Architect Trey Trahan on Building Sacred Spaces for Connection in Design and the City Podcast

Architect Trey Trahan on Building Sacred Spaces for Connection in Design and the City Podcast

In this episode of design and the city – a reSITE podcast on how to make cities more livable – Trey Trahan, Founder of Trahan Architects, discusses the importance of designing spaces that foster human connection and encourage self-reflection. With ecology and the poetics of space as core values, Trahan Architects’ work focuses on creating impactful cultural places and in this podcast, Trahan advocates for design centered on elevating the human experience.

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ReSITE – a global non-profit organization working to improve the urban environment, launched the second episode of its Design and the City podcast earlier this year, with previous guests such as Winy Mass, Thomas Heatherwick and Gary Hustwitt. Covering a wide range of cross-disciplinary topics, conversations on the podcast focused on issues such as surveillance and security, child-friendly urban planning, and how to combat gentrification in growing cities.

In conversation with Alexandra Siebenthal, Trahan explains how his upbringing in rural Louisiana fueled his interest in ecology, particularly soil, and the search for a “meaningful dialogue” between architecture and landscape. The architect uses the example of the Mississippi River and the native architecture of Louisiana to emphasize the importance of soil both as a building material and as an essential factor in the health and economy of a region. Drawing on a parallel with the ecosystem of a forest, the architect advances the idea of ​​designing for a range of different lifespans, creating greater opportunities for urban environments to evolve in response to changing conditions. unpredictable.

Trahan then talks about architecture that encourages human engagement, nurtures reflection and memory, or reconnects users with the natural world. The conversation covers topics such as the architecture of religious spaces, the profession’s move away from the starchitect system, architects letting go of excessive control of their designs, the value of unpredictability, and “the architecture of healing”.