Our New Relationship with Home: The Architect’s Case for Home Making
Living Rooms at the Border, San Ysidro, DWL. Developer: Casa Familiar; Architect: Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman. Photo by Harry Connolly
By Katie Swenson
Katie Swenson is a Senior Principal at Boston-based MASS Design Group, leading the community development and affordable housing practice. Previously she was the vice president of Design & Sustainability at Enterprise Community Partners, Inc., where saw oversaw the Rose Fellowship. Swenson is the author of two new books: Design with Love: At Home in America, and In Bohemia: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Kindness. For more: katieswenson.com.
I was asked by an architectural writer and designer who my architecture role models were growing up. My immediate answer: “My mom.” I was surprised to learn that not many architects answer that way. I was a little embarrassed. Was my answer “wrong” in some way? Had I just branded myself a “female architect” rather than an architect? As I elaborated, I realized that my instinctive answer highlighted what is for me one of the primary responsibilities of architecture. My mom is a ‘home-maker’ in the fullest sense. She always understood that home has the power to be the central platform for a person’s life.
To make a home. Is there a more fundamental responsibility? No matter our profession or role, having a productive and happy life begins with a safe, high-quality, stable home that serves as that central platform for what we do with our time, our resources, and our loved ones.
I propose that we take a fresh look at the notion of homemaking. Its traditional use is reflected in the compound word “homemaker,” which denotes a person—historically a wife and mother—who manages a home. But if we widen the lens, the word becomes “home making.” Being a Home Maker—a maker or builder of spaces that provide people with the indispensable foundation they need to build their own good, healthy, and meaningful lives—sheds light on something that seems to be missing in architecture, in housing policy, and even in the way we see our lives and our world.
There is a tendency in architecture for architects and designers to remove themselves from the domestic realm—as well as from the political realm that impacts domestic spaces. The emphasis instead is on design per se, usually for buildings and public spaces. While I love beautiful design as much as anyone, when it becomes too abstract—motivated by design for design’s sake than an understanding of how deeply we are affected by our built environment—we miss the opportunity to connect the physical use of a space with the emotional experience of being in that space. The architect can design buildings, but the architect as Home Maker also imbues the building with a sense of dignity, connection, family, cohesion, safety, and sanctuary.
CALLING ALL COMMUNITY ARCHITECTS
I have always been interested in affordable housing, starting with my volunteerism in high school at my community’s homeless shelter. In my final year of architecture school, I saw an announcement from Enterprise Community Partners looking for “community architects” to become Enterprise Rose Fellows - designers paired with local housing organizations over a three-year term. I had never heard those two words together, but something in me immediately lit up: whatever a community architect was, that’s what I wanted to be.
As a Rose Fellow with Piedmont Housing in Charlottesville, VA, my primary focus was the 10th and Page Street Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. My role was to participate in the project management, funding, design, and oversight of the rehabilitation or new construction of thirty-one homes for mixed-income homeownership.
The roots of housing inequity run deep in Charlottesville. The neighborhood, halfway between the Downtown Mall and the University of Virginia, was one of a few areas where the black and brown community could live due to decades of racialized real-estate practices, coupled with federally mandated underwriting requirements that promoted segregated housing, restricted access to people of color. About 70 percent of the housing in the neighborhood was rental, owed mostly by local landlords, much of it affordable.
As I learned to design, build and finance new homes, I also got the chance to work with the new homeowners, some who raised families in those homes, others who have moved on, both by choice and necessity. Design and development cannot solve economic and social inequities. I learned what it meant to be an outsider in a community, even one geographically just two miles from my home, and how persistent race and class divisions can define a city. This experience, however, also committed me more fundamentally to strive for the core values I hold today: that everyone, no matter their race, or the neighborhood they live in, deserves a well-designed, affordable home in a safe community.
GROWING COMMUNITY ARCHITECTS & HOME MAKERS
I joined Enterprise in 2006 to direct the Rose Fellowship program, which ushered me into the next dozen-plus years of my career traveling the country to recruit and support communities and fellows. I visited with nearly all eighty-six Rose Fellows who have designed and developed nearly 40,000 homes in partnership with local groups in 40 states in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. In border towns, inner-city streets, rural communities, Rust Belt cities, remote tribal reservations, and neighborhoods starved for resources, the fellows have learned how to navigate the complex and sensitive process of entering a community as an outsider and learning the best ways to be helpful.
Diane and Louis Baskfield, Charlottesville, VA. DWL. Photo by Harry Connolly
Lagwunda (Shea) Clark at her home in Eastmoor Estates, Moorhead, MS. DWL. Photo by Harry Connolly.
At this moment in time, when many of us are under shelter in place orders and spending more time in our homes than ever before, we are learning a whole new relationship to home. Home has become the primary locus of our existence: the place we sleep, eat, work, relax, and, via technology, connect with others who are likewise confined to their homes. For some of us, home has also become a place of caregiving or convalescence. For others, home is not a safe space or a protected refuge.
Being quarantined is teaching us how much our spaces affect us: how much the places we live shape us, support family life, function as a workspace, and impact our health. In this time of the global pandemic, when access to the office, schools, places of worship, restaurants, and stores has been temporarily suspended, we are learning what’s truly essential and what is not. The spaces we require for survival are actually very few: a safe home, space outside for fresh air and exercise, and, when necessary, a hospital or other medical facility.
