Monocle’s design editor, Nic Monisse, reflects on how architecture is key to a strong sense of home. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
This is Monocle on Design Extra.
It's a short show to accompany our weekly program where we discuss everything from architecture and craft to furniture and fashion.
I'm Maile Evans.
The meaning of home is a complex one.
The objects, furniture and keepsakes inside it that we accumulate over time chart our past and where we've come from, from our present lives and habits, as well as perhaps a hint to who and where we'd like to be in the future.
But might there be another facet to our homes that might offer a means to evoke strong emotions and memories?
Here's Monocle's design editor Nick Moniz to explore just that.
My house is my refuge, an emotional piece of architecture, not a cold piece of convenience, wrote Mexican architect luis Barragan in 1948.
These words, which I first heard when I was at University about 65 years later, stuck with me as I set out to create a home of my own.
Following graduation, I spent the better part of a decade trying to inject some of myself, my own emotions, into the various residences I called home.
Places have been furnished with the colorful painting of an eagle that my partner and I picked up at a street facing gallery in Amsterdam, a Renzo Piano sketch of the Center Pompidou that the Italian architect gifted to me while I was reporting on his work, and zigzag chairs of questionable provenance purchased from a quirky Dutchman in Surrey.
The stories attached to each of these elicit strong emotions feelings of love, pride in one's work and a sense of adventure respectively.
But off the back of some recent reporting for Monocle magazine, I realised that perhaps I'd missed Barragan's point, the idea that architecture should be a motive and not just the furniture and objects within it.
The world, it seems, is trending towards aesthetic sameness.
Visit any new development from Stockholm to Sydney and you'll see the same colourfully clad mid rise mixed use buildings.
So picking a home that is bold in its ambition seems to be key to addressing this need for emotive architecture.
Whether it's a city centre apartment that's light filled despite its compact footprint, or a sprawling country estate that's positioned to frame views of rolling landscapes.
Living in architecture that seeks to uplift and enhance one's way of life can improve our wellbeing and nurture personal growth.
Architecture of such ambition should be protected and celebrated.
Take the residents of the Ma Vista Tract, a grouping of 52 homes completed in Los Angeles in 1948.