ARTICLE 21
What If You Couldn’t See the Architecture?
Growing up, my grandfather was blind.
He also had an enormous presence in my life. I admired him. I wanted to be like him. In a lot of ways, I still do.
When I was little, we would walk hand in hand down the street to the store. In my mind, I was helping guide him because he could not see.
Every once in a while, though, he would suddenly pull me back and say there was a car coming.
I would look.
Nothing.
Then five or ten seconds later, a car would come around a corner or out of somewhere I had not noticed.
I remember being fascinated by that.
How did he know?
What was he hearing that I was not hearing?
What was he noticing that I was not noticing?
And because I looked up to him so much, I sometimes tried to understand it myself.
As a kid, I would close my eyes and walk around the house.
Not because I thought I could actually understand what it meant to be blind. I couldn't.
I was curious about something much simpler:
What does a place become when you cannot rely on sight?
Where is the doorway?
How far away is the wall?
Can you tell when you have entered a larger room?
Can you hear that the ceiling has changed?
Can you feel sunlight coming through a window?
Can you smell the kitchen before you reach it?
Can you remember the number of steps between one place and another?
Without realizing it, I was experiencing the house differently.
And strangely enough, some of that has stayed with me.
Even today, I tend to keep my house pretty dark. I will walk through rooms at night without turning the lights on because I already know the space.
My girlfriend is considerably less enthusiastic about this habit.
But there is something interesting about moving through a familiar place when you cannot really see it.
You notice other things.
Sound.
Temperature.
Texture.
Smell.
Distance.
Air movement.
Memory.
The feeling of the floor beneath your feet.
You begin to understand that architecture is not simply something we look at.
We experience it with our entire body.
And now, as an architect, that childhood curiosity means something different to me.
Buildings have to work for people who experience the world differently.
Someone may use a wheelchair.
Someone may have limited vision or hearing.
Someone may have difficulty walking.
Someone may simply be getting older and discover that stairs, narrow doors, slippery surfaces, poor lighting, or an awkward bathroom suddenly matter much more than they did twenty years earlier.
Good design cannot assume that every person experiences a building in exactly the same way.
Which brings me back to the question I was unknowingly asking as a kid:
Should a well-designed home still make sense when you stop looking at it?
I think it should.
Not because everyone should be able to close their eyes and walk through their house.
But because a home should have a logic you can feel.
And that is very different from simply making something beautiful.
A Beautiful House Can Still Be Annoying
Some of the most beautiful houses I have walked through would drive me crazy to live in.
The finishes are expensive.
The kitchen belongs in a magazine.
The windows are enormous.
Everything photographs perfectly.
And somehow everyday life still feels harder than it should.
Architecture is also what happens when you come home carrying groceries.
It is where you put your keys.
It is whether you can move naturally through the kitchen.
It is whether afternoon sun blinds you while you are trying to watch television.
It is whether you can hear every conversation in the house from your bedroom.
It is whether the smell of dinner follows you upstairs two hours later.
Those things rarely make it into the photographs.
They are also the things you experience every day.
Could You Move Through Your Home Without Thinking?
You probably already do.
Think about walking through your house at night.
Your hand instinctively reaches toward the light switch.
You know where the doorway begins.
You know where the furniture is.
You know where the hallway narrows.
Over time, your brain builds a map of the house.
You learn its rhythm.
When the layout has a clear logic, movement begins to feel almost automatic.
When it does not, you notice.
You step around the same piece of furniture.
You squeeze through the same awkward opening.
You walk around the same oversized kitchen island.
You open one door and somehow block another.
Once or twice, these things are minor.
Do them several thousand times and they become part of your experience of the house.
Your House Should Not Be an Obstacle Course
Imagine walking through the door with two bags of groceries.
There is nowhere to set them down.
You step around the shoes by the entrance.
You cross through the living room.
Then you circle a giant kitchen island just to reach the refrigerator.
The island may look incredible online.
It is slightly less impressive when you need hiking boots to get around it.
That is circulation.
And circulation is really just asking:
How do people move?
Where are they coming from?
Where are they going?
What is in the way?
Good circulation usually does not announce itself.
You just move.
Bigger Does Not Automatically Mean Better
Residential design has a tendency to equate size with quality.
More square footage.
Larger kitchen.
Larger living room.
Larger primary suite.
Larger island.
But rooms can absolutely become too large.
A living room can be so wide that furniture feels disconnected.
A kitchen can have so much distance between the refrigerator, sink, and range that making dinner becomes exercise.
A bedroom can have plenty of square footage and still have no obvious place for the bed.
Sometimes a smaller room that has been carefully considered works far better than a much larger one.
Square footage tells you how much space you have.
It does not tell you how well that space works.
