What determines the nature of the places we inhabit? At the end of my street, construction workers are tearing apart what used to be a hospital. The hospital recently moved further out into the suburbs to a new building, while their old building was to be demolished. In the past two sentences that I just wrote, I have used the word "hospital" in two different ways. In the first sentence, I used the term "hospital" to denote a building, while in the second, "hospital" refers to the collective community (staff, doctors, patients, and administrators). It is this ambiguity of the term that makes me wonder, do we understand a place through its architecture or the people and their work that happen to be in a certain building? I am inclined to say that it is the people and the work they do that gives a space its meaning. Whether it is a hospital, a school, a non-profit or a for-profit company, the buildings that populate the landscape of our lives, on closer inspection, derive their meaning from the communities within and around. This strikes me as remarkable. Human beings are architects of meaning through their daily work. In the case of the hospital that used to be at the end of my street, workers and patients infused the raw materials of that particular space with a significance and purpose beyond what any professional architect could have done. Now, the hospital has not been destroyed, but rather only relocated because the hospital is where the community is. This realization can be applied to any building that we recognize as operating for a certain function. It is incredible, really, that we recognize any particular building as performing a certain function (i.e. education, healing, worship, serving the community, etc), this is a radical testament not to the design or signage of the building, but rather to the work of the people inside and out.
