by Elizabeth Cunningham
There is no doubt whatever about the influence of architecture and structure upon human character and action. We make our buildings and afterwards they make us. They regulate the course of our lives.
Winston Churchill spoke these words before the English Architectural Association in 1924. So powerful was this statement that two decades later, upon requesting the exact replication in rebuilding the bombed-out Parliament building after World War II, he declared: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” *
Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, London, United Kingdom. Photo courtesy of Ian Britton.
Consciously applied, there is no doubt of the role architecture and design play, not only in the resulting serviceability of buildings, but also in forming the human psyche.
In her memoirs, rich with descriptions of her various domiciles, Mabel noted that every house she ever lived in reflected her interior being while she lived in it. When her surroundings were grand, she felt grand. Her sentiments echo those of Churchill’s:
So the houses I have lived in have shown the natural growth of the personality struggling to become individual, growing through all the degrees of crudity to a greater sophistication and on to simplicity.
Indeed, as Lois Rudnick observed, the metaphor running through Mabel’s memoirs is that of a woman searching for a place where she can be “at home.” Further, her dwellings serve as corollaries for her inner self “as well as for the state of the larger society that she feels her life represents.”**
Photo courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Mabel likened her homes to “shells of the soul” that faithfully revealed “the form of life they sheltered until they were outgrown and discarded.”
Reading through her memoirs, I found these parallels fascinating. It inspired me to feature the successive homes that shaped Mabel’s life—starting with her childhood in Buffalo and ending with her finding her true home in Taos. They provide as good an overview as any other vehicle on this remarkable woman’s growth and development.