THE 3 C’s OF HOME DESIGN
We are a culture that reduces complexities to sound bites. In our quest to be memorable, we often give short shrift to the colorations that best describe everyday life. “Less is more”, “Post-modern”, and “Organic architecture” are catch phrases of some of this century’s leading architects. It would seem brevity is the soul of wit for many aestheticians.
Architect designed homes often have the “cheap thrills” and skin-deep aesthetics that are analogous to these sound bites. The architect-designed houses that do get built are the manifest tip of an iceberg where many unbuilt broken dreams go unseen. Truth be told, most designs of most architects never get out of the ground because some of the most elemental concerns of home owners go unaddressed in the design process. Inevitably, the truth will out, and the misfits will reveal themselves, architects get fired, and the fruits of the isolated muse remain a conceptual reality.
Being an aesthetician myself (an architect) I am prey to the pithy imperative as well. After designing a couple of hundred built domestic dreams, I am emboldened to divine my own conceptual distillation, the “3 C’s of Home Design”, that address the elemental truths so often ignored by architects. In prioritized order, they are:
1. Client
2. Context
3. Conscience
Most people think of architects as amusing oddities, irrelevant in terms of day to day concerns and often absurdly elitist (in the mode of fashion designers). These “3 C’s” are the direct antidote for this pretentious posturing. Although so obvious as to be cliché, these design criteria are often left out of what architects choose to deal with when designing homes. The rest of this article will speak to the nature of each of these “3 C’s” and try to put them into perspective for those who are contemplating using an architect.
1. Client.
Despite the fact that all buildings have them, reality-based clients are never addressed in architecture school. In school, buildings are viewed as objects that respond to a wide range of abstract inputs. Clients are often portrayed as bizarrely eccentric cartoons conveying design criteria that is intended to excite often jaded young minds (“A wealthy patron wishes for you to design a bordello. . .”)
In residential work, the client is the house. Whether the client demands an extreme suppression of an architect’s aesthetic predilections, or whether the client lusts for a designer driven art piece, the homeowners are the denominator of what we do. Not only do they provide all of the functional elements upon which we drape our product, they also provide the funding to build (and occasionally pay us as well). More often than not, clients are viewed by architects as a means to an end, a vehicle for implementing pre-existing notions.
Truth to be known, clients are often mocked by architects in artiste-oriented gatherings. One of my least favorite experiences is being surrounded by a group of black-clad practitioners who simultaneously brag about the scope, breadth, importance and cost of their commissions while bitching and moaning about their clients’ ignorance, pettiness and “bourgeois” sensibilities. If you view a home as simply the largest set of clothing that your clients wear, the intimate trust given over to you as their personal tailor is a true gift.
To a great extent, clients are potentially the greatest wellspring of creativity an architect can have. Because clients are, in fact, human beings, I have never met two who are identical. Although there are definitely degrees of similarity, there are more elements of surprise, delight, and even inspiration in a client’s domestic dreams than with any other area of design input. When architects are blind to their potential for inspiration and arrogantly dismiss heartfelt dreams, it bespeaks a fragile ego.
Truly confident designers are open to outside input. If your core of beliefs are rock solid, then the acceptance of client input merely serves to animate and enliven your existing sensibilities. As long as a client knows what your inherent, immutable design predilections are when they hire you, their input, no matter how strong, merely brings what they want into the realm of your vision.
2. Context.
Context is all those things that are outside of the architect’s and clients’ control. Not unlike client input, the project’s existing surroundings are often willfully eschewed by architects. Rather than accept the nature of a site’s environmental data, cultural heritage, or even basic topographic realities, architects are taught in school that it is often a better idea to stand in contrast to (rather than in concert with) the context within which their project is set. Just as in dealing with the complexities of a client’s predilections, actually dealing with the latent characteristics of a site is a far more difficult job than simply saying “no” to what is offered up.
The reality is that the “no” alternative is one that looks great in two dimensional photographs and is easy to describe in slide lectures and prose. It is much easier for an architect to provide the yin to a yang than it is to create something that actively deals with the context and create something that is definitively new, invigorated, and yet grounded/rooted in the essential wellspring of its creation.
To simply say “no” and create a context ignorant space ship has all of the sexiness of sculpture without “taking care of business”. To be more than sculpture, buildings must shed water and have some commonsense recognition of maintenance and energy use in the “out years”.
Unfortunately, the lens of life’s camera does not focus on one building in poignant isolation. Once a building is built, it is part of a large scale geographic, cultural, and environmental fabric. Although it may stand proud and gain attention is its early stages, the folly of a contextual miscalculation will become hysterically obvious as time wears on (and wears on the building).
3. Conscience
The last of the “3 C’s” deals with the mindset that allows for architects to embrace outside input like clients and context without selling out or running roughshod over the realities of the first 2 “C’s”. The word “conscience” has seldom, if ever, been applied to issues of aesthetics. But in reality, a conscience can be the one abiding denominator by which architects can divine whether an aesthetic option is valid or simply absurd. Whether it is a client’s untenable demand, or the architect’s unwarranted preconceived notion, idiotic efforts at putting a square peg into a round hole can be preempted when an empowered conscience is allowed to hold sway. A conscience can’t be learned, but professional perspective and a knowledge base born of executing a multitude of similar efforts can allow for the sort of enlightened practicality that is often inaccessible for architects obsessed with creating “statement” buildings (whether they’re houses or hospitals).
As said, a conscience can cut two ways. In terms of providing perspective to a ravenous architectural ego, a conscience can be the voice that speaks quietly of budget, weatherability, usefulness, and perhaps just plain old common sense. When ideas become so overreaching that they take a building and turn it into a large-scale toy for the architect’s amusement, the project inherently loses all relevance for its occupants. Similarly, if an architect kowtows to his client’s basest/most predictable wishes, then his or her perspective is useless to them and a strong aesthetic conscience will allow for the assertion that the “highest and best use” of the architect’s services.
Rather than a “guilty conscience”, the last “C”, the architect’s conscience, can best be seen as an ethical alter ego, a perspective which distances itself from the worldly pressures of rampant ego manifestation or fearful pandering to easy answers. By following a path that will let them sleep at night, architects can serve the duality of high art and common sense. In the largest sense, a guilt free conscience results from having done the best job possible without bending to the pressures that have nothing to do with the task at hand, whether those pressures are the arbitrary immortalization of one’s artistic persona or the subordination of the creator’s art to hackneyed, shop worn cliché’s.
The bottom line of the “3 C’s” is this: when ignored, the buildings that result become like the “one liners” this article alludes to. A “sound bite” building, while being easy to communicate in two dimensional terms and easy to design, often begs the questions that are most important to those who will actually use the building.
Humans are lazy. They will almost always take the shortest distance between two points. It is hard to expect that architects would opt for the complexity and ambiguity of the “3 C’s” when the celebrated paradigm of artistic isolation facilitates easy answers. Here’s hoping that the profession of architecture grows to embrace a more adult sensibility of thoughtful acceptance of dissonant input. Our profession’s traditional posture of adolescent pique and infantile self-centeredness has left an undeniable wake of failure and irrelevance no honest practitioner can wish away.
