I want to direct the group to read an essay written by Colin Davies, a professor of architecture in the UK. Mr. Davies is the author of "The Prefabricated Home" which is a history of architects failures to influence housing. The story is told in the context of the prefabricated housing industry, but the wider story is architects failure to get the housing market.
This recent essay makes most of the salient points in the book and is informative for any architect that aspires to improve the design of housing in the US in any meaningful way. Its here:
If you find arguments like this compelling, or disturbing, you owe to yourself to read it, get his book and try to come to grips with this:
But before we come to that, we must tackle a bigger problem: that architects are not very good at popular housing in general. Their training ill fits them for the task of providing what people want at a price they can afford. They are brought up to believe that designing buildings involves talking to clients, writing briefs, 'mapping' sites and producing unique solutions of which they are the sole authors. But this set-up is no use for popular housing, which is for customers not clients, which deals in ready made designs not one-offs, and in which designers are anonymous. As a result, popular housing, apart from the small, publicly funded ones, is mostly produced outside architecture. Architects contemptuously call these 'Noddy houses'. They don't bother to look at them and fail to learn from them, which means they have no influence over most people's most intimate experience of building.
Perhaps CRAN - CUSTOM Residential Architecture Network - is the wrong place for such thinking. Perhaps production housing is not your concern. Perhaps. But CRAN to me always appeared to be reactive to CORA, which purported to be about production housing. However I honestly saw little difference in the outlook their than here. This is a message both CORA and CRAN needs to swallow.
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Gregory La Vardera
Architect
Gregory La Vardera Architect
Merchantville NJ
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