
The Poche has long spoken about performance and intelligence. Now that it has achieved its Patent (USPTO #12227946), it is exposing its heart, aimed at people who want to be their best human.
Why would a startup with a patented building framing system, promoting economical, performance, and wellbeing advantages in a housing shortage market jump on a track for people who want to be their best humans? Aligning more with yoga, meditation, rock climbing, forest bathing, and the like? The housing market is real and the Poche offers a true solution to some of its hardest problems. So what’s with the Snug and its promoting space where you do nothing on the chance you might become everything?
This is the wall I have been staring at for a number of months as we standardize ADU plans for online purchase and entertain small house projects using Poche. Exciting times to be sure. But my heart keeps getting turned to face the Snug.
It’s an earth floor with a stone It’s a tree These are the superpowers
The Poche Snug is just the pinhole through which you get into a concentrated experience with nature. Not soluble. You either get it or you don’t.
I have no illusion that my stepping off the rail to propose a place for doing nothing is not deeply uncomfortable, but you see, evidence suggests that many of us suffer from something called place blindness, which is an inability to orient oneself in one’s surroundings due to a lack of direct experience. Here is when I begin to remember Slow Architecture. Places that aspire to create a direct experience. Places that by virtue of extraordinary intentionality concentrate an experience such that you vanish into pure presence. Slow Architecture historically dwells in the realm of the rich, the creatives, and the craftsperson. So the Snug with its modest scale and common materiality is plunking what was privileged into greater reach. Standardizing the wellbeing we gain through nature into a sliver of space we can put in your backyard or in a public garden or maybe even on a farm.
The idea that nature is of substantive benefit to us is well known…from ancient Chinese healers to Western writers such as Thoreau, the belief that connecting with the natural world improves wellbeing repeatedly appears throughout recorded human history. This is commonly experienced by folks of who get away to forests and beaches to recreate and decompress. Is it such a far reach to suggest that a small sliver of space intentionally connected to nature might become a commonly available space to re-create yourself? Do we create the world we dream by fixating on the material or do we create that world by becoming our best human?