The residue humans leave in their wake, from useful objects to toxic waste, are artifacts that emerge from the stories we share. These stories serve as a narrative lens through which people collectively view the world and their place in it. They represent a society’s belief about what is important, what is valuable, and what is worth pursuing, resulting in a value system that organizes a society’s activities and determines what objects are worth creating.

In the realm of architecture, the opportunity to interrogate existing value systems is nearly inexhaustible as the process of creating the built environment contends with the complexity and entanglement of most human endeavors.

Within this creative process architects have an opportunity to investigate value systems and bend the arc of existing stories toward constructive and sustainable narratives.

We start by questioning every story we encounter, especially the ones we believe in.