WOMEN IN DESIGN: Robert Frost, Senior Citizens, and Architecture
It’s about time we started with a fun fact again. I think it’s been a bit too long since the last bit of unusual information. Today’s fun fact is that Robert Frost is, at least in my mind, surprisingly related to architecture.
This seems like a weird connection, I know. This whole realization started this weekend. I’d spent most of the day working on studio, and even though I wanted to go to sleep, my brain was convinced that my bedtime was the perfect time to ponder all of the world’s problems. And what do you do to distract your brain and (and thus allow it to wind down so you can eventually fall asleep)? I tend to take out my old dog eared anthology of Robert Frost poems, and read the ones I like the most. One of my favorites is “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” which describes the nightly routine of an old man who lives by himself out in the country. The lines that stick with me the most are the final ones:
One aged man – one man – can’t keep a house,
A farm, a countryside, or if he can,
It’s thus he does it of a winter’s night.
I realize that this (still) doesn’t seem like it has anything to do with architecture. But I promise it does. That same day, on a brief break from studio, I was trying to be at least semi-productive by looking at architectural things. Some of these things happened to be a variety of assisted living homes.
As I read the poem, my mind immediately leapt to the assisted living homes from earlier that day (as you can tell, my brain had not quite wound down yet). I realized that what Frost was describing in his poem was the routine of an old man whose house and farm had outgrown him as he aged. This, of course, is just one of the many reasons that older citizens decide to live in nursing homes and assisted living communities.
One of the most interesting things about the housing facilities I had looked up is that there is a wide variety of intents. Many of the older ones cater to the things we think senior citizens desire, while the newer ones tend to cater to the things they actually want and need. Some of this is due to time; what people once wanted is not necessarily what people want now. However, this is not always the case. While it’s a good thing that our intentions have changed as time passes, that we want more input from the building’s ultimate users, it’s still a bit sad that at one point some people were not as concerned with the building’s users as they should have been. I wonder if Robert Frost would have preferred today’s assisted living homes to those of his time, if he would leave his farm at all.
But this raises the question of architecture in general. Good architects strive to keep the building’s users as key components in decision making, and communicate with them during the design process. However, not all architects do this. It’s easy to say that we know more than the clients (sometimes it’s true…other times…not so much). To what extent do we do as the client says, and to what extent do we override their opinions to do what is ultimately best for the building? It’s easy to swing too far in either direction, resulting in less-than-stellar designs or buildings that do not reflect the client’s wishes at all.
This train of thought applies to the individuals in the architectural field, too. Thinking about the journey of women in the profession, it’s easy to wonder why things happened the way they did. One of the reasons that the journey was slow is the fact that change itself is slow. Like taking the changing needs of senior citizens into account, it was probably unusual to consider changing the role of women in the workplace. Eventually, however, assisted living facilities were more strongly based on the desires of their users, and the role of women in the architectural profession was tailored more to women’s capabilities rather than their traditional roles. Just as many assisted living communities are much better suited to their users now than they were decades ago, so too are most women’s jobs, expectations, and responsibilities.
This change is an inherent part of life, thankfully reflected in the architectural field. It is also reflected in Frost’s poem, as the old man’s life has changed as a result of his aging. His relationship to the house and farm have altered considerably as he ages, and he finds himself hardly able to keep up with everything.
Part of me wonders if this is not also the case with architecture. The profession is growing and changing drastically, and it’s easy to feel overwhelmed or unable to keep up. But that’s one thing that makes our profession so awesome. We create and use new technology, learn from our clients, try to be as inventive as possible, and overcome whatever challenges we face. We are not (proverbially) one old man, but a huge conglomeration of people with an incredible variety of skills and talents. Odds are, we will not find our profession outgrowing our capabilities. Rather, we will grow with it, guiding, shaping, molding it as we go. And that is incredible.
If you want to read the poem (and I recommend it), go here: http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/old-mans-winter-night