Sarah Susanka
INFO
Susanka will speak from 5:30 pm-7:30 p.m., Wed., July 18, at the Georgia Tech College of Architecture Auditorium. Tickets are $10 and reservations are needed. http://www.aiaga.org/calendar/index.cfm.AUDIO
Nationally known author and architect Sarah Susanka is going into the life-guru business.
Susanka's first book, 1998's The Not So Big House, tapped into a yearning among many people to downsize from McMansions. She comes to Georgia Tech on Wednesday, July 18, to talk up her self-help book – The Not So Big Life: Making Room for What Really Matters – which extends the theme of The Not So Big House to a not-so-small subject.
Here's a sampling from an interview with the Minnesota architect. For the entire interview, listen to the podcast provided here.
CL: How closely are the McMansion phenomenon and the McLife phenomon tied together? Are they part and parcel of the same thing?
Sarah Susanka: Yes, they are indeed. If you just look for a second at how we cram our days with activities and just an incredible amount of communication going on today from e-mails to text messages to even cell-phone conversations. We're bombarded with pieces of information, most of which need a response. And so we end up chopping our days into these little tiny soundbites, essentially.
The point that I make in The Not So Big Life is that we can't really show up in our lives when we've got them chopped up in these little tiny segments. And we're always worrying about what we've got to do next and what we've just done. We're never actually completely engaged in what we're doing.
So just as [with] the idea of building a house – we assume we've got to build more quantity in order to get a sense of home, but we discover that's not true – what we're doing in our lives is just the same thing. We're filling them with all this stuff, assuming that somehow if we get it all done we're going to feel better.
And it doesn't work that way. What we're looking for is a quality of life, and that requires slowing down. Except it's not just slowing down. ...
CL: It's easy to understand why you wrote your first book – the Not So Big House book. You're an architect. But what makes you think you can take on a subject as broad as the not-so-big life? Why of all people should we listen to you?
Susanka: I believe that architects have a very unique way of looking at any problem. And I do really believe we have a problem today. I think we're in a crisis and don't even recognize it. When we don't have time to practically breathe between activities, we've got a problem. And I've always used myself as sort of a guinea pig. For anybody that knows my Not So Big House books, you'll know that I've written about my own house and how I created something that fit the way I actually lived as opposed to the floor plan I was told I was supposed to want. It's the same thing with my life. I know what I'm supposed to do in order to live a successful life, but I also knew it was just about killing me. So I started to experiment and discovered that there were indeed things that I could do to, as I put it in the book, to slow down my movie, the live I was living, enough that I could start to breathe in it and start to find that vitality and meaningfulness that I was looking for.
