In the universality of our mortality, every architect-client collaboration is a unique connection. The island of intimacy that clients and architects occupy is as small as it is intense. Often, dozens of meetings exchanging the inner life of the client and the arcana of building are shared. The very nature of an architect’s motivations and the client’s values partner in a dance that transcends professional protocols and becomes exponential in the sharing exchange. As with psychotherapists and clerics, the essential faith the client and the designer have in and for each other is, under the best of circumstances, transformational, not transactional. 

Building is an elemental human act. Design is the aesthetic extension of our hopes, and our hopes are discovered during the design process because buildings manifest who we are: designer and user. Designed buildings become what we value: Building hope, by finding it in constructed beauty, has a unique power and presence for the builders. 

When projects are built, the people who come together to create them have a time-limited, risk-filled, emotionally draining partnership. In the beginning-middle-end cycle of months—or, often, years—relations between strangers become intimate, strained, and frequently deeply rewarding. The analogy of childbirth may have some validity, but your children are with you forever. Builders disappear after the paint is dry.

Julio Capurro died a few months ago. I knew him well for exactly who he was, because our decades of intense work together made that understanding inevitable.

A builder I have worked with for a quarter-century on perhaps 20 projects, Julio Capurro, died a few months ago. I knew him well for exactly who he was, because our decades of intense work together made that understanding inevitable. And unlike many other relationships we had with others making projects, we understood, admired, and even loved each other.

The intimacy of architect and client in the effort to build has all of the practical pains of financial danger, wasted time, even personal conflict. And, sometimes, buildings do not happen, despite our best efforts. The selection courtship is often broken when you’re not chosen to partner with a patron. Sometimes, the clients themselves discover that what they want is not possible—whether because of budget, local regulations, or a site’s inability to accommodate the reasons to build.

Those eventualities are hard truths of any endeavor when humans come together to try to make something out of nothing. But the practicalities of building—the thousands of workarounds, sacrifices, inventions, and even deep disappointments—are almost always forgotten in the aftermath of a realized opportunity, the often astonishing joy in creation the partnership realizes.

That act of realizing hope is why I’m an architect; its depth of gratitude and purpose for the parties concerned makes a death in that partnership so deeply felt. A moment of a few years—creating, defining, building, occupying—often comes and goes without epiphanies or recriminations. A good thing was accomplished, and all parties moved on. 

But there are other connections that extend beyond the practical value of mutual utility, when shared interests and expertise are manifest in a building. Sometimes, humans find love for each other in the values that have meshed during the creation of the building. Solving problems is necessary, but making hope into beauty is not the transaction of genius for patronage; it is the discovery of what is loved by all those who love—a uniquely human thing.

More than two decades ago, before 2008’s tectonic economic shift, clients called me. They had a site, owned by a parent, on a lake that no one could build by unless the new home was exactly on the footprint of the existing modest cabin. Unlike the years of multiple projects that connected Julio and I, these clients came to me for one house.

They had seen a book or two that I had written and read a few pieces of my published work—a very typical 20th century way that clients found architects before the internet changed everything. The project worked its way through design, including the disaster of each of us going to the other’s location for our first meeting. I should’ve known that the love and humor they shared in my screw-up was just a portent of decades of friendship. But the power of intelligence, humor, and devotion was part of who these clients were.

One half of this couple had the same inordinate love of wood that I do, and he purchased $10,000 worth of board feet in a late-night internet auction, without his wife knowing. (And all of it delightfully used in the place we made.) Meetings, emails, and phone calls were always full of laughter, mostly at ourselves. The tangible results of all our time and effort was a beloved place. It gave everyone involved—builder, woodworker, me, the owners—great happiness.

We did not know that that joy would become sporadic connections across distance and that my wife would find the couple as delightful as I did. Their deep humor was a sentence away and ever present, even as a decade of his health was compromised by the inevitable aging of the machines we live in.

This week, my fellow wood-worshipper succumbed, and all the realities of creating beauty together washed over me.

At a certain age there are more funerals than weddings, and I am about there. But the intense shared devotion of creation is as thrilling in rediscovery as it was at conception. The noise of living through the evolutions of life, beyond the building of beauty, do not end the connections that were forged in risk and hope. Death does not invalidate our devotions. It reveals them anew.

Featured image courtesy of Duo Dickinson Architects.