Courtesy of Duo Dickinson

住宅设计的小贴士
The Intimate Work of Designing a Home

由专筑网李韧，邢子编译

设计一座住宅并非壮举，但是对于客户来说，它却至关重要。在这样一个小型的项目中，每个决定都能带来或多或少的影响。当客户参与到设计过程中时，也许能够产生许多意想不到的结果。建筑师兼作家Duo Dickinson在本文中描述了其项目经历，通过清晰的话语来描述了住宅设计的发展。这篇文章最初由Dickinson发表于其博客Saved by Design。

在8年前的项目设计过程中，我常常带着我的客户欣赏我的一系列设计作品。这名客户非常体贴，他认为最终的设计方案并非来源于他的直接回应，而是思考与演绎的结果。在看完一系列项目之后，他认为，每个人都应该有一个属于自己的家，在这里和所爱的人一起生活。

我们花费了一年多的时间推敲设计，但是设计思路方向基本正确，建筑的外观具有自身的吸引力，同时与内在空间密切联系。

但是室内施工等待了1年时间。因此我申请参观了这座僻静的场所，我在这些原始的空间里穿梭，几个小时之后，我便又回到图纸绘制的工作中。我保留了住宅精彩的外观，但内部却仍然生活气息十足，这些听起来有些难以理解。

我发现，在这个尚未完成的室内设计工作中我犯了一些错误，不经过精心布局，虽然空间仍然在那里，但是出于对项目与客户的尊重，我应该将项目持续下去。

在遵循美学理念之后，我发现项目失去了一种魔幻魅力。客户希望内部空间正如他所看到的一个项目那样具有创造性，那是我改造的一座住宅。建筑的形态、场地、内外空间看上去优雅又积极，但是我似乎对他所看到的东西做出了错误的引导。其现代风格的室内设计非常完美，因此在几个月之后我便习惯了这种设计方式。

直到后来，我才真正了解了这些事实对于住宅产生了哪些影响。

原有的设计思路虽说是正确的，正如他们所看到的那样，他们喜欢这种方式，而我也是这么做的。但他们喜欢独特的想法，并非一味的模仿，如果我继续模仿自己以往的作品，那便是错误的思路。

我的失误显而易见，因此我希望进行改善。我向客户们告知，住宅的内部空间意味着什么，它们应该是什么样的，而客户也表示理解。后来，当我积极了解建筑的内部的调整方向时，客户也愿意多花费一部分资金进行住宅内部细部的调整。

但它十分奏效。

这个错误决定了建筑美学，很容易就会被发觉，虽然事实上并没有那么大的区别。但是我所作出的错误思路已经是事实了，尽管我也不知道自己为什么要这么做。有时候，沉默往往最能代表真相。

我所能感知到、看到的东西来自于自身，外表的美丽仅能满足视觉效果。但是我却无法说服自己向客户证明这种做法同样正确。

但是这不正确，因此我无法通过自己的定义来武断的认为场所的美与魅力。也许你也正在犯诸如此类的错误，对我而言，生命的魅力存在于我们身边，我们所能接触到的一切，都在向我们传递着美感。

在最初的接触中，厌倦与犯错并不可避免。而在25年后，在我的住宅中，我似乎看到了真相。只有在一片宁静中，我们才能感知内在的美，而在狂热的设计过程中，这种美学理念只是偶尔才会出现。

当时我并未预见其中的错误，这并不意味着我忽略它，我有些遗憾，因为当我再看到以往的思路设计出的作品时，我会更加内观自己。

其实有时候你很难意识到自己的错误，因为这些浮夸的外观需要付出一定的代价，建筑师也需要生活，但是这也并不意味着可以完全不考虑经济因素，成功有时被定义为社会的交集，而在这其中很难让自己的内心安定下来。

所以，直到现在我仍然愿意倾听。

Designing a home is no mean feat. It is a project of intimate importance to the client, and one small enough in which each seemingly minor decision can have a significant experiential impact. But when clients are willing to take part in a collaborative process, it is possible to create magic. Architect and author Duo Dickinson describes in this op-ed his experience with such a project, looking back at the work with clear eyes and a vision to the future. This article was originally published by Dickinson on his blog Saved by Design.
In designing a place, perhaps eight years ago, I had brought my client through a number of built projects that I had designed. He is a very thoughtful human: decisions are not reactions to him, they are reflections and deductions. After seeing these various projects he responded with great enthusiasm that one had an interior that he, and subsequently his partner, loved.
We pushed forward with the design -  it took a year of back and forth - but all was right with the world and building began. The exterior retained its magic, despite my intimacy with its essence.
But the interior had to wait a planned one year absence by the builder. I visited this remote place, and, at my request was left alone on the site, walking through the raw, untouched, interior. The hours were spent reviewing the drawings I had brought with the rough-framed insides. I was in the glow of an exterior that seemed to have a life of its own, beyond my hard understanding.
And I knew I had made a series of errors in judgments on the yet unfinished interior design. Not the layout: it was right there. But in the fealty to the love of the other project I had designed in full accord with my loved clients – that my client had loved.
But in following that aesthetic model, I had lost the magic. The proposed interior was a creative, crafty homage to the house he had seen, that was a retrofit into the house I was in. That home has a life of active grace in terms of shape, site, it’s spaces, inside and out, and I had done the completely wrong projection of what he had seen. That model interior design was pretty damn nice, and I simply, professionally, adapted that, wiped my hands after a few months of careful detailing and walked away.
Until I saw, in real time, what those realities would have meant to this house.
It, the original design, was the right thing to do: they saw, they liked, I did too. It was defendable. They liked what I had done after all, it was not imitating someone else. It was me imitating me - a mistake.
My error was obvious in the silence of my confrontation with what was. I had to offer to fix it. I offered, on me, to show my client, and now friend, what the interior could be – to me, should be. He agreed. And then, upon seeing what I knew was gist of the house nurtured and birthed in its interior, they agreed to spend the extra money to redesign the interior detailing.
And it worked.
The mistake defined the beauty of the house that I had already designed. The mistake, uncorrected, would have been throughly defendable, nice, to some not that much different. But is was wrong. It was wrong the way I am often wrong. Doing the right thing, ignorant of why I am doing it. Silence revealed that mistake. Because I think that silence offers truth.
I could see, more, I could feel, the reality that was obvious, always in me, that the beauty of the outside filled my eyes with. I could not rationalize my earlier effort. I could not justify it to my client, because it was, indeed, justifiable. It was right and good.
But it was wrong. But it was not the magic and beauty of the place I had defined that perched and glistened upon a site. I am wrong daily. You are too, I would guess. But the beauty of life is, for me, having what is around us, what we do, revealed to us as not just justifiable or defendable, but revealed to us as beautiful.
The exhausted frustration of dealing with a baby is so mistaken and impossible to avoid. Now, here, 25 years after we had babies I see that, in the silence of our home. It’s only in the silence can I see the exquisite power of infants that I saw briefly, intermittently, while I was in the midstream of raging parenthood.
I was wrong not to see it. But I could not see it. That does not mean that I should not have seen it – I regret that now with each insanely beautiful child I see. But I could not see that beauty until I got away from it a bit.
It is often just harder to know that you are wrong rather than just defend it. It’s more expensive when the basis of my life is doing things the best I can, but that does not mean making money. Or defining success as some professional social swirl. It is harder to know that silence is inevitable.
And that I will have to listen to it.