Identity Through the Grounding of Experience in Place

Arizona-based architect Rick Joy is renowned for creating beautiful modern houses that are responsive to the natural landscape. Here he describes how experience and identity in a completed work are grounded in a mutual relationship between inhabitant and habitat: spaces condition behaviours as much as they are then, in turn, conditioned by their inhabitants. Accommodating these qualities in a design is wholly reliant on the architects' ability to be perceptive – to observe habits, nuances, atmosphere and a sense of place.