Everything changes
As my Dad ages and the pages turn, I reflect on his values, and what I learn from him. I don’t see him enough but I see him when I can, while I can. In recent years when we meet he will often say “Everything Changes”. Not in response to a particular situation, but as a statement, as an undeniable reflection, a description of life. I think he wants me to understand and comprehend that our lives are part of a timeless flowing force. Environments are in flux. Interactions between people and places are in flux. Any semblance of permanence and stability is a temporary illusion soon to be adjusted by times erosion and ecological re-balancing of a wider picture we are a very minute part of. And so it is with design. Major architectural and landscape projects I invested several years realising have been changed, sometimes by others, sometimes positively augmenting a design, but not always sensitively or with a similar vision to mine. We have no rights over the objects and spaces we design and make. They are simply our contribution, our gift to the wider context. Environments effect people and their environmental contexts. Construction processes change places, often violently and destructively before they can be repaired and healed. Completion and occupation of a building changes place actively over time via interconnections to contexts that are forged. When new architecture or landscape becomes a seed for positive change, and it takes root and grows within and as part of a wider environment, it becomes integral to the place and survives and thrives. The place may also grow and change in ways we could not or did not imagine or can’t comprehend…
This is the context we design into as small parts of bigger interconnected systems. Ours is a world where simulations, mapping, parameter driven design and artificial intelligence self-learning systems attempt to define and manage the barely predictable. What is sought through these tools is control so we can be active agents of change. As designers we cope with unpredictable and infinite complexity by reducing and prioritising the information we are able to process, and we do this through abstraction as we design and refine. We start simple and add the complexity. As Pat Hanly the painter would say as he squinted his eyes while appraising a landscape “what are the big issues”. As designers what are our major moves in response to the big issues? And importantly, how will our design operate over time after we leave. What happens after we have handed our work here back to a client group and the community and environmental context it operates in? How is our design in some ways strategic, anticipating its effects on people and place and accommodating and facilitating of changes that might occur? How is it able to adapt as its contexts change. Because… everything changes…