Architects and Houses
Familiarity/Genius Breeds Contempt
by Duo Dickinson, architect
The house is the only building type that is universally understood and yet has intimately idiosyncratic meaning for everyone in its use group (all of us). Obviously different cultures have different needs, expectations and rituals to be accommodated but more importantly in the late 20th Century America our fractured society has seen unprecedented change in the demographics of housing consumers, and stock plans are less and less likely to meet the needs of single parent households, home offices, multi-generational households, etc., etc.
To date the house has been a highly problematic opportunity for expression by architects. According to National Association of Home Builders and AIA statistics 80% of all architects have worked on single residence design in the last several years and 35% in any given year. In truth every year 55% of all construction dollars are spent on single family residences with fully 67% of all construction dollars being applied to either single family homes or housing in general. However, despite this huge opportunity for expression, architects are woefully inadequate at getting the job of designing new homes. It is often anecdotally cited that architects have designed less than 2% of all houses in America.
Our lack of desirability is definitely reflected in our fees. The same NAHB/AIA statistics show that the smaller the firm gets the more residential works it does, but even the smallest of firms (1-4 people) only have 42% of their gross income coming from residential work. For 4 to 10 person firms billings for single home residences amounts to 25% of their total company’s cash flow and less than 10% of billings for all firms with more than 10 people. With the highest level of construction activity, and 80% of our profession working (at least occasionally) on homes why are we so grotesquely underpaid?
The answer to that question can be applied to the profession of architecture in general. Essentially we view ourselves as being an “essential” profession — like the other licensed trades—lawyers, doctors or engineers. But unlike those professions architects seldom, if ever, deal with life and death issues. Given that we are not needed, (especially to design something as universally understood and familiar as a house) then is there potential reward in simply being desired?
For those who believe in God, their Rabbi, Priest or Shaman has an ongoing presence in their appreciation of the world around them. The problem is that our profession does not train its practitioners in the very qualities of practice that make clergy highly valued for so many (while being unnecessary in practical terms). Doctors, lawyers and engineers have developed their own “terms of art” out of necessity. Technicalities can be translated, but technologies need their own shorthand communication. By being opaque to the layman, these languages create value. Unfortunately the practice of fine arts deals with tools that anyone can understand so artistes create opaque obfuscatory language to simulate exclusionary knowledge. “Fenestation”, “axial linearity”, “transparency”, “parti” and on and on are simply “inside baseball” jargon that precludes our relevance to the housing consumer.
The bottom line for anyone who wishes to be professionally desirable is their relevancy to those who they are seeking to serve. Unfortunately, in the elitist tradition of fine arts style architectural education student architects are taught to remove themselves from the day to day utility they so desire. Because it is necessary to teach design in a vacuum students develop a “black box” design sensibility in order to create a product in blissful isolation. Architects also find it too great a leap to then take this intimate design process and open it up to anyone who might hire you. Thus it could be actually said that “genius” breeds contempt in home design.
Alternately clients can see untold thousands of houses around them, typically live in one every day, and watch houses being built from stock plans as the “norm”. Their intimate knowledge of a home’s typical components and qualities creates a corollary paradigm — “familiarity breeds contempt”. Without direct input from clients, the houses architects’ design often devolve into self-serving sculpture. For a handful of people, their vision of domesticity is living in a designer sculpture. Very few of us could fit into a runway model’s outfit (or afford it) – similarly, very few housing consumers “fit” into a sculpture, so we can either be celebrated oddities (like fashion designers) directly serving a tiny group or we can be usefully relevant professionals for the general population. Those eager to listen to clients are often the least experienced practitioners. Without a good knowledge base, good intentions will seldom design a buildable house, so the all too true stories of petty incompetancies abound, scaring off many open to a designed house.
In this pre-existing contemptuous relationship, there’s little room for the classically “out of it”/communication-challenged designer to step in and become a facilitator of a process that is not thoroughly controlled by the architect. It takes a large ego and a strong sense of personal integrity to follow an uncharted course from beginning to end, having faith that the final result will be something that the designer will be proud of. Unfortunately, most people (let alone architects) lack the strength, vision and purpose that would allow for such faith.
