It was wonderful to gather so many people together just to allow surprising conversations to happen. I was watching people talk who might never have met otherwise. It was good to see the very young running among the rain soaked gardens with newly found fast friends as only the young can do. Sweeter still to see older and younger dancing to the beat of well sung tunes, because that is what legs are for. The barn began its life for all the things we had hoped it would do and will keep doing. I believe our son Asher got it right in his design and it reflects what the words below say about good architecture.
I came across these beautiful words yesterday in Image Magazine about good films, “My friend the architect Colin Fraser Wishart says that the purpose of his craft is to help people live better. There’s beautiful simplicity but also enormous gravity in that statement. Just imagine if every public building, city park, urban transportation hub, and home were constructed with the flourishing of humanity—in community or solitude—in mind. Sometimes this is already the case, and we know it when we see it. Our minds and hearts feel freer; we breathe more easily; we are inspired to create.
If architecture at its best helps us live better, then it is very easy to spot bad architecture. In a space intended purely to house the so-called “making” of money, for example, we are touched by melancholy, weighed down by drudgery, compelled by the urge to get away. But in a space whose stewards seem to have known that human kindness is more important than the free market, that poetry and breathing matter beyond bank balances and competition—a concert hall designed for the perfect reflection of sound, a playground where the toys blend in with the trees, a train station where the transition from one place to another is honored as a spiritual act—we know that it is possible to always be coming home.”
It is our hope that the barn will always be a coming home of sorts, a place where hearts and minds feel freer, people can breathe more easily and we leave inspired to create other good things in the world.