A Foot in Both/And Worlds
Every building is a house.
Every building.
This may appear to be an absurdly reductive statement. Admittedly, it is. But allow me a little hyperbole to make a point. I’m sure you could come up with numerous examples of buildings for which this analogy is a stretch—you could even come up with some homes that would be hard pressed to call themselves homes—but these would be the exceptions that prove the rule.
This reductive statement works because of the reductive nature of our stubbornly neolithic brains. While over the last several thousand years we may have differentiated the built environment into a plethora of spaces and structures intended to serve highly specialized needs and uses, our limbic system, having evolved over millions of years, still reacts in a primal way to the experience of encountering shelter: to the fundamental conditions of inside and outside, to identifying and occupying a space shared with other human beings. Whether it be a school or factory or office or restaurant, any place implies a family of sorts, along with a culture and the norms, protocols and expectations that that implies. The archetypal model for any gathering of people is family, and the model for any kind of shelter is home.
“On the other hand, every house is everything but -”
On the other hand, every house is everything but just a house—homes can now serve as factory, workshop, warehouse, commissary, church, hospital, school, spa… And, thus, every house should be able to effectively accommodate a wide range of specialized activities. For most of our history, houses did just that. Like the multi-generational and extended families that occupied them, homes were less the endless rows of gabled monopoly houses with which we’ve come to associate them and more nodes in a continuous field of spaces and relationships, mingling work and home life in a continuum of activities simply called life.
The point of making these seemingly contradictory propositions is that here at RoehrSchmitt, we believe there are distinct advantages to having experience and expertise with both residential and commercial buildings, and in particular for bringing a little of the sensibility of the one to the other. Most architecture firms practice exclusively in one realm or the other—commercial or residential. It’s hard enough to establish a reputation and clientele in either of these project types, much less both; and it can be confusing to your clientele as well.
As we’re always up for a good challenge, we’re a decidedly both/and kind of firm: we feel that with a foot in both worlds we’re able to bring a signature warmth and personality to our commercial projects, while incorporating a commercial-grade rigor and refinement to our residential projects that is only possible with this breadth of experience. There are elements of scale, organization and materiality characteristic of each that, used appropriately, bring something to the other; act as certain spices do to awaken flavors otherwise latent or obscured.
This strategy of reframing the typical characteristics of one genre with those of another allows us to see these qualities in a new light, presenting new opportunities, and reminds us that the evolution of the spaces in which we live and work is perennially unfinished and ripe for invention.
