We know it will happen.
Architects do.
The poetry and transcendence.
After months and years
the thing we aimed for
the thing we willed
the thing we trusted to happen
…has begun.
The building is waking up.
POCHE
Poche Snug
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?
THE PATENT!
01 Poche_Truss: a patent-pending building system
Say you woke up tomorrow and found that the world no longer held to the rules you had invested a career holding on to. Rules such that land was malleable and light was functional, and that stillness was a phenomena to be debated but not apparently useful. And you found that instead, there was a growing awareness of a web of life stirring just below the surface of the land; and that light began to give way to emotion wrapped in atmosphere; and that stillness revealed its power to manifest everything. Do you think this would change anything?
I have invented a new way to build. And it solves many of our current day construction issues such as lack of skilled labor, unstable material cost, and the lean toward making more environmentally robust buildings. As an architect, I am a problem solver, intelligent solutions come from fixing attention on the situation. And so it did with the Poche_Truss. The image below claims all of the above in its patent application.
The thing, though, is that parallel to my inventing the Poche_Truss Building System, life happened. It brought with it tragedy beyond comprehension of a magnitude that dissolved my world. The conceptual way of thinking that is so prevalent in architecture slid away with it. 
I feel like Peter Zumthor must feel; I see like Glenn Murcutt must see; I hear Ray Kappe’s quiet gaze, yet, more than anything from my learned world of architecture, I sense the presence of a profound reality that I can no longer dismiss.
No – I have not gone all woo-woo. I have held death in my arms and the gift has been to have life implode, snapping presence right here, right now, into the very current of life. This phenomena is not held by thinking, but is simply present in a humble breath.
Here is what remains: I have a patent-pending building system that addresses many of the challenges in our residential construction reality. The Poche_Truss Building System is an audacious disruptive innovation that will rock the construction world. I am just saying…this IS a tangible solution.
Have a look here, though. The thing about poche is that it has a substantive thickness capable of creating a threshold between a deeply human interior and the forces of nature and society on the exterior. If we engage this inherent quality of poche with rapt attention, we can reach a dimension of profound wellbeing. Confucius said that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper name. The poche in our truss building system not only sets up for tangible intelligence, it suggests a new way for buildings to Be* by upping their capacity to change our environment.
*The extent to which a building can Be is determined by its ability to enable the currents of light, air, views, and precipitation to flow and by it being situated such that people can inhabit these currents.
4-06-2021 Boulder, CO
Many of us woke up and have found that the world no longer holds to the old rules and that this in fact changes everything. If you are interested in attending a presentation on the Poche_Truss Building System and/or if you are interested in executing and/or co-founding the Poche_Truss Building System project, please get in touch: ml@studiopoints.com