Darien Avoyé

For thousands of generations, humankind evolved by living as hunter gatherers in small tribes scattered throughout Africa. Small huts or tents were typical of our closed functional spaces, connected to each other by the outdoor communal spaces where we worked and played. Gathering resources was a journey: not in vehicles, but on foot to the streams, forests, and hunting grounds. An experience of spaciousness filled with the awe of nature’s wonders. Nature was deeply embedded in our everyday experience; the sunrise and sunset were our natural clock and set the rhythms of our natural bodies, as well as our spatial orientation and awareness. Flora & fauna, wind, weather, and climate were all experienced firsthand and were woven into our daily lives and our storytelling, shaping our individual and cultural identity. For hundreds of thousands of years, the environment we lived and thrived in shaped our sense of being. Yet over the last roughly 10,000 years of human civilization we have come to believe that we are well suited for living in rigid closed containers with limited light and access to nature. And while yes, we can survive in these buildings, our biology and psychology were never adapted to thrive in them. The goal of Authentic Design is to begin by acknowledging what it means to be human, and how we became who we are. That we are not well suited for hard boundaries between nature and our built spaces, nor are we well suited for being disconnected from all the natural cues that our daily rhythms were developed to be governed by. Some systems of environmental design have adopted principles to bring the design of our spaces more in line with human nature. The Chinese practice of Feng Shui seeks to align a building’s spaces and flow with the traditional understanding of the “qi,” while the traditional Hindu system of architecture Vastu Shastra takes on similar approaches. While these systems have their merits, I see them as codified frameworks – and when treated as doctrine, they can constrain the flow of creative design. The right design must feel right to my client – true to how they choose to live today, not bound to frameworks created for ancient worlds that faced different challenges than ours today. Authentic Design honours our present-day challenges as well as our origins as a species. Designing a living space that completely fulfills our need for integration with nature is nearly impossible in most circumstances. But with intentionality at play, my goal is to strike a working balance between the two that elevates our lived experience, leaving a legacy of human value in built form that transcends generations.