Inspired to create a new workshop for architects, designers & professionals to help them reveal their clients’ poetic program.
I just returned from Portland(ia), at the Living Future un-Conference from May 1-4.
While there I dove deep into Biophilia and Biomimicry – creating place from a deep intention to love life (here’s the blog post on Helicon Works Architects if you want to know more about my experience there). We are innately a part of nature, and we need a direct relationship with the earth and all her aspects. Buildings are central in creating places that put us in intimate relationship with nature. Dwelling: A Poetic Exploration of Home is all about this.
On a personal note – I found myself wondering where Dwelling fits into all of this. Our projects at Helicon Works Architects are implicitly LBC-aligned, and I advocate their work. I know Dwelling is completely attuned with LBC, and am curious about how I can expand their work.
It aims to give architects other ways to consider how a client’s home, the one they help them design or redesign, can engage them to live a fuller life through its spaces, materials, and connections to the forces of nature and the natural world.
I got to fly home yesterday – I say it that way as I love looking out the window most of any flight, take in the beauty, and let my thoughts wand and gather. This flight revealed many astonishing sky/earth-scapes, opening windows for me to see what I can offer LBC. I day-dreamed and wrote notes for a workshop I intend to offer there next year, as well as to other professionals interested – Dwelling – Poetics of Home; Architect as Midwife.
This workshop is a way to introduce architects and other professionals to more deeply reveal their clients’ poetic program. It aims to give architects other ways to consider how a client’s home, the one they help them design or redesign, can engage them to live a fuller life through its spaces, materials, and connections to the forces of nature and the natural world.
The workshop will guide you to explore consciousness, ecology, and our home as ecosystem; sharing stories about your favorite homes or places, exploring the microcosm of Dwelling, practice exercises to develop your intuition and understanding of the dialogue between your soul and home, so you can develop this process with your clients.
I will also guide you through the process I take clients on, giving them homework and asking them questions that can reveal their life-giving impulses. Their answers inspire my work to design spaces that embody their intention. Some of the questions I ask them to explore are:
- First questions – Must you build? What do you need, not want? What are your intentions – for your life, and your home?
- The narrative for how they want to live in their home – your story.
- Their home-biography, especially places they felt safe, and/or enlivened as children.
- Images of Home that inspire them – homes, and texts – and how.
- Program, and programme (feeling of each space).
- Read Dwelling: A Poetic Exploration of Home. Discuss.
You will be lead on two explorations I offer clients – one working with a poem found in Book 1, followed by a body prayer which gives form to the central dynamic of Dwelling. There are many more explorations in the book and we can talk about those as well, depending on your interest.
What are your ways of understanding your client? What questions, processes, explorations do you take them on to better understand their needs and impulses?
If you are interested in attending this workshop, please get in touch with me – bill@explorindwelling.com.
