The CIVITAS Chronicles

Pretty cool post. I just stumbled upon your blog and wanted to say
that I have really enjoyed reading your posts. Any way
I’ll be subscribing to your feed and I hope you write again soon!

Being an owner of a 109 year old house, I find this site a great resource.

I wanted to share an international competition with you that your readers may be interested in as it’s brick related.

“Brick-stainable: Re-Thinking Brick - a design competition seeking integrative solutions for a building using clay masonry units (brick) as a primary material.” (please pass this on, tell them ripe.com sent ya)

http://brick-stainable.com/

It seems so many architects are no more than a product of their schooling. They are psychologically captured by these boxy angular designs. Most people, I think, would rather live in a tent than to be housed in one of these tin cans. These styles are cold and heartless and lack any soul. They are really more suitable for conference tables, office furniture and office equipment.

I agree with Kim. To go further:
My experience with architectural schools is that they don’t make the necessary face time available between traditionalist instructors and students. It is easier to obtain results when teaching rationalism and minimalism with no reference to historic style or contextualism. Residential designers, especially, need to be exposed to the feelings that forms, spaces and combinations of materials have on Everyman. This should be psychology 101 for such aspiring designers.

The real problem with designs like the “Binary House” is that they do not acknowledge the natural world in which they are to exist. The design of traditional houses evolved over many centuries in response to rain and wind and heat and cold. Pitched roofs and overhangs protect the facades from rain and snow; mullioned windows resist wind load and provide operable sash; and traditional materials and joinery accommodate the inevitable building movements caused by temperature and humidity.

The slick, sleek Binary House looks like a chipboard model, devoid of any material considerations or appropriateness to place. When these things get built, they face accelerated deterioration because the materials and detailing do not draw from a long history of successful use, but from the designer’s abstract desire to create a particular form.

Clem,

If somebody would get this message to you, I would love to get back in touch. Debe and I have talked about you for a number of years and are sorry we have lost contact with you and Claire.

Ted

Clem - You’re right on the mark. I was trained in a Modernist philosophy, like most architects these days. We get heavily indoctrinated in the mantra that anything traditional must be rejected and modern is the only proper architectural language. I agree with Bob’s comment that this kind of thinking ignores the lessons learned over the years about how to deal with rain, sun, wind, etc. But more importantly, strict modernism ignores the psychological lessons that are a part of our culture and grown within the human experience. It is pure vanity on the part of architects to say that all that has come before was wrong and only we, the modern architects, can create the forms that properly respond to mankind.

I think that this kind of attitude hinders our profession and is a disservice to the public. I wrote my book, Designing Your Perfect House precisely to empower homeowners and clients to help them understand why they feel the way they do about their houses and help them understand that they can ask for more than what’s on the archtitect’s menu. The solution to the blight in house design is not simply convincing the architects to do better, but to help the public feel more confident to demand better.

Part of the problem is the amount of residential construction done without architects. I recently moved to the Rochester/Finger Lakes area of New York and see mile after mile of cookie cutter housing developments; all by developers working frojm their stock plan books, waiting to the last minute to sell so that a buyer (and user) has little to say other than interior colors (if that). There is little attention to susatinability and green design (other than a better grade of window than used in the past, but not necessarily the best) and a higher efficiency furnace or boiler. But they are still huge monstrosities with no soul.

Sarah Susannka has hit the nail on the head with her “Not So Big House”series, and Tedd Benson with his blog “House Rules” - ‘the way we have built homes for 100 years is no longer sustainable.

Unfortunately we, the consumer, often have little choice, it’s the only option when developers have bought up the large tracts of land and sub-divided to obtain the maximum number of lots (read - profit). Co-housing is one option, where a group of end-users become the developers.

First, let me say that I really appreciate Traditional Building magazine, and I am personally involved in historic preservation. I sit on our local Historic Commission, and I’m a member of the board of the county Preservation Society. So, I’m into old buildings. Most of the buildings I work on as an architect are either old buildings or new buildings in traditional styles. All of that said, this supposed argument between traditional and modern or contemporary design is completely wrong-headed. (Though, ironically, it was early 20th Century modernists who started it by demonizing historical precedent and historicist architecture.)

A lot of modern/contemporary architecture is garbage, but so is a whole lot of “traditional” architecture. Most of what passes for traditional nowadays is incredibly thin (literally and figuratively) stuff, poorly detailed and poorly constructed. Unfortunately, most people don’t pay enough attention to the things that make good old buildings so good, and so are willing to accept the cartoonish replicas that we see so often. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve lovingly drawn a historical architectural detail, only to see the built result come nowhere near what the drawings show. And in my experience, that sort of error almost never gets corrected, either because the builder no longer has the necessary skill or sensibility, because the owner doesn’t see the difference, or both. A big part of the problem there is that real traditional buildings grew from a vanished building climate in which materials, techniques, and expectations were all vastly different from today’s.

Although I love old buildings, I can fully appreciate the modernist notion that to build really well we should learn to integrate the materials and methods of our time. I would love to design a highly articulated masonry building with razor-thin mortar joints and beautifully joined stone, but there’s nobody around here who could build it. It’s like the criticism that Mr. Labine levels at the MAXXI building in his most recent post: because of the loss of skilled craft, most of the best of traditional building, at least where I live, is now unbuildable.

So, we need to get over this false dichotomy. Fine, the modernists started the argument, but those guys came of age in a totalitarian time, and like all well-intentioned ideologues, they wound up missing their own point. Technology can be helpful, and materials can and should inform the way we build. That doesn’t mean everything has to be a cube. Nobody who doesn’t like ‘em needs to fear that America’s neighborhoods will soon be full of Homettas. But some people, including me, also appreciate modern architecture, so cut folks some stylistic slack. And given the load of monotonous trash that passes for “traditional” in most new developments in this country, we should all be hopeful that architects and builders can find a new way of building that can incorporate the best of the old and the new.

I prefer to live in a clean machine-styled house than all the fake cottage, fake mediterranean houses here in California. Most of the fastest machines
like car, plane and boat are hand built
too,just like a machine inspired house.