BEFORE THE ARCHITECT – HOME DESIGNING BACKGROUND – UNIQUE HOME DESIGN ARTICLES
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HOME DESIGN OVERVIEW
By Before The Architect
Copyright 2002, 2003, 2007 Before The Architect
Adapted from a recent interview with a principal of Before The Architect.
YOU MAY FREELY QUOTE THE AG WITH PROPER ATTRIBUTION
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The craft of building is in declining health, in my opinion — smart and impassioned and skilled craftsmen are scarcer and scarcer, older and older on job sites. Metal plate trusses and prehung poofy doors, faux stone have become bigtime, because trade masters are harder and harder come-by. Who knows how to build a fireplace from scratch? Fewer and fewer.
Finally, most buyers – consumers – of homes, additions, remodeling haven’t a clue about home design and building at all, let alone doing it better. Home consumers, in the majority, like what they know.
Why these changes? Form follows function: fundamentally, it’s about people spending major money more or less blindly to the appreciation of much more than the deal, proving to this author once again that price is a psychological phenomenon. People know little-to-nothing about design and home building, so they’re expectations are less, and they get less. Builders build what buyers buy. Generations of Me-Me-Me buyers learned to be more selfish and irresponsible, to demand instant satisfaction. So to speak, “Here’s a stock home plan, just add water.” "Here's a farm field, just add the same basic home 20 times or 200."
Isn’t this view one-sided? Yes, there are always other sides to my stories.
Generations Me fostered some good. Take for one example, Cyberville. Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Hotmail — all about cheaper, easier, faster communication — benefits to means and ends. But in home plans and home building, means are better some to none, ends are none to worse. That’s because standards have diminished; that is, both standards expected and standards delivered. Buyers focus on five-peak façades and not what’s holding them up, the chandelier and not the wiring, the sink and not the drain. Home designers and home builders easily, naturally echo their markets’ superficiality, ignorance, and inattention.
Aren’t buyers protected? You know, there are rules and regulations. Right? We have a saying about folks who gather round you when you build a home or add on, “It's your dream home; it's their business deal.”
Now first off, I absolutely must say that there surely are excellent brokers, builders, inspectors, and others involved in constructing and remodeling homes. Even I have met a few. And second off, I absolutely must say again that the marketplace for services and goods doesn’t just happen – it’s organized, it’s demanded and supplied, it’s formed and shaped by the players. Buyers demand, sellers supply in the natural tensions of the marketplace.
Of whom little is demanded, little is expected. And little is delivered. Let’s see more particularly about brokers, builders, building inspectors, and the law – the major players – and allow for the exceptions. Brokers sell you what you want to buy, and you’ve got to know what that is, and most buyers know diddly about important matters of design and home building. Builders build you what you or your surrogate specify, and if don't do the specifying, then you get what they give. What do buyers know about significant specs? More diddly. Building codes are minimum safety standards. Minimum standards – there’s little or nothing to them about durability, convenience, more safety, better materials, means, and methods. Building inspectors – independents aside – are government employees whose pronouncements are without implied warranties of fitness – no guarantees that they get it right. They screw it up, they walk, you pay. My design and building experience with courts and real estate lawyers is that they break hearts and pick pockets, respectively.
Building better and best is primarily on the buyer. Buyer beware. Buyer be wise. Or it’ll be buyer be sorry for leaving it all up to someone else.
What’s going to change things from your view of home design and home building? Nothing lasts forever.
On the big screen, long-term view it’ll be cheaper, easier, faster design and home building that benefit both means and ends. Sea changes. Paradigm shifts. You know, bigger than Wal-Mart, smaller than antibiotics. We see probes into our future all around us - geodesic domes and biospheres, various applications with concrete, water-borne cities like Norman Nixon's Freedom Ship, the smaller homes of Sarah Susanka, Jim Tolpin et al., Paolo Soleri’s arcology and the Cosanti Foundation’s Arcosanti, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. They’re worthy probes and prospects, but they’re not roadmaps into our future. You need to stir in: a) independent, even individualized means of total-use energy production; b) cultural insistence on and acceptance of more efficiently designed, more attractive, smaller-sized home structures; c) less economic dependence on big cities as we know them. For starters, that ought to do it. Since this is my wish list, let me add high-speed, wireless computer technology seamless both in software and hardware acquisition, adaptation, and application.
