Gregory, you are quite right in sharing this article. It is timely to me in particular as a facebook friend of mine from Australia just posted a question asking if anyone knew of any free interior design websites. After a good deal of google searches, I had a lot of difficulty providing her with good resources. And the conversation thread on her fb wall turned to more structural and renovation concerns. I offered that most architects should be able to help you with that...but upon visiting the
www.aia.org site, there simply isn't anything that would be of help to a homeowner who wants to make design changes to their home.
I agree with the part of the article you shared below. It's ironic to me that when I decided back in late elementary school that I wanted to be an architect after drawing exterior elevations and home plans and playing office (which was really more like today's design/build practices), little did I know that a formal education in architecture would be detrimental to my innate talent as a home designer.
Thanks for sharing this artice. I will read it in its entirety later.
Regards,
Tara
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Tara Imani AIA
Principal
Tara Imani Designs, LLC
Houston TX
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Original Message:
Sent: 02-05-2011 10:40
From: Gregory La Vardera
Subject: What is it with architects and housing?
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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