Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Educating spaces

Reading this article makes me want to send my children to school in Germany.  This is exactly the kind of forward-thinking and revolutionary initiative that we should be pouring our infrastructure dollars into.  I've been saying for a while now to whomever will listen (run now while you still have the chance) that politicians should try to avoid the impulse to use stimulus spending to merely control anxiety levels by propping up failing industries or investing more of our money and energy in yesterday's world.  Here, Germany is putting 8.3 billion Euros into a radical re-design of educational spaces.  Current schools in Germany sound much like Canadian schools -- monotonous little beehives of classrooms with rows of desks and chairs facing front.  When we vary from this scheme, our experiments tend to be on the small and safe side -- a cluster of classrooms sharing a computer lab or an outdoor classroom consisting of a few benches and perennials.  These are fine initiatives, but why not go back to the fundamentals, think about all we've learned about how children learn and then build a structure to support those processes?  Let's treat our current state of disarray and confusion as an opportunity to re-think rather than an occasion to shrink from in fear.

Peter Hubner is proposing something here that should not be revolutionary.  Let's go take a close look at the constituents of an educational building - the students and their families - to think about what works and furthermore let's hang their ideas on a commonly understood framework -- the village.  Then maybe we'll end up with a school that looks more like what it actually is -- a garden for growing healthy young citizens -- than what it is not -- a penal colony.  The only thing I'd want to add to the story given here is to remember that in addition to asking people about their visions for a school, there should be ways to assess how they are currently using their educational spaces and what is working and what is not.  Just as with writing a good story, it's not what your characters say...it's what they do.

Electronic porches

I've been thinking about porches a lot this week.  One reason for this is because ours is tiny, inadequate, almost unusable as a social space in part because part the house's original porch has been co-opted as entirely needed mudroom space (when we built this space, I had this grand delusion that we would be able to use it as a nice hybrid indoor/outdoor space).  I'd conveniently forgotten that six children each need to have 14 pairs of shoes.  84 shoes don't leave much space for front yard levees.  But I digress.).  The conclusion of our own recent porch discussion was that we can't afford a new porch, so we're lucky that we have friendly neighbours with a beautiful porch and we'll just have to share with them or, if they don't feel like having us all loll on their comfy furniture then we'll have to encourage them to go on vacation a lot (they're really nice neighbours so I suspect this will all somehow work out).

As these things seem to go, as soon as you start thinking about something, the whole world suddenly seems to rotate around it.  So on Friday night, while visiting a more distant neighbour with a beautiful set of Victorian porches, upper and lower, we were talking about how her porches were crumbling and becoming unsafe.  The bill for repair would be almost as high as building a new modest little house, so they're in a holding pattern right now.  But she told me something about her porches that I'd never thought about before.  The lower porch, she said, was a great place to sit to participate in the social life of the street.  People walking by would notice you, wander up and chat, perhaps even sit with you.  The upper porch was more private and intimate.  It was a great place to sit and observe the life of the street while at the same time being a bit more inaccessible -- announcing with that bit of extra distance and elevation that your eyes were on the street but your soul was feeling a bit more private.  Multiple porches as a way of spatially regulating your on-the-street social life.  Very clever.

Yesterday I was reading Avi Friedman's fantastic little book Room for Thought.  This is a collection of marvellous essays about domestic spaces and influences of the city plan on social life, among other things.  In one essay he bemoaned the absence of porch life in certain kinds of homes and neighbourhoods, and he argued that our electronic lives have taken the place of our porches.  I'm not sure I agree completely with that statement, but it does make it interesting to reflect on different types of social networking tools and upper and lower porches.  In Facebook, for example, unless you take the time to tweak settings a little bit, the default is a lower porch.  Anyone you've previously befriended can wander up, take a look, and see via a little green dot whether you're on the porch.  If you are, they can not only peek in your windows but they can ping you with a bit of chat.  A Twitter account seems to me a bit more like an upper porch.  Except by prior habits of use and a bit of guesswork, nobody can really tell when you're on the porch looking out.  You can sit and watch the passing parade or, if you're so inclined, you can lean over the porch and holler out.  In face-to-face social life, we use a rich palette of body-based cues to signal our availability and focus of attention.  In electronic social networking, the rules are very different.  Our presence, though I'd argue no less real, is ephemeral and very highly mediated.  

