Tributes

As I continue to work on Dad's biography, the theme I try to keep in the front of my mind - and my writing - is how Dad was trying to change the world. Today, though, I revisited the tributes that had come in after he passed, and I was reminded again why I took on the task of writing his biography in the first place.
Person after person talked about how knowing Dad changed their life, mostly by changing their way of thinking. The architects talk about how he used systems thinking in his way of approaching architecture and how unique that was. Others point to performance-based design, which Dad pushed for, as opposed to the more traditional engineering design.
But when you get to the part of Dad's life where he's meeting with neuroscientists and medical professionals, and he's convincing them that the study of what he called (invented?) neuroarchitecture has merit? That's when the really amazing stuff comes out.
So the thread that I keep trying to pull on is that all of his early thinking - his maverick-ness - led to the idea that architecture and its impact could be measured, and more importantly, could lead to improving people's lives. Systems thinking made Dad see the connectivity between all the elements of building design, as well as the built environment. Performance-based measurement was an early way of getting to the important part of design - it doesn't matter as much how thick the walls are or how much light the windows let in - it matters what impact those things have on the people within the space. Numerous studies have tried to measure why this design is better than that design - for learning, for health, for mental capacity - for humans! With neuroscience, Dad finally believed he had found the means to quantify the impact and get the science and the engineering and the art to meet - to the betterment of the human.