Between Assertion and Presence

Chateau La Coste, Provence, 2025

“We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us.” - Winston Churchill

I’ve long been drawn to structures and works that evoke something in me.

Perhaps that’s why the work of Richard Rogers and Andy Goldsworthy has lived side by side in my imagination. Recently, I had the opportunity to experience both - in a single day - at the Chateau La Coste.

Rogers’ tensile buildings declare the ingenuity and durability of human craft.

Goldsworthy’s temporary interventions — twigs, leaves, stone — eventually dissolve back into nature.

Each, in their own way, reveals what it means to leave a mark.

As leaders and as human beings, we oscillate between assertion - making something visible, defining an edge - and presence, the receptive stance that allows something new to emerge.

Both are necessary.

Too much assertion, and we drown in our own certainty.

Too much humility, and our gifts go unseen.

The real art is in the movement between them —

the ability to speak one’s truth without closing the space for others.

That space - the living field between expression and listening - is where genuine leadership presence lives.

It’s where design, conversation, and coaching all converge:

awareness shaping action, and action revealing awareness.

In architecture, light defines form.

In leadership, awareness does.