Retail space

Something I've been thinking about for a while now is the possibility of fallout from the economic recession for the organization of retail space.  The obvious is that the next real estate ripple following the widespread foreclosure and abandonment of domestic spaces will be a knock-on effect on commercial spaces, and we're already seeing this beginning to happen.  Empty storefronts are appearing here and there, some large retail chains are in trouble, and even in my mid-sized city which has been somewhat shielded so far from the worst of the shrinking economy, I'm told that there's a good deal of vacant space.

But other than the simple closure of businesses and the consequent emptying of buildings, we may see more interesting and even adaptive responses of businesses to the changing economic climate.  I was really interested in the article in today's Globe and Mail describing the response of one of our large Canadian chains - Canadian Tire (which, for non-Canadian readers, sells much, much more than tires!).  The re-think of the square foot ratio in so-called 'smart stores' is something that probably needs to happen at many levels, and not just because of the current crisis but also looking forward to a sustainable future (or possibly even a resource positive one).  It only seems to make obvious sense to have your business footprint be as small as it can possibly be to maximize business profit, but I wonder if there are more subtle effects of the shrinking down of retail spaces like this.  On the weekend, I was in one of the smaller Canadian Tire stores.  It was busy, cluttered, and dynamic.  It was impossible to walk down an aisle without squeezing around other shoppers, making eye contact and conversation.  It was a kind of bazaar atmosphere, not unpleasant at all.  It reminded me a bit of summer experiences in small town general stores picking up the essential food and supplies for a weekend camping trip.  We were all having a little bit of a party.  Contrast this with the typical experience at one of the giant Canadian Tire stores in the outer reaches of a city (substitute any kind of large retailer that you like).  Gigantic wide-aisled warehouse sized shopping spaces make it possible to slip in and out of the store without coming within 10 feet of another human being.  And when you do pass someone, you're most likely to keep coasting without a glance, treating them more as a part of the background than as another member of your species worthy of attention and interest.  In an odd kind of way, it's like the contrast between high-density living in the city and the wide, curvy roads of the newer suburbs.

I know there's much more to this.  I'm really just scratching the surface here.  I can hear the counter-argument that when you're out on a Saturday morning looking for a new washer for the bathroom faucet, you're hardly interested in getting wrapped up in some kind of crazy hardware cotillion.  I hear you.  And I know that what's being done at Canadian Tire involves much more than a simple contraction of aisle width -- it sounds as though a good number of clever tactics are being used to maximize the number of dollars shed from shoppers' pockets.  But at the same time I have to wonder:  in times where we're all feeling pretty anxious about what new crisis might be around the corner, where we'd desperately like to believe that the worst is behind us for a while, yet our sensible selves warn us that there could be more nastiness on the way, are we likely to want to take some comfort from rubbing shoulders with strangers?  Will remembering that we're part of a larger community make us feel better?  I suspect that it will.  But regardless of how we think about these kinds of shifts in space, what interests me the most is the potent influence of our spatial arrangements on our movements and feelings.  Where we put our rooms and corridors can exert social control in all kinds of interesting ways.

Save Al Purdy's A-Frame

If you come here on a regular basis, you'll understand that I'm a firm believer in the power of emotional resonances generated by place.  There's no question in my mind that the size, shape and order of a built space can affect the emotional states of its occupants and can influence what happens there.  Like Heidegger's Hut and Thoreau's Cabin, there's got to be mystical, intimate connection between the words that found voice at Purdy's Place and the walls and woods where he and his friends found solace.  If you've got a couple of bucks that you can afford to part with, pass them along.

The boathouse - quiz #1

The first quiz consisted of a QR code containing a link to a Google map that showed a marker in a building by the edge of a little lake in Kitchener, Ontario.  To win the book, a player needed to find a way to crack the code (as with a camera phone loaded with a free QR code reader) and then leap to the Google map and find some way to identify the building.  Not too tricky, but a good warmup round to encourage readers to have a crack at QR decoding and to take a peek at a custom Google map.  Using online maps for navigation is nothing new for most people, but fewer know that it's pretty easy and fun to design your own maps and to make them available to others.  This can be very handy for all kinds of things, including pointing out an interesting feature, indicating a route or a trail, or really anything where you want to have a personalized and enduring online record of some piece of geography, large or small.  If you're interested in that sort of thing -- and loads of people seem to be these days -- it isn't very hard to find a kajillion specialized applications for doing everything from travel blogging to geo-tagging photographs.  I've mentioned a few of them in these pages.

