A child bends down and lovingly grasps a frog from a creek edge stone. This is not happening in a video game the child is playing outside in nature.
At home the child’s mother finds a shoebox for her daughter’s new pet. They place the frog in the box and puncture the box with a sharp pencil. The sundry holes in the box provide the frog with a minimum of daylight and air. The frog survives for a time, but I wonder if it is happy? Does the frog long for the stone as it views the world through tiny apertures inside the dark box?
Then I wonder, in my odd way, why we do the same thing to ourselves?
Most homes are boxes with random holes punches in them. The doors and windows that I call holes are kept to a minimum because they are expensive. In a typical suburban house, the openings are placed based on plans created by someone who has never set foot on the earth where the house is to be built. No one has observed that windows in one location provide a wonderful view or sunlight at a particular part of the day. No one has observed that windows in another location will peer into the neighbor’s bedroom. Unless peering into the neighbor’s bedroom is your thing the window will have to be covered. A covered window is not a window.
We so often just don’t seize the opportunity to open our homes to outside to nature. We punch a few holes in our boxes and consider that good enough. We provide ourselves the minimum daylight view and air to survive. But I wonder if minimizing our connection to nature makes us as happy as we could be in our dwellings? I wonder why it seems we treat ourselves like captured frogs.
The point is so many of our typical dwellings could be greatly improved by simply investing more thought into the location and size of their openings.
THE EXTERIOR COURTYARD IS AN EXTENSION OF THE SPACE