Hope

Areas with hope radiate youthfulness, abundance, and life. They often project a sense of weightlessness, light, lightness, and flight that defies gravity and encourages an upward gaze.

Places that shape our embodied cognition invigorate us and make us feel more alive. They expand our horizons and allow us to contemplate new possibilities. Places with hope express purpose, promote well-being, and celebrate life. By being inclusive, they enhance our self-belief and our ability to create social change regardless of where we come from, our abilities, or our beliefs.

“Hope is not the same as optimism or wishful thinking,” explains Israeli radiation oncologist Dr. Ben Corn. Rather, it is a perception of what is possible. “Hope is a very active concept, and nobody needs it more than the cancer patient and the people surrounding that patient,” says Corn, who is systematically advancing the concept of hopefulness in clinical practice. Corn’s work builds on psychologist Charles Snyder’s model for hope, known as hope theory, which is oriented around setting goals that are plausible and meaningful with far-reaching applications.

British anthropologist Tim Ingold reinforces Corn’s observations: “With plans and predictions we can be optimistic that their realization is just around the corner. There is light at the end of the tunnel. But hope and optimism are not the same. The difference is that optimism anticipates final outcomes; hope does not. The verb ‘to hope’ is not transitive [that is, a verb that uses a direct object] – like ‘to make’ or ‘to build’ – but intransitive, like to ‘to grow’ and indeed ‘to live.’ It denotes a process that does not begin here and end there but carries on through.”

In his book, Disturbing Peace, former dissident and president of the Czech Republic Václav Havel writes, “Hope is not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out … that gives us the strength to live and continuously to try new things, even in conditions that seem as hopeless as ours do, here and now.”

A central responsibility of architecture, beyond functional requirements, is to capture and express our aims, aspirations, attitudes, thoughts, and hopes – to offer up and facilitate a better world in the sphere of the real and the tangible. Architecture of hope offers not an end but a measurable way forward based on qualities of comprehensibility, manageability, and meaningfulness. As we have seen in Antonovsky’s concept of meaningfulness as framed by salutogenesis, hope refers to “the extent to which one feels that life makes sense emotionally, that at least some of the problems and demands posed by living are worth investing energy in, are worthy of commitment and engagement, are challenges that are ‘welcome’ rather than burdens that one would much rather do without” – that there is a high probability that things will work out as well as can reasonably be expected.