But there was another reason for my having chosen the site that I did for the answer to the first quiz.  The building in question is one of my most beloved landmarks in my adopted home town of Kitchener.  The Boathouse is a tiny little dot of a blues club sitting on the shores of an artificial lake in Victoria Park.  There are all kinds of reasons to love this place.  One of the biggest is that it has been a frequent haunt of Mel Brown, an extraordinary musician who helped to build the Kitchener area as a hub of blues music.  When it comes to blues, Kitchener definitely punches above its weight, and Mel Brown is one of the reasons for this.  Brown played here a lot on Sunday afternoons for not a lot of money but a lot of fun.  On the notorious Saturday referred to in the quiz, funeral services were held for him in Kitchener, and some of the revellers ended up here listening to another great local band named Daddy Long Legs.

But there's more.  There's just something about this little room containing not much more than a rickety kind of stage, a hole-in-the-wall kitchen, a bar about the same size as the one my dad had in his basement rec-room and seating for about 30 people.  When you walk through the door, especially if you already know something about the history of the place and the incredible musicians who have played there, you're taken aback.  It doesn't look like much.  But yet at the same time, you're suffused by a subtle kind of ease.  Once through the door and settled into a semi-comfy chair (if you're one of the few to get one), you just don't ever want to leave.  I don't get to go to the Boathouse as often as I'd like to, but every time I slide into one of their seats and settle into a night of music appreciation, gazing out over the little lake, sipping a fine glass of beer, I find myself wondering why I don't spend a lot more time there.  It's a place I want to be.  It's a place entirely associated with positive emotions for me.  I love it there.   It seemed fitting to me that I open this little contest with a story about a place that I love, because parts of my book are about exactly these kinds of ideas -- what is it about such places that draw us?  Of course, there's the music and the very generous and fun manager, Kevin.  But I think it also has to do with the style, the appearances, and the shapes of the space.  It's a room that somehow resonates with its purpose and its memories.  And that's worth thinking about.

The landmarks of a city

I've got a big bunch of ideas rolling around in my head today.  Perhaps some part of my cerebral cortex has registered that Richard Florida has been in town over the weekend, seeding the air with interesting talk about geography and commerce.  I'll roll out the ideas one by one so as to avoid those epic blog posts that cause readers' eyes to glaze over.  Just a short note today about landmarks.

Landmarks can serve in an iconic role.  Marketing a city can revolve around landmarks of one kind or another.  In Toronto, the city where I grew up (kinda), the buzz over the last couple of years has come from dazzling architectural creations like the Libeskind renovation of the ROM (which doesn't do it for me) and the Gehry transformation of the AGO (which definitely does): two new city landmarks.  But another time-worn strategy is to go tall.  When I ask you to think of famous city landmarks, you're likely to jerk your gaze upwards.  The Seattle needle, the Washington monument, the Eiffel Tower, the CN Tower.  Not all of these landmarks are beautiful.  In fact, with the possible exception of the Washington monument (and I can't say why I like that one more than the others), none of them caress my eye.  Sometimes, in exceptional circumstances, a landmark can be a tall hole in space.  When I visit Manhattan, I still find my eyes drawn to two extra towers of gaping sky.  Landmarks can identify a space in a city and make a wide range of different statements ranging from "I am here" to "This is what we were."  That hole in space in Manhattan is, if it's anything, a kind of temporal marker separating us from a time that at least seemed simpler, even if we now understand we may have been deluded.  That hole has dropped the veil from our eyes, perhaps.

In a new video, I talk about the landmark that meant the most to me growing up.  This one, living in a landscape that I knew well as a child, is woven through some of my own autobiography.  It keeps me in place on the drive in to the city, so it acts as a navigational landmark, but it's much more than that.  I can't look at it without finding that some ancient memory has been triggered.

The biology of public space

Whenever I'm lucky enough to have a chance to bend the ear of an architect about my crazy ideas, I come away with new enthusiasm for how much untapped potential there is to connect architecture and psychology, and new humility about how much I just don't know.  I've written a couple of posts about my slow and painful education in Le Corbusian architectural theory -- a work still very much in progress -- and I had another small lesson when I had lunch with a sharp, young architect named Vincent Hui on Friday.  I say 'lunch', though somehow things got a bit out of hand.  After planning about three years of research we discovered that much of the afternoon had vanished behind us.  Time well spent.

