Every client is unique. The challenge is blending their program with the poetry to create the structure. Often, said Oshatz, his clients don't have a set idea of what their finished home should look like. It's up to him to elicit their emotional responses to space and light and create spaces that work for them. For one claustrophobic client, for example, he designed a home with glass walls that tipped outward, so that even when the man looked up, he could look out.
People function better in the right environment.
If you go on a picnic, you go to a place you find aesthetically beautiful, not to an industrial site. Innovative approaches to home building don't necessarily have to be shocking. After all, some of our favorite familiar home styles started out as radically different from what was then the norm. Frank Lloyd Wright's Usonian homes of the 1940s were meant to revolutionize the way people who lived in them related to each other and to the land. Their horizontal design was intended not only to be affordable but also to encourage the sharing of family duties and the sharing of space.