The Second Studio (formerly The Midnight Charette) is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by Architects David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features different creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions.
A variety of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes are interviews, while others are tips for fellow designers, reviews of buildings and other projects, or casual explorations of everyday life and design. The Second Studio is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.
This week David and Marina of FAME Architecture & Design discuss designing a home as a narrative. The two cover why this is beneficial, the parallels between film scenes and sets and architectural spaces, sequences and processions, creating key moments in a home, coherency, dynamism, and emotion.
(00:00) Introduction - Why
There are a lot of different ways that we understand a home as we're designing it. For example, the floor plan drawing provides a certain way of understanding the house, program diagrams help us organize the functions or activities that take place, and construction drawings for how it gets built. But I think from the early stages of design and throughout the process, it's important to think about the narrative. Even when we are looking at a floor plan, which in a sense, is a way of thinking, critiquing, and creating the framework for the house, we're thinking about narrative and we’re thinking about what it means to flow from here to there and what you experience and what you see. (00:55)
(03:51) - Scenes vs Sets
Within a film set happens different scenes. The bedroom is a set and a scene would be sleeping. That's only one scene. Many scenes can happen within the same set. That's why it starts to become more interesting when we think about all of the things that could happen in that bedroom and how they can inform the design or the creation of what that bedroom wants to be. Is it for sleeping? Is it for reading a book? Is it a place where you watch movies, where you cuddle, where all of your dogs are sleeping with you in your bed? Everybody lives differently. We each have our little ritual, our sensibilities within our everyday life. I think it’s interesting to pick up on everybody's routine and moments and the small things that make one person different from another. How can we as professionals pick up on that, really embrace it, and blow it up to become something that actually makes your bedroom, your bedroom? (04:30)
(11:53) - Sequences and Processions
If you have a scene [in a film] but the scene's not doing anything for the plot, then the scene doesn't belong. We want to do the same thing in architecture. We want to make sure that if we are putting in a room, it's not just there because it adds to the bedroom count. It needs to do something for the experience of the entire house. (07:20)
There's this relationship between the set (the architecture) and the people within it. You want that relationship to be a positive one. The design of a home or a room should allow for certain things to happen, but should also promote specific things based on who's using it. I think that the relationship [between the characters and the set] is super important. We never just think about the design of a room or entire house as just being an object, we always think about it in terms of how it's affecting the characters or the people in the space. (08:37)
(24:25) - Moments
Media also is kind of misleading people. Because media in architecture and design tends to focus on only showing those big moments and you rarely get the traveling camera from one space to the next showing you the procession. But really that's how architecture is experienced. That's how you judge good architecture... it's through that procession. If the procession is amazing, the architecture is gonna move you. (25:46)
(26:30) - Coherency
(33:38) - Dynamism
I personally think houses should have a certain amount of dynamic-ness, so there should be compression and expansion, and these kinds of things because that's reflective of life. I think that's what keeps houses interesting, engaging, and meaningful over a longer period, rather than it just being white arches repeated over and over again, for example. I think there's more to what it means to live in a house than that. (35:26)
(38:38) - Emotion
In architecture school and the profession, the emotional impact our designs have on people is not thought about or talked about nearly as much as I think it should be. I think it's because it's very easy for architects to be focused on the 1000 other things we need to do like the floor plans, the programming, and the building science. All of these things have to get done and they're just as crucial, but I do find that it can be easy to get locked into this very pragmatic way of thinking [and we forget to ask ourselves] What does it feel like to be in the space? How does this make a person feel? This is also where you have different cultures and you have to understand the people in the city or part of the world where the project is. (38:38)