I couldn't possibly summarize all of the ideas Vincent set in motion, but one that interested me a lot had to do with understanding how public space works.  I'm here slogging into an area of huge interest and attention, of course.  There is a long history of academic and practical interest in how such spaces work (or don't).  One thinks first of people like William Whyte, Jan Gehl, and Jane Jacobs, perhaps.  As I've mentioned before, my own bias about Le Corb, and I know I'm not alone, is that he got things really wrong.  If you throw buildings up on pillars to create big wide open spaces underneath them, people hate them.  When I said something like this at our lunch, Vincent leaned forward in his chair, fixed me with a look of some urgency and suggested that this was not always true.  Cryptically, he promised pictures.  Here's one now:

 This is an HSBC bank in Hong Kong.  You can see enough to understand that it's an open space underneath a building, in a manner befitting LeCorb, but it is also obviously working as a public space.  Not only public, but exuding such comfort as a refuge that occupants are not only sitting on beautiful little blankets to enjoy picnics and conversations, but they're actually snuggling up and falling asleep.  This is nothing like the Pruitt-Igoe-high-crime-crack-pipe-shards-of-broken-glass images that we normally conjure up when we think of the failure of Radiant City.

So why does this happen here and not, for example, here?

Or here?

Well, where do we begin?  Density?  Maybe.  The Foster Bank in Hong Kong is in one of the most densely populated areas of the world.  Pruitt-Igoe was never even fully occupied in its heyday.

But there's much more to it than that.  We all know about public spaces that work and ones that don't.  Think of where you live.  Think of a warm, sunny Sunday afternoon in the core of your city.  What places are empty and which ones are teeming with people?  Much, you might argue, would have to do with what's around you.  But underneath a bank on Hong Kong?  What's there?  

What about biology?  In psychology, there's a classic old test called the "open field test".  It's hard to imagine anything simpler.  Plonk an animal into an open space of some kind and see what it does.  The first thing you'll discover is that any self-respecting animal has strong and quickly developing place preferences.  Other than some very simple things, though, such as that many animals prefer dark places and places where they are close to a wall, we know very little about how such preferences develop.  We assume (and make the argument sometimes) that these kinds of preferences must relate to survival.  Animals probably prefer the spaces that are most likely to be safe from predators, aggressive neighbours, the environment.  

When Filipino domestics in Hong Kong go out for an urban Sunday picnic, they're probably not worrying about predators or typhoons, but they're still led to make choices about where to spread those colourful blankets by deeply in-built impulses that propel them towards comfort.  So one of the differences between public spaces that work and those that fail seems likely to me to have to do with preferences for size, shape and appearances of spaces.  Understanding how to tap into those preferences to build successful public spaces might be helped along by adopting a more biological approach to how we apprehend spaces, and then doing the experiments to establish the general principles.  Time to get busy.

Space, place, and the AGO transformation

I finally had a chance to visit the new Art Gallery of Ontario this weekend to have a look at the new Frank Gehry addition.  After an unfortunately not entirely positive reaction to the other big-name archi-revamp in Toronto, the ROM Crystal by Daniel Libeskind, I confess I was braced for the worst.  I visited under the best possible conditions.  I had arrived in Toronto on Friday, sans gaggle of offspring, avec lovely partner in crime where we lolled around in the cavernous bar at the Intercontinental (gotta love Hotwire) deconstructing the perfect martini.  There was nothing on the slate for Saturday other than feeding ourselves delicious things, visiting the gallery, and hunting down some good music.  I can't remember the last time my agenda looked like that.  Anyway...my mind is now wandering space and time...so back to the AGO.

I'm not going to rabbit on here about Gehry's beautiful sinuous curves, the astonishing masses of Douglas Fir, or the clever staircases.   Others have poured heart and soul into that effort.  I'm actually more interested in how people move through spaces and how they feel as they do so.  The attentive reader might have already noticed this about me.

First, art galleries in general:  for people interested in space and movement, they're the perfect kinds of spaces.  Unlike spaces such as shopping malls, libraries, casinos, offices, hospitals, or government buildings, there's really only one reason we visit a gallery:  to look.  My old friend Thomas Seebohm used to describe galleries as the "teapots of architecture".  What he meant by this might only be obvious to those readers who know something about computer graphics.  A classic reference object  for computer graphic modeling and rendering of three-dimensional objects has been the teapot.  If you can render its surfaces, curves and reflections in a convincing manner, then you've got a good 3-d model.  In the same way, if you can make a gallery work, then you've got a good space.

