Cohousing-L Mailing List: Children's facilities

[Diane Simpson (dqs]

I highly recommend reading Clare Cooper Marcus' book, "House as a Mirror of
Self" (Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home)  particularly chapter two,
"The Special Places of Childhood" before going into your design workshop.
Professor Marcus has written a very insightful and thought-provoking book
that describes what it really means to be "at home."

Although Clare Cooper Marcus is a professor of architecture and landscape
architecture at UC Berkeley, there are no architectural drawings in the
book. To write the book, she interviewed people and asked them to talk
about and make drawings about how they felt about their homes.

Chapters include:
1. House as a Mirror of Self
2. The Special Places of Childhood
3. Always or Never Leaving Home
4. Becoming More Fully Ourselves: Evolving Self-Image as Reflected in Our Homes
5. Becoming Partners: Power Struggles in Making a Home Together
6. Living and Working: Territory, Control, and Privacy at Home
7. Where to Live? Self-Image and Location
8. The Lost House: Disruptions in the Bonding With Home
9. Beyond the House-as-Ego: the Call of the Soul

At the end of most of the chapters are exercises you can do to help you
understand such things as how your childhood home affects your current
perception of home; what home really means to you; a problematic
relationship with home; what it means to "feel at home"; discovering a
neglected part of yourself; working out differneces in making a home with a
partner; the hidden conflicts in working at home; how to work out
territorial conflicts; how to figure out what is your ideal neighborhood
and your preferred residential setting (Big Town, Small-Town,
Out-of-Town);and how disruptions in your life affect your feelings toward
home and what you can do about them.

I met Professor Marcus when I attended a community dinner at Berkeley
Cohousing this summer. That's how I heard about her book. She's just as
inspiring in person, but more funny.

At this dinner salon, she talked about her book and the process of writing
it, and she talked a lot about children and her own childhood. She advised
not to over-design the community, but to deliberately leave some "wild
places" where the children could go and play their imaginary games. She
said that you would be well advised to bring the children in on the design
of the community, because they're pretty much going to take over the place
once they move in, anyway!

If you would like to get her book, it is published by Conari Press, 2550
Ninth Street, Suite 101, Berkeley, CA 94710.

----Diane:.)


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