We bought a couch and I had an existential crisis.

If you hang around me long enough in a professional context, you will likely hear me say some version of the following:

The role of the architect is to draw a line and say "the space on this side of the line means one thing and the space on the other side means another."

While this is an astoundingly reductive way of describing an incredibly complex and demanding profession, I tend to say it a lot because it's instructive. We draw lines (walls) between bathrooms and bedrooms. We draw lines (floors) between retail and residential uses. And we draw lines (facades) between conditioned spaces and the outside world. We get so obsessed with the thickness (lineweight) of lines and what that says about the things it is demarcating that we will have weeks-long arguments over email and in person about how to draw these lines.

But where am I going with this and how could it possibly connect to couch we recently bought and I am currently sitting on?

Bear with me, I promise this will all make sense. Maybe.

Because ultimately, the act of drawing that line and defining the meaning(s) of the adjacent spaces is an act of exclusion. If, for instance, you draw lines in such a way that the only access to a bathroom is through a bedroom, you're saying "this bathroom is overwhelmingly for the use of the primary bedroom residents." If you draw walls around a space and call that space the "vault" it implies a set occupants strictly limited to bank employees.

And if you draw a set of lines on a plan and say "these are stairs" you are implicitly excluding people like me, John Wick, and ED209 from whatever use is at the top or bottom of those stairs.

And it turns out that the architecture (and architects) I grew up admiring had a deeply problematic history with [gesticulates wildly] all of this.

At its core, the Modernist movement was a democratic and humanist project. Emerging largely from European nations where aristocratic control was within living memory, a small cadre of architects, designers, and artists developed a spatial and visual pattern language that centered the physicality and political power of the modern everyman. To put it in terms of the analogy I've been torturing you with for the last few minutes: this was an architecture that drew lines to exclude the aristocracy. At first, that is.

Modern architecture–the spaces, furnishings, and forms that I grew up idolizing–was also deeply entwined with the eugenics movement. Because if your main function is to draw lines that circumscribe expected behaviors (this is a bathroom, it's where you poop) or traits (this is a gymnasium, where you must be able-bodied), you'll likely end up making choices that exclude further groups and classes from your spaces. Many modern architects were unabashedly vocal about their belief in eugenics, in the creation of fitter, stronger, (whiter) men who would lead us into the future. Philip Johnson would praise Adolf Hitler multiple times throughout the 1930s, and there is even circumstantial evidence that he helped design mobile gas chambers (built on truck chassis provided by Henry Ford) for the Nazi regime.

This circumscription even extended to planning policy. With the establishment of the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) in 1934, it became the explicit policy of the United States to guarantee mortgages, derisking lending for banks and creating millions of new homeowners. But again, lines were drawn, this time excluding communities (most often comprising black and brown folks) from mortgage lending in a practice that became known as redlining. Without the ability to create generational wealth that homeownership provided, these communities often had to make do with a material culture built largely from cheap and disposable goods.

To bring it back to me, and ultimately to couches: I didn't know any of this–explicitly–while I was growing up. I just knew that there were certain places, practices, and objects that signified being on the "right side of the tracks," on the right side of the eugenics line. Because I lived in white people Wakanda (AKA Vermont), this line was drawn for me on the basis of class:

• On the good side of the line we drove European or Japanese cars. On the bad side, big American cars and trucks.
• On the good side we experienced the outdoors without motors (sailing, skiing, hiking). On the bad side, it was all motorboats, snowmobiles, and ATVs.
• On the good side we lived in Shelburne or Charlotte, in modest but refined houses on well-manicured land. On the bad side lay mobile homes surrounded by broken-down vehicles and various junk, in towns like Monkton and Bristol.
• On the good side we aspired to go to Harvard and Yale, on the other high school was enough.
• On the good side we sat on modernist furniture by designers like Eames, Corbusier, or Herman Miller. On the other side, cheaply-made overstuffed couches.

I wrote the preceding thousand words to help you, hopefully, understand the depths of the existential crisis I went through two weeks ago when Dacia and I drove to the San Leandro Living Spaces with the specific goal of finding a sofa. Because I have spent a lifetime aspiring to own furniture that signify my class, wealth, and taste–furniture that is no longer suited to my new body and its "deficiencies"–and now I was about to buy a gargantuan plush sectional sofa with built-in recliners. The Ford F150 of couches. The cheap developer-built faux-tuscan-villa mcmansion of couches. But a couch that I can easily get on and off, a couch that reclines so much that I can get my feet above my heart, a couch that has built-in USB chargers so we don't have cables and bricks strewn about the living room, and a couch that everyone in the family can cozy up on to watch a movie. A maximalist sofa, the exact opposite of the clean and pure lines of the modern furniture I love.

So we walked (and rolled) into the store at 8:00 pm on Friday evening. Because of course Living Spaces is open until 9:00 pm every day. I transferred onto and off of six sofas, ultimately settling on the "Liam Flexsteel Sectional" upholstered in top-grain saddle leather. We purchased three components–two recliners and one non-reclining center piece. And while we could have had them delivered the next day, we chose to have them delivered on Wednesday (when the white-glove delivery was cheaper by $50). All of this was accomplished in under an hour and delivered in four days–compared to the 10-16 week lead times I am accustomed to with the fancy people furniture I've historically bought.

When the sofa arrived, of course the kids immediately demanded that we buy more sections so we could have an L-shaped sofa again. So we ordered two more pieces (which we could have received SAME DAY if we wanted) and now have an enormous and gauche sofa in the middle of our living room, and I'm still trying to let go of my prejudices.

Because damn if it isn't comfy as hell.