Noelle is seven.
Her dad is an architect, Kyle Phillips, a senior associate in the Seattle offices of Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson–a very good one. In fact, we honored his team-work–led by firm principal-in-charge Robert Miller–for what they achieved on, “The Bear Stand,” one of this year’s 11 luminous BUILDER’s Choice Custom Home Design Award projects yesterday in Washington, D.C., which you can see here.
Now, an important note in The Bear Stand story is that its architects’ pre-design research took a rather unique direction. They camped, in tents. Three hours northeast of Toronto, they forayed out on foot, in the Ontario, Canada, 99-acre property’s forest for several nights–hiking the woods, paddling canoes on Contau Lake, swatting mosquitoes, and cooking meals over a camp fire in the evening–before one pencil-sketch of what became a 3,245 square-foot wood forest paradise took form.
Young Kyle, about 14 years into a successful career in residential architecture since he came out of Washington State University, may or may not have known that in choosing his livelihood, he was signing up for nights in a sleeping bag on the hard ground, and days trekking through the woods swatting flies and mosquitoes from his face to see a pathway that would lead, ultimately, to a shining of example of how and where people and place can mesh beautifully and in harmony.
But here he was, yesterday, with daughter Noelle by his side.
During a morning of earnest exchange on one of our society’s critical challenges–affordable housing and housing affordability–Noelle sat in the front row, by her dad, coloring, reading, peering occasionally up at the stage as architects, builders, innovators, and experts in social science and building technology each shared a take on how to think and how to act to change the course of a growing crisis.
And all the while, a halo of innocence, of unchecked curiosity, of reveling in a moment bonding with her hero–her father–hovered like visible warmth and electricity over Noelle, as one hour tripped into two, and then three long hours of our Hive Design program in Washington, D.C.
That program–and little Noelle’s serendipitous place in the middle of it all–together provide an inadvertent but powerful context of meaning, and a human bridge to understanding where lies part of the solution to one of affordable housing and housing affordability’s hardest-to-solve problems, costs. And, by the way, the role that joy plays in whatever solutions we come up with.
Award-winner and presenter, Austin-based Alterstudio’s Kevin Alter, put his finger on it. A paraphrase of his comment amounts to this. When–in trying to solve for housing affordability–we look at the price of things, the cost of things, we tend to become blinded, deafened, and numbed to an essential economic and cultural factor. Instead, we should listen–with “big ears”–see with opened eyes, and feel with all our beings, this essential factor: Value.
For instance, we may look at camping in the woods, in tents, on the ground, and getting mauled by biting insects as a cost, a price to pay. But, how does that compare in the end with the value that experience may have generated in Noelle’s father, on a project whose impact is both immediate and enduring?
We may have to look at labor costs, at materials prices and their tariff-fueled roller-coaster ride through the stratosphere, at land-use costs as high and thick and strong barriers to housing affordability–which essentially means giving more people access to decent housing options, rather than less, which is happening today. But how does investment in breaking through those barriers compare with the gains in value to our communities and society and culture and economy when we succeed in beating the challenge?
Noelle Phillips, daughter of Builders Choice-Custom Home Design Award winner Kyle Phillips, in Washington, D.C.
We may look, as well, at the price, the costs it will take to allow little Noelle Phillips to keep pursuing her passion, joy, and curiosity on the path they take her–perhaps into architecture like her hero father–and to a housing market that’s accessible, attainable, and achievable when she comes of age as one of society’s contributors. Yes, there’s a cost to that. A price to pay.
And how do we calculate the value of doing that?
Note: an earlier version of this story had an incorrect age estimate for Noelle. She is 7.