AT HOME IN AMERICA
In 2018, I embarked on a storytelling and photojournalism project with Harry Connolly to capture and share the lessons learned through the Rose Fellowship. We traveled from the U.S.-Mexico border and up the California coast through Los Angeles to Seattle and over the mountains to Yakima, Wash., one of the largest farming communities in the country. We visited a native pueblo community in New Mexico and a native plains community in South Dakota. We visited booming Atlanta and the all-but-forgotten Mississippi Delta. We went to small cities like Detroit and Baltimore. We found great diversity in climate, topography, culture, and architecture. We also found in each place community members working on behalf of the health and well-being of its members, with housing opportunity at the core.
In New Mexico’s Kewa Pueblo, Rose Fellow Joseph Kunkel assisted the Santo Domingo Housing Authority to build a new 41 unit development of affordable rental homes, each with a small detached workshop to accommodate residents, 85 percent of whom are artisans. In Moorhead, Miss., Rose Fellows Emily Roush-Elliott and Michele Stadelman worked on behalf of residents at Eastmoor to rehabilitate dilapidated and build new homes for residents who had to engage in a lawsuit to stay in and improve the homes and neighborhood in which many have resided for fifty years.
Wa-Di Housing Development, Kewa Pueblo, NM. Developer: Santo Domingo Housing Authority; Architect: AOS Architects. Photo by Harry Connolly.
In Los Angeles, Rose Fellow Theresa Hwang worked with the Skid Row Housing Trust and Our Skid Row to renovate and develop new permanent supportive housing, while advocating for the needs of all residents of Skid Row, housed, or unhoused.
In each of these cases, the architect as Home Maker is not simply building buildings. We worked with community members to make both homes that suit their diverse needs and wants, and also invest in the stewardship of the larger neighborhood and community, both physical and cultural.
HOME FOR EVERYONE: UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS
In order for home making to really matter, we need to prioritize the importance of home for everyone. Article 25 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: “Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and his family, including food, clothing, housing, and medical care and necessary social services.”
With more than 2.5 million people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. in any given year, we are failing. Providing ‘shelter’ is not enough. The difference between a “shelter” and a “home” cannot be overestimated. Home Makers contribute to this universal human right by designing beautiful, affordable homes that support the dignity and well-being of people, and by advocating for a national housing policy that commits to the fundamental right for every person to have a high-quality home.
Homelessness has always been an inexcusable problem and a blight on our national conscience. Now, as the novel coronavirus circles the globe, and two of the primary means to flatten the curve and save lives are social distancing and staying at home, homelessness is revealed as a public health hazard. At a large homeless shelter in Boston, CDC testing found disproportionately high rates of coronavirus infection in both residents (36 percent) and staff (30 percent). The same frightening pattern was found in shelters in Seattle and San Francisco.
After advocating for communities, leadership and public-private partnerships to prioritize, design and develop home making and homes I joined MASS Design Group in 2020, two months before the novel coronavirus crippled our world. I joined MASS Design in order to return to designing communities and homes as an architect, and to look at how to make impact nationally and internationally. MASS is an innovator and global leader in mission-based design.
Architects can use their skills to make an immediate, life-saving impact. MASS Design responded to the novel coronavirus outbreak among Boston’s homeless population by assisting nonprofit, construction, and government organizations to bring best practices in design for infection control. We assisted with the construction of pop-up medical clinics as well as quarantine tents equipped with heat, electricity, medical equipment, hand washing stations, and a negative pressure ventilation system that reduces the spread of infection. These Rules of Thumb for Limiting Contagion in Makeshift Facilities have been referenced across the world as global communities face similar urgent needs.
Such measures are crucial. But they are temporary. To bring long-term solutions to the problem of homelessness, the architect as Home Maker needs to take up the responsibility to do exactly what the name implies: make homes. We can still design public spaces and cutting-edge buildings, but what if architecture firms dedicated some portion of their practices to designing beautiful, affordable homes that support the health and well-being of every citizen? Architects like Brooks + Scarpa, David Baker Architects, and Koning Eizenberg Architecture are doing just that, while many more are helping to shift the mindset—and thus the design—from affordable housing to making homes.
Downtown View, Minneapolis, MN. Developers: Project for Pride in Living and Youthlink; Architect: UrbanWorks Architecture. Photo by Harry Connolly.
Kirby Lane Park, Baltimore. DWL. Photo by Harry Connolly
The Home Maker mindset reminds us that we can no longer think of health and housing as two separate fields. Instead, we must design with the idea that there is no physical health without healthy housing. All housing, especially for vulnerable populations like seniors and those with disabilities, now needs to be built and maintained with infection control principles in mind. People over the age of 65 make up nearly 80 percent of all COVID-related deaths (and that number rises to 91 percent if we include all people over 55).
MASS Design partnered with 2Life Communities to design J.J. Carroll, a new senior development linked to their larger campus in Brighton, Mass. The design, initiated before the COVID-19 epidemic, was based on the infection control principles learned from our experiences in places like Haiti, Rwanda, and Liberia. Smart design of apartments like J.J. Carroll and access to outdoor space can ensure that seniors not only have safe access to the services they need, but they also have fresh air and engagement with their community as the strict stay-at-home directives ease over time.
In this most vulnerable time, when we are more aware than ever that home is the basic, essential platform for a good and healthy life, architects can expand their notion of what it means to work in the domestic realm. It’s not enough to deliver on a set of drawings and move on to the next project. We need to bring our whole selves to the pursuit of Home Making—to making inspiring spaces that promote health, safety, dignity, meaning, and connection for every person—which calls for a deeper investment in the design, creation, and maintenance of our spaces.