That's how I approached the new AGO.  Where did I want to go, and how did I feel when I got there?  As we passed through the entryway, craning our heads to take in as much of the complex, curvy organic warmth of the wood as we could (but I won't go there), I immediately began to feel a bit of rising tension.  The source of it, I think, was a greedy concern that I not miss anything. Where's the contemporary stuff?  Where's the Impressionism?  What new Canadian art is here?  Are there some traveling exhibits that I won't be able to see next time I visit? This slight art-angst (where's the Munch?) was probably exacerbated by the fact that this AGO was an entirely new version of an old gallery that I have been visiting on a regular basis for about 40 years (more about this in a moment).  Suddenly, a space that I have known pretty well for a long time has been reorganized, but it retains many of the old objects that I've grown to know over much of my life.  It didn't take me very long at all to discover that what the transformation is all about is breaking down those kinds of traditional approaches to a gallery space by refusing to categorize art in the conventional manner.  Instead, pieces have been put together to stimulate thought about art, rather than to encourage visitors to go look for their favourite iconic artworks so they can tick them off a mental list like birders going after the rare Black-Faced Spoonbill.  So for example, one of the most brilliant spaces for me was one in which one wall was literally plastered with a large number of well-known and much loved paintings hung Academy style, while the wall facing it was carefully arranged with a sparse collection of beautiful Impressionist paintings.  At the same time we're admiring the pictures, we're confronted with an interesting epoch in art history.  What does the contrast mean?  What do the changes in the ways that we present art have to say about how we feel about art?

Another example:  In the contemporary galleries, pieces are arranged chronologically.  As we walk through the collections, we move through time, make connections with the context in which the art was being made.  Instead of looking for common uses of materials, techniques and methods, we're looking for repeating ideas and themes.

As a repeat visitor to the gallery, and one who can connect much personal history to the space (everything from grade school excursions, bus rides from hell, illicit cigarettes sneaked outside the back door to visits with wan and willowy young companions when I was a pretentious university student wearing a safety pin in my ear), I was fascinated by the fact that re-arrangement according to new devices, new categories of thought shook loose all of these memories, separated the personal context of my viewing from the work itself in a wonderfully jarring way, and stimulated thought.

But beyond the personal, I loved the fact that what the AGO has done is to make the arrangement of spaces and the objects that it contains into a series of pieces of conceptual art.  Even though I've spent a decent amount of time talking to curators, and have at least a rudimentary understanding of how the process works, it was a deep epiphany for me to see curation as such a fundamental and transformative creative act.  The curation has actually changed the art.    That's what Gehry has unleashed here.

The marketplace of place

There's a sad little platial drama playing out in my town -- Kitchener, Ontario.  We've had a farmer's market in the centre of town for well over a hundred years.  In fact, Kitchener boasts one of the oldest continuing farmer's markets in the country. The market has resided in various locations through the city, but in my years of living here, it has been in only two places.  First, in Kitchener Market Square -- a moribund downtown shopping centre that was built in 1973, mostly vacated by merchants over the years as commercial development migrated to the exurbs where operating costs were much lower because taxpayers were footing the bill for much of their infrastructure.  More recently, beginning in 2004, the market moved to a new space right on Kitchener's main street (King Street) in a gigantic multi-level building that ended up costing a small fortune.  The concept was that the traditional Saturday market would be supplemented by a retail and restaurant space that would operate every day, draw a good lunch crowd and possibly some daily food shoppers for gourmet items.  When I read of this plan, it seemed to me like a no-brainer.  The organic and locavore movement was just beginning to pick up some steam, the market was easily accessible and central, and to me the idea of being able to go grab a quick lunch and then maybe pick up some good coffee beans or some cheese to take home seemed like exactly the thing a growing city should offer.  Yet in the five years of its existence, I've visited the Kitchener Market exactly twice at times other than Saturday morning.  And my experience is not an isolated one.  The market is just not doing well.  Why?

