes, early on, is architectural design’s tendency to be noticeable when it’s also monumental. It’s a discipline built around going big or going home.
What’s noticeable in smaller places – homes, bars, restaurants, stores – is the province of designers, people who come into a functional shell and transform the interior while the architecture recedes into the background.
The spaces we move through every day shape us in ways we barely think about, simply because we pay more attention to the stuff that’s packed inside them.