The secret, therefore, is to make the design process understood by those who are now intuitively learning it in architecture schools. Rather than having the “design morphology” approach where a hyper—systematic/pseudo—scientific approach is taken to explain the way things are designed, perhaps it is a good idea to simply encourage young architects to describe verbally or in written form their own design process to non-architects and receive feedback from those non-practitioners. That plus a host of other “consciousness-raising” techniques may create a greater openness in the profession to receive input from the “unenlightened” (our patrons).
Over four million homes for Baby Boomers will be built in the next five years. These will be primary residences, fully optioned and built for peak-earning providers. There is now an unprecedented opportunity for home design to become a more deeply meaningful part of our profession. Traditionally viewed as “work that you can do until real work comes into the office”, residential work is, in fact, a separate, distinct discipline not unlike healthcare design, skyscrapers or prisons. It is perhaps the only building that a single individual can design, draw and see built. It is the most fundamental built form and yet it has been subjected to the most rarified form of elitist esthetic hyperbole perpetrated by architects.
How can such raging cross-purposes be overcome? At my own practice I have built over 250 things simply by being “there”—available, open, engaged and more importantly boringly responsible in terms of listening, following through and having faith that a client’s bad idea will become self-evident if its consequences are fully understood by being “reality-checked” in the design process.
Secondarily architects can become an inevitability in home design by proving that they have tangible, real world worth rather than simply being an esthetic nicety. In truth architects can serve as the homeowner’s informed agents during the act of construction, allowing them to have control over a budget that normally is presented to them as a singular price tag. But to do this, architects need to “get their hands dirty” by aggressively pursuing a working knowledge of how homes are built as well as designed.
For the average housing consumer there is no precedent for the home design/bidding process. More often than not a home is the largest purchase that anyone will make, and the only similar transaction is the purchase of a car. When walking into an automobile showroom there is a base model with a fixed price tag and options can be applied with each of their own individual price tags creating an overall budget that can be superficially trimmed to create desirability. In fact the design process for homes is the inverse. There is no base model, nothing to touch or walk through. The entire end product is derived from an ambiguous process that combines conceptual options. And the final price tag is not known until after the designer and client’s heart is set on a product that inevitably shows the effect of budgetary constraints.
Our profession has a dim prospect if it follows the fashion designer/Artiste path that has been so well trodden over the last 150 years. At present our work in homes will effect perhaps 2% of the population, with more than half of those hiring us having relatively stratospheric levels of wealth.
On the other hand we could follow another path, that of the heroically elitist architect — one that tries to re-invent building systems to show “the truth” for the masses, while evidencing none of the real world utility of Home Depot or “This Old House”. Wright’s Usonian houses, Bucky Fuller’s Geodesic domes and the sand-filled tire fantasies of the southwest have yet to catch on despite a few decades of market testing.
The last failed model of residential designer is that of the unrepentant “hack” that picks up a book, Xeroxes a few pages, does a quick recombinant paste-up then presents it to the client in a way which lacks innovation, ignores opportunities and simply is the shortest distance between two points. In this way the architect mindlessly enacts the rudest primary yearnings of those seeking design help.
In truth all three traditional paths are easy because they have a very limited set of rules. The Artiste listens only to his or her own muse, the Heroic reformer rejects all that has been in favor of what might be, and the Hack simply accepts what has been and spits it back.
In truth successful home design depends on the oxymoronic mindset of grounded innovation. Without a basis in the “real world” of existing technology, budgets, and the ever increasing governmental rules and regulations that constrict the parameters of home design, whatever talent an architect may or may not have will be like that proverbial tree falling in the woods. The future lies in providing a level of buildable innovation that makes our worth tangible, despite its lack of absolute quantifiable measure. It is the challenge of our profession in general and for home design in particular that we take the best aspects of our perspective, born of experience and inspiration and utilize those gifts in ways that have meaning for people — in the form of designs that are built rather than useless good ideas that so often become broken dreams.
