Greenway Studio Architecture creates nature-inspired buildings and spaces that seek to merge with the landscape they inhabit, approach environmental sustainability, and connect with what is meaningful to the people that live and work in them.

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The studio’s work focuses on mainly on unique single family homes, yoga/wellness retreats, community gathering and health care projects, public and private sacred spaces, landscape master plans, community design charrettes, and art installations. Similar to how one's life and world view grows when learning a new language, our work is informed by long experience of independent world travel in the great cities and remote places in Africa, Asia, South America, and Southern Europe.

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Our approach to each project differs as each site and client are different. From experience, the process of finding that right approach for each project has three aspects in common:

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• Learn what is meaningful to our clients, other users of the building, and the community. While ‘meaning’ may not be knowable in some absolute sense, through sharing images and experiences of what we are drawn to, writing down what can’t be shown, an understanding can be reached.   

                                                                    

• Be physically present on site without distraction, especially in the early stages. This direct experience informs the more technical site analysis and guides the first conceptual ideas. We walk, sketch, sometimes camp out, and observe changes over time until we know the site well enough to design a building that belongs there.

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• Stay true to ourselves. Once those first two aspects have come together, this third one has always followed.

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In the design of buildings, spaces, and places, we seek to express a certain ‘quality’. This ‘quality’ eludes precise definition, much like asking “What is the meaning of life?” This innate, intuitive, sensibility found clearer articulation in books such as in The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander. Alexander uses the term ‘The quality without a name’ and approximates it with specific terms that work around the heart of the subject yet are individually inadequate. In his words:

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‘Alive’

The very beauty of the word ‘Alive’ is just its weakness

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‘Whole’

But the word ‘Whole’ is too enclosed

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‘Comfortable’

Yet the word ‘Comfortable’ is easy to misuse and has many other meanings

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‘Free’

Overcomes the lack of openness of ‘whole’ and ‘comfortable’ but can be too theoretical: a pose, a form, a manner

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‘Exact’

Balances ‘Free’ but yet, of course, does not describe it properly

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‘Egoless’

When a place is lifeless or unreal there is almost always the will of a master mind behind it. The word is not right as it does not mean that the person who makes it must leave themselves out of it. ‘Ego’ can mean the centre of your character, your likes and dislikes, which are part of you.

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‘Eternal’
Like all the other words, this word confuses more than it explains. The ‘Quality’ is not mysterious. It is, above all, understandable.

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This ‘quality’, or the lack of it, can be experienced in a person, in a place, or in a building. We try to touch this in our work in a way that is of our time and place as the ‘quality’ is integral to the experience of being fully alive. To us, meaning in life or work, while not truly definable, is built slowly and cumulatively through those experiences. Working with others to add to it is part of building meaningful existence for a person, a family, an organization, a community, or a city.

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This is work worth doing and why Greenway Studio Architecture was started in 2019.