February 2016
Beginning again
I’m feeling much better today! I’m getting a good handle on my recovery and life is starting to feel good again. I’m thankful for the little moments of happiness that I’ve shared with my friend here, my home.
Kind architecture is many things, but above all, it is nurturing. While I’ve found it helpful to consider my home as a person to explore the physicality, sensuality and materiality of the architecture, it’s only one avenue to understanding how kind architecture is created. There is so much more I want to study here.
Kindness, as living beings express it, is a universal concept understood without verbal language. It follows then, that an architectural language can also express kindness – as architects GRAFT and Foster + Partners have done in designing spaces to encourage healing on all levels. There is an existing wealth of research and architectural knowledge that can be assembled as the genesis of kind architecture.
However, a starting point for kind architecture is all that can really be defined – in exploring these ideas I’m acutely aware of just how individual and customisable kind architecture ought to be. The final expression of a kind building is guided by its purpose and preferences of its inhabitants: my preferences for the physical and material aspects of architecture stem from my own sensuality, memories and life experiences that in turn define what I consider kind. Away from my own biases, kind architecture is supportive, healthy and deeply personal, overcoming issues of naive or ignorant design, access, and exclusion.
I’ve recovered enough in the last few months to begin living again: next week, I start my studies in architecture! I truly believe that kind architecture must be part of the conscious design process in creating architecture that makes life more comfortable, no matter what conditions a person may face.
Kind Architecture
A retroactive manifesto on recovery and architecture.
Part 6 – February 2016
Read the journal version at www.issuu.com/leoniecsanki/
Leonie Csanki 