The green and blue spaces on Maria Westerståhl’s urban doorstep are helping her to rebuild her confidence and sense of adventure after Lockdown and a battle with long Covid.
Serendipity brings Tim to my home desk on International Women’s Day. (Is it a wink from the universe to stay in the frame?) A decade has passed since he was last here, then to document our self-build house. Today, his camera is smaller and the house marginally larger. The development and its extension were twins to our children: parallel, all encompassing labours of love.
Our studio is a separate building across the original stable yard, which I traverse in my Swedish clogs. It was designed for extended family and has been used for much besides. I love this model of a home, tuned in to something beyond the nuclear family unit without erasing the special boundary around it. It certainly proved its worth during lockdown. I personally think hybrid working is here to stay. Rather than compromising the social architectural workplace, it could be framed as a way to extend it.
I felt that I slightly lost sight of my values whilst staying afloat through lockdown workload and a winter’s long Covid. I’ve had to slowly rebuild my confidence and sense of adventure. I know I’m not alone. I am lucky to have green and blue spaces on my urban doorstep. On some molecular level, life is an ongoing process of recovery. It’s easy to take it for granted.
It’s three years now since the RIBA invited its London members to learn about cooking on International Women’s Day. My open letter, intended only to cancel the event, took on a life of its own. Maybe it was something to do with the mix of fury and absurdity. There is always a tension between symbolic and effective change, but I’d like to think it shifted the conversation in a room somewhere.
I am energised by projects with a social purpose and which respond directly to place. I did always like Alvar Aalto’s famous question: would it work if a lion jumped through the window? It’s important to keep changing your point of view in a creative process. For example, I could speculate that it was actually Aino who said it first, to him, in the home they designed together. In my mind’s eye I can see her clearly, gingerly swinging her legs through an open casement in Munkkiniemi, hot on the heels of the allegorical big cat. Meow!
Maria Westerståhl
London N4
Maria Westerståhl is an associate at Cottrell and Vermeulen
Source: Architecture Today