Compared to our much larger market situated squarely in Mennonite country in St. Jacobs, the little urban market attracts a decent but much less impressive Saturday crowd.  When I go, I actually like this because it's not as hard to move from aisle to aisle, find the things I need, and even to stake out a little spot to stand and eat something delicious on offer from one of the few restaurant stalls that operates on the main market floor.  I have no idea whether the main market space is doing better or worse than in its old location, but I do know that the upper floor, housing the permanent restaurants and stores, is foundering.  It seems like such a good idea until you arrive at the site.  First, the opening to the market building is a large, empty piazza.  It's just not an inviting space that reels me in and makes me want to linger.  But more importantly, for all of the efforts that were made to make the upper space cheery, inviting, and in keeping with a market atmosphere, it just seems to make the space act like one that I want to rush out of rather than cling to.  The large, vaulted skylit ceiling and the wrap-around windows seem to take away any semblance of coziness or refuge.  The exposed surfaces, almost all consisting of concrete and metal, don't help.  The food is actually quite good and there is good variety, but having purchased a delicious order of jerk chicken or some rib-sticking Croatian fare, when I get to my table, I just want to gulp it down and flee.  It's very much the same feeling as having lunch at a food court in a shopping mall.  These are not spaces that are designed to encourage us to linger and relax so much as to bolt down some sustenance and to go back into the shopping fray.

Now there's a new manager for the market, who says that she's going to try to figure out how to make the upper retail and restaurant space more compelling.  She says she is going to "warm it up and make it very comfortable to be there."  Encouraging that she seems to have put her finger on the problem exactly.  But how to fix?  Can shuffling the purpose of the space, filling it with cooking demonstrations, community group meetings, and a mini-market accomplish this, or does the configuration of the space itself need some more radical surgery?  It's a fascinating problem and one I hope finds a solution.  I'm a firm believer in urban markets and local foods, and I know I'm far from alone.  I want to want to go there, but right now I don't.  

Le Corbusier Redux

I got some great feedback on yesterday's post on Le Corb.  Perhaps the most interesting comment arrived by email late last night.  A friend said something that given my bleary-eyed post-putting-children-to-bed state, I hadn't been able to process properly until this morning.  I quote:

"The problem is when you put actual humans into a giant open space, they all
huddle at the edges.  I don't think they knew this is how people would
actually behave."

Spoken like a psychologist, and I think getting at a key part of what I was trying to say at the end of my post.  I'm still stumbling around in dangerous ignorance of Le Corbusier's project, but I think I'm in fairly firm grasp of two things:  1. the kind of planning in which we all live off the ground in massive high-rises full of a beehive of machine-like dwellings, while the ground plane is left completely open for us to wander, drive and all somehow share, doesn't work.  2. Le Corbusier's motivations for thinking that it would were not grounded in an understanding of human psychology, but in something else.

So what the kinds of approaches I've been trying to develop and those advocated by Le Corb share in common is that they both strive to find a way to design spaces in accord with the dimensions and functions of the human body.  But I argue (like many before me -- William Whyte, for example) that the way to do this is to measure behaviour -- to see what we do in real spaces (or virtual ones).  Le Corbusier's approach, as I understand it, was to try to approach the problem in a different way -- by theorizing about what people were and, in the tradition of French philosophers like Blaise Pascal, to build an image of humanity and then to design to it.  I think this is also the approach of at least a good handful of other very prominent architects -- you could probably name some of them yourselves.  The problem is, if you're wrong about the image, you can be dead wrong about the design.  You can be wrong about the measurements as well of course, but you're more likely to be wrong about the explanations for the measurements than the measurements themselves.  And even if you are wrong, the design principles that emerge still might not be completely doomed -- you just may be confused about why something actually works.  What's truly exciting about this to me is that we now have a great set of tools for making the right kinds of measurements.  I think at least we can now get that part right.

So now I'm thinking about that -- how we design for images of who and what we are, rather than the stubbly little biological critters that we may sometimes want to deny lie at our cores, but can never divorce ourselves from completely.  I've just written a little thing for another site in which I'm talking about how I think people should go about hunting for a home.  One of the pointers is to work hard to make the distinction between the image of yourself (sometimes a fantasy) that you'd like to project via your home, and the way that you actually live.  I think that the failure to make this distinction can cause great unhappiness.  I even think our inability to separate realistic insight into self from fantastic dreams of what we might turn into given a suitably palatial residence is one of the root causes of the US housing crisis.  Sure the bankers (with a huge assist from the federal government) let people buy beyond their means.  But it's the fact that they wanted to so badly that fascinates me more.