39) Building solutions.

How could we make something architectural out of human dignity? It will come as a sudden flash of inspiration. What makes a space pleasant or even beautiful are windows placement, airflow, colors. Design allows us to translate problems and abstract ideas into specific manageable forms and to bring high value to daily life. Furthermore, architecture is the way we plan and create emissions, interactions, and actions, and all the humanely shaped processes of public and private life.

The most powerful means of effective change will occur when we can directly, tangibly, and emotionally experience some of the challenges of life today, and use these experiences to inform our future design decisions.

The task of building to ensure the protection of people’s dignity necessitates architecture to consider a wide range of diverse issues. This goes hand in hand with the project of finding social sustainable approaches to building. Sustainability will follow only in a world where everyone has a decent place to live.

Describing a troubling future with the intent of helping avoid the consequences of what we do today helps us create positive actions in hostile conditions. Our initial instinct may be to run away. That instinct is wrong. These issues are manageable, not unsolvable. We can instead gain the valuable experience of having to cope with these very hard issues. Creativity is concerned with our capacity to rediscover our ability to search for design alternatives. There are not prescriptions.

Architecture is primarily space organization and space alteration. Through it, we have the opportunity to imagine new possibilities. Because other worlds are possible. We can imagine possible solutions and examine their practicality, or else play out impractical solutions until they become practical. What we imagine actually affects how we react to solutions, technically, viscerally, and morally.

Providing architectural options for the poor require us to raise our aspirations to meet those of the poor for themselves. And the ability to conceive of and implement beautiful design within reasonable budgets is a great test of architectural skill and talent. 

How wonderful would it be if the progress of architecture and technological innovation would run parallel to the progress of human dignity and social inclusion?