The Idea of Heirlooms

There is beauty in legacy. When architecture endures through generations, it becomes sentimentally and culturally substantial. Whether it's enabling social interactions, exhibiting wondrous architectural details, exercising superior performance, or offering affable dexterities, we all find a sense of comfort around the heirlooms we grew familiar with.

As architects, we bear immense authority and responsibilities with our designs to provide containers for such memories. And the way we amortize these embodied energies is by making our creative works robust, substantial, and beautiful. Such that architecture reinstates its responsibility of centennial service with intent, and not fortuitously. In hopes, our future generations could look upon the world we created as inheritance, and not inconvenience.

Therefore, when we build, let us think that we build for ever. Let it not be for present delight, nor for present use alone…and that men will say as they look upon the labour and wrought substance of them, “See! This our fathers did for us.” - John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1907.

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