Light Can Make a Room — Or Ruin It
Natural light is one of the most powerful tools in architecture.
But more glass does not automatically mean better architecture.
A huge west-facing window can frame an incredible view.
It can also turn the living room into a solar oven every afternoon.
A bedroom surrounded by glass may look spectacular during the day and feel completely exposed after dark.
The better question is not:
How many windows can we add?
It is:
Where is the light coming from, when will this room be used, and what do we want that light to do?
The sun moves.
Seasons change.
Your house does not.
Nobody Dreams About Where the Vacuum Goes
Storage may be one of the least glamorous parts of architecture.
Nobody sits down with an architect and says:
“I have been dreaming about the perfect broom closet.”
But everyday life arrives whether you planned for it or not.
Shoes.
Coats.
Mail.
Dog leashes.
Kitchen appliances.
Laundry.
Amazon boxes you are definitely returning tomorrow.
If those things do not have somewhere to go, they find somewhere.
Usually the countertop.
Or the dining table.
Or the chair that slowly becomes part of the closet.
If your dining table has become the mail room, office, charging station, and package distribution center, you may not actually have a dining-table problem.
Sometimes you have a design problem.
These questions will probably never make the cover of an architecture magazine.
They may make your life noticeably easier.
Open Is Not Always Better
Open floor plans can be fantastic.
They can make a house feel larger.
They can connect people.
They can create great spaces for entertaining.
But when everything is connected, everything is connected.
The television.
The dishwasher.
The kids.
The conversation.
The smell of whatever you cooked for dinner.
The person trying to have a Zoom meeting while someone else is watching a movie.
Sometimes connection is exactly what you want.
Sometimes you desperately want a door.
Sometimes the best design decision is removing a wall.
Sometimes it is realizing the wall was doing something useful.
There Is No Perfect Floor Plan
That is because there is no universal way to live.
Someone who entertains every weekend may want the kitchen completely connected to the living room.
Someone who cooks seriously may want separation.
Someone working from home may care deeply about acoustic privacy.
Parents with young children may want visibility across the main floor.
Someone planning to remain in the house for decades may care more about stairs, bathroom layouts, and accessibility.
And people change.
The person who has no problem with stairs at 35 may feel very differently about them at 75.
A temporary injury can completely change the way someone experiences a house.
Families change.
Children grow up.
Parents age.
Needs evolve.
A house does not have to anticipate every possible future.
But thoughtful design should at least ask:
Who needs to use this space, and what might make it easier for them?
The house should respond to the person.
Not the other way around.
Photographs Capture Moments. Homes Are Experienced Through Routines.
A photograph does not show you that the pantry door blocks the walkway whenever it is open.
It does not show you the bathroom plumbing you can hear from the dining room.
It does not show you the glare on the television every afternoon.
It does not show you that cooking smells linger throughout the house long after dinner.
It does not show you walking around the same awkward corner ten times a day.
Those may seem like small things.
Until they happen every day for twenty years.
Architecture lives in those repetitions.
Maybe Good Architecture Is Something You Can Feel
I still think about the question I had as a kid.
What did my grandfather understand about a room without seeing it?
His experience of the world was different from mine, and I would never pretend that closing my eyes as a kid allowed me to understand what it meant to be blind.
It did make me curious.
It made me pay attention to things I otherwise might not have noticed.
The sound of a room.
The texture beneath my feet.
The smell coming from another space.
The warmth of sunlight reaching my skin.
The change in temperature near an exterior door.
The distance between one object and another.
We learn familiar spaces through all of those things.
Eventually, we stop consciously thinking about them.
And maybe that is part of what good architecture should do.
It should have a logic you can feel.
The door opens where you expect it to.
The hallway leads naturally somewhere.
There is a place to put things when you come inside.
The kitchen relates to the way groceries actually enter the house.
Morning light reaches the places where mornings happen.
Furniture fits naturally.
Private spaces feel private.
And the building respects that not every person moving through it experiences the world in exactly the same way.
You do not necessarily notice all of those decisions.
That is kind of the point.
The Best Design Can Almost Disappear
A house should not constantly remind you that somebody designed it.
It should simply make your life easier.
Architecture can create beautiful objects.
But a home has a bigger responsibility than looking good in a photograph.
You have to wake up in it.
Cook in it.
Work in it.
Relax in it.
Raise a family in it.
Come home exhausted to it.
Grow older in it.
Live your ordinary Tuesday nights in it.
And when all of those ordinary moments work well, something interesting happens.
You stop thinking about the architecture.
You just know where things are.
You know where to go.
You understand how the house works.
It feels natural.
The architecture almost disappears.
And maybe that is one of the best compliments a home can get.
Michael Demetrios Frudakis, AIA, NCARB
Principal Architect