Salk Institute
image: TheNose | Flickr

I often use the term “lifestyle design” when thinking about the design of architecture. By this, I mean that architecture holds within it a great power to uplift the way humans live their daily lives — and it is “lifestyle” which is directly connected to human health, happiness and spirit.

Although many factors must be considered, architecture is ultimately for the occupant. And it is up to the architect to provide real and meaningful value for them.

When you stop to think about all of the things that make up an occupant’s lifestyle, the list is quite overwhelming. In many ways, simply understanding what your occupant really needs is an art. Translating those needs into a wonderful design takes a lot of ingenuity and forethought.

Asking the Right Questions Will Guide You Toward the Right Solutions

What I challenge you to do is to take their needs, in all of their complexity, and solve for them by incorporating and targeting their lifestyle. How can you improve it? What do you need to change about it? What do they want to change? What do they love about it? And so on.

Hone your ability to ask the right questions. Know where to look for answers and what other global or cultural factors to consider when making your designs not only work, but work extremely well.

With each design decision you can ask — What is the “real architectural value” for occupants? How can you, as an architect, make sure that your designs are providing real value (going way beyond those important regulations and requirements)? And how can you rise above building “constraints” to really push toward a design that holds within it great architectural progress and meaning?

Know when you have found the right solutions. Know when to add complexity and when to simplify. The key is to unleash a building design that not only impacts lifestyle design, but improves it.

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© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman

Dmitry Maslov | Dreamstime

What makes architecture sacred? That spirituality that a “place” makes you feel often serves to inspire and provoke memory through the senses. By capturing and triggering important memories, architecture can bring people together to unite individual memories into a collective memory. Architecture can allow important moments to live on, sacredly, in this way.

In some regard, all good architecture has a spiritual quality about it. Such architecture triggers our senses to experience in renewed ways. However, sacred architecture can provide for a more spiritual journey as occupants interact and travel through a “space”.

Did you know that when humans look up they often experience a sense of awe? By tuning to occupant senses, sacred architecture can have a profound effect. Sacred architecture can transcend symbols by speaking a universal language that stirs spiritual experience through the senses.

© 2008-2011 Sensing Architecture by Maria Lorena Lehman