Stewardship and Stone Soup

Abstract

Stewardship is hardly a new concept. The biblical basis for the idea of stewardship dates all the way back to the creation story in Genesis. God created man and “placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and watch over it” (Genesis 2: 15). The biblical idea of stewardship suggests that as humans we do not, in fact, have ownership nor entitlement over the things that we typically claim to be ours. Our time, skills, and possessions have been entrusted to us not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of the human community as a whole. Living out stewardship within an individualistic, consumer culture seems to be an impossible paradox. Stewardship requires a high degree of accountability for the results of one’s actions on the environment, the economy, and our fellow man or woman. It is the opposite of being wasteful, cautious, apathetic, or complacent. This thesis, while accepting the American, consumer culture as reality to be reckoned with, seeks to counteract its throwaway tendency by inserting programs that make it easy, beneficial, or fun to do stewardship in an architecture that acts as a catalyst for sharing as well as a vehicle for reuse and interaction. By working in synergy with the existing capitalist structure, this thesis will attempt to create an architecture that will act as stone soup within its community; bringing together excess resources and redistributing them for the benefit of all.