From the granite knee of life experience down all the years
More words of wisdom from Before The Architect
Wise words that keep on giving
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Serve and satisfy. That's the outcome of design. Serve a function. Satisfy a sense. The better the design, the better it serves and satisfies.
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Form follows function, the dark side: fundamentally, it’s about people spending major money more or less blindly. People know less, so they expect less and get it. Builders build what buyers buy. Buyers buy down and don’t know it for the gussied-up look and price. Generations learned to be more selfish and irresponsible, to demand instant satisfaction. House design and construction are not spectator sports.
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Do it right beats make it right. Every time.
Note that this quote is the baked down version of this one - - -
Oh yeh. Oh yeh. Don't you know that it is a far better thing to doeth it right sooner even if it means a piece out of your own hide, because to maketh it right later can mean an even bigger piece out of your own hide. Thus spaketh this house designer from the granite knee of been there, done that.
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Really competent people easily share their competence, though they may not have the time in their lives to share it all or say it twice. So listen hard.
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You know what I hear as the most frequent complaint of folks who've worked with architects? Clients say they identify something or other that they want or need in a design – step-down living room, open staircase, butler's pantry, less wasted space in the garage, Craftsman style exterior but without the low-pitched dormer, bigger pantry, a wall moved a few inches this way or that, room to iron clothing, one passageway for all arriving guests and visitors and family and friends, etc. – and their architect tells them, "You don't want that." Now, that's not entertainment. That's intellectual abuse at its lowest moment.
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Things architectural have two parents: construction and art. Construction serves. Art satisfies.
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You've heard of the walking wounded? Sure, everybody has. Well, I've met their close relatives - the walking witless. Who are the walking witless? Alice, so glad you asked.
Take this fellow, please, who a) is generations deep in builders with dad and bro still hard at it; b) works as a real estate broker; c) enters stage left with a foregone conclusion on what working with us will cost; d) reckons his bro could do up this middling addition with a few words of encouragement; e) grinds through 6 - count them - 6 drafts of a floor plan; f) reckons in spite of that track record that he doesn't need more than floor and roof framing plans to get it all going and gone through; g) figures he'll just waive his arms to clue in bro on how the roofline will work to chop off the bucks out of pocket when he's certain he's spent enough wherever that's gotten him to the moment he decided that he has spent enough; h) exits stage right acting as though he's been screwed.
Well, your Honor, he's right. We're guilty, as charged. This victim's been screwed out of his egocentric fantasy. That is, unless bro could have spared the time and our client the cash to build up and tear down five additions before the guys got it right on the sixth shot. And unless bro's electrician and plumbing subs are already on pensions. And unless they could get the rooflines just right adding on to a pristine style for the existing. And unless the local authorities having jurisdiction will pass a two-story, 2000 square feet of addition without elevations and a wad of other plans. And unless they're keen on new acquaintances – you know – debt collection agents, credit reporting bureaus, and lawyers.
Now that's entertainment. Alice, that's the walking witless.
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If you can't think easily and every which way in three dimensions, swear off roof design. You'd better lay off cornice work, too. Come to think of it, plumbing isometrics won't be your friends, either.
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We like to ask for a representative set of plans from the area in which we design and draft a house. What we're after are local conventions reflecting drafting style or issues of importance immediate to the locale. You can learn a lot by quietly studying others' plans.
Our work up-coming was to start designing a new house near Austin. Sure enough, we got a set of plans for a house put up nearby where we'd be working. It had a goodly number of sheets, and the paper was bigger than notepad scrap. Those were the plan's virtues. That's it.
On a close look, these plans looked like work done by lunchtime on day two of a twelve-day draw. No codes, no legends, no welter of dimension. Based on these sheets, it wasn't clear to us just how this house would turn out. No telling, really.
Our client said the house built was pretty. We told him that pretty was for architects and real estate brokers. Who knows what's under the 15-year roofing, the lumpy sheetrock, or the cheap carpeting. Based on the plans to build that pretty house, there's no telling. Really.
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The lowest bid may not be the best bid. It's just the cheapest. In other words, you get less for less.
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This designer sees a lot of Christopher Alexander in Sarah Susanka (start with the "Creating The Not So Big House" and having gone no further you miss not much new besides the pics); however, Susanka mellows Alexander nicely by taking one giant, practical step away from his proclamations. Her focus is small houses, small living spaces. She refers to Alexander a lot. Just not all of Alexander, thankfully.
Jim Tolpin - metaphorically - puts meat on Susanka's bones, and is happily yet another step again away from Alexander's strictures. Tolpin's pretty pragmatic. While small houses take his interest, so do big ones. Principles of behavior are, after all, principles of behavior without regard to the size of the physical framework in which you find them. You may find Tolpin's "The New Family Home" more accessible and applicable to your own residence-to-be than the others [Alexander's and Susanka's]; however, to go through the first two in the order presented will responsibly set your stage for Tolpin's relevance not only to your life experience but also to the architectural vernacular embedded in both Susanka's and, more particularly, Tolpin's.
Lots of pretty pictures. Instructive, too. Again, particularly in Jim Tolpin's.
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My advice to folks designing and drafting on their own? Keep it simple and keep it up. What's really important to you ought to be in your drawings. Wherever you start, you won't end anywhere nearby. Work it and rest it and work and rest.
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Designing and drafting well is complex, most particularly when you have the mind to build responsibly at the same time albeit now vicariously. Nobody perfect draws breath, but if you want the fast track to screwing up the whole thing for a very long time, then hurry up.
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Designing, building, remodeling, repairing for so long is a two-fer to this day.
Used to be we could design on the fly all day long as we