PODCAST: Architecture for Human Beings

CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA: Keith Struthers and David Barrett talk organic architecture, the Hippie days, Buddhist sensibilities, and take a stab at defining deep listening. NaturalsCool is South Africa’s up-and-coming producer of podcasts featuring innovative designers from around the world. In this 30 minute podcast you’ll hear two like-minded architects groove on the essence of their creative practice.

“I don’t like pure modernism when it seems to be devoid of possibility;

it’s locked into a moment.”

David Barrett

Listen to the podcast here

A few words from NaturalsCool:

David’s passionate, integrated and warm hearted approach to design includes ‘deep listening’. This means quieting yourself down to become more present in the moment, with all your senses and awareness. To be in-touch with the site, your clients, your colleagues and yourself.

It’s a way of balancing and amplifying the relationship between our inner and outer realities.

Deep listening stands as a counterpoint to technology, which both speeds up our lives and encourages absence to our immediate reality. When talking or texting on a mobile phone, trawling Facebook, TV etc; our awareness moves out of our immediate environment and experience of time into a kind of timeless zone in cyberspace. It can sometimes feel like a form of hypnotism, where we are no longer present as self conscious individuals.

So the question we grapple with daily is, how do we engage with technology without losing our all encompassing and visceral relationship to nature, one another and ourselves? Can our method of designing embrace the complexity of our times without becoming one-sided, so that our buildings embody and support our full humanity?