On the small screen, near-term view, change if at all noticeable will come from social and economic elements already in play like a cat stalking – slowly, patiently, and probably just as messy in its intermittent outcomes: 1) folks buying and building smaller — for me, a given from US demography; 2) people propelled by accumulated wealth and accumulated experience to demand better and best whatever the magnitude of the home enterprise; 3) fewer design and home building craftsmen to deliver better and best, thereby assuring their premium; 4) marketplace economics of design, home building, and ownership that penalize prevalent materials and methods while pending reward for demonstrably better ways and means to design and draw and build.
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What about the smaller home aspect of my smaller screen? These are popular notions – smaller homes. These notions don’t necessarily mean per-square-foot cheaper homes; they mean more personally, more carefully designed smaller spaces.
I regard the smaller home notion hereabouts as a kind of second Craftsman Style. This smaller home movement as it were extends its predecessor’s emphasis on the human craft of home structure more recognizable on the exterior and breaks it down to functionally individualized home designing elements on the interior. Notably, this second structural-functional stage of design advances the application of interior light – natural and not – both in quantity and variety and the interior dimensioning of spaces.
Let’s right-off give Christopher Alexander his due. I get asked once in a while about the extent to which I subscribe to Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. It takes two answers to answer. If you mean "Am I a disciple of Alexander's?" then the answer is "No." I think Christopher would have had that it were not thus, but it is thus. His physical system is brittle as plate glass, closed to my world and yours, frozen in all its dimensions, unable to adapt. His philosophy is another matter entirely. His philosophy is to home design as are the open arms of mother to child.
Now I know that Christopher Alexander wadded intellectuals' shorts over what might be characterized as his structuralist approach, his Utopian philosophy, his cultural insensitivity, his monomaniacal schema, his elitist exclusivity, and some downright odd statements now and then. All these characterizations seem to have merit. In these meritorious respects, both those intellectuals and Christopher himself are blinded by their own light.
If you mean "Do you subscribe in your work to the precept that form follows function, to the association of owners and builders in design, to the development of very comfortable spaces, to easy flows of traffic and sight from room to room and from inside to outside, and to an abundance of natural light throughout?" Then, my answer is "Yes to all but one outright, noting specific assent to form and function so long as function does not distort, disproportion, displace style." I am also attracted to Christopher's notions of intimacy gradients, his inclinations to small spaces for sitting and semi-privacies, reckon his references to extended family cohabitation were prescient, and are at least generally prescriptive, revel in his use of lightness and darkness throughout (though less enthusiastic about this one with aging eyes) and particularly between larger spaces (which with responsible gradients may be ok with me, too), and I enjoy his Hellenistic or Romanesque sense of interior leisure and, therefrom, leisurely interiors with my own precedent reservations as to both his ex cathedra pronouncements on structure and function.
You'll see a lot of Christopher Alexander in Sarah Susanka’s writings (start with the Creating The Not So Big House); however, she mellows him nicely by taking one giant, practical step away from his proclamations. Her focus is small homes, small living spaces. She refers to Alexander a lot — just not all of Alexander, thankfully.
Jim Tolpin - metaphorically - puts meat on Susanka's bones, and is, happily, yet another step again away from Alexander's strictures. Tolpin's pretty pragmatic. While small homes take his interest, so do big ones. Principles of behavior are, after all, principles of behavior without regard to the size of the physical framework in which you find them. You may find Tolpin's The New Family Home more accessible and applicable to your own home-to-be than the others [Alexander's and Susanka's]; however, to go through the first two in the order presented will responsibly set your stage for Tolpin's relevance not only to your life experience but also to the home designing vernacular embedded in both Susanka's and, more particularly, Tolpin's - lots of pretty pictures, instructive, too.
These folks are among the smaller-home leaders to my mind. The motivators: changes in the labor pool of craftsmen; tighter budgets over longer lives; pagan- and practical-minded minimalism and resource concerns; an aging population looking to smaller for better.
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