Architecture from co-creation

Bringing our marriage into a space of co-creation in almost all areas of our lives is a daily learning, a moment-by-moment sharing, a deep collaboration from a space of openness. Each of us has had an interest in exploring the depths of what our masculinity and femininity can become in a way that allows us to grow to serve our fullest potentials. For us, this is both an individual path and a shared journey. The beauty seems to arise where these paths merge in ways that enlighten the other. This is expressed in our buildings which come from an intertwining of masculine and feminine energies during the design process right through the construction and into the lived experience thereafter.

The studio, the Chamber of Wonder, embodies a predominantly masculine energy through the space it holds for bringing into reality the dreams, imaginations, and beauty that we see in the world. Its gesture of reaching up into the sky, into the airy qualities of the mind and its idealism, is brought firmly downwards through its wide perimeter which spans close to the ground, as if holding these ideas in an embodied space of creative action. The form which results is that of the vesica pisces which, through its intersecting circles, each touching the heart of the other, brings together polarities into a space of co-creation.

A more feminine quality can be experienced in the kitchen. This structure has a close relationship with softness of mother Earth where her natural topographical form continues inside underneath the roof. The change between inside and out is gentle, reflected only in a textural surface - from vegetation to an arrangement of stones which were chosen from the river and carefully laid for their forms to align. A roof of three separate elements brings light and air through the interior. With a gentle form and surface of vegetation, it feels almost like a peeling back of the landscape to create a warm space to gather within.

As with the studio, a meeting of the feminine fluidity and the masculine heldness is essential in experiencing balance. The roof of the kitchen, flowing in its feminine grace and earthiness, comes to a perfect geometry at its centre – an equilateral triangle. When you look upwards the symmetry is abstract in that it is one flat plane in the form of something imagined, not something coming from nature. As you follow this geometry that twists thirty degrees in a clockwise motion, you come to the three perimeter sides of the roof, each of which feels malleable to the views, the land, the vegetation living on that side. All sides of this looser perimeter triangle are supported by columns, each in a unique way, relating to the particular positions of rocks in the ground below. In this way the roof moves from a masculine energy in its centre down to a feminine energy where it meets the ground.

Yet at the same time this play of masculinity in relationship to the sky and femininity in the relationship to the earth are countered. The large boulders which have been held right where they are in the ground for time are each the supporting base for a light dancing roof form above. It is in this way that we aspire to co-create, each hearing and living within the qualities of the other to create a more alive whole than each one alone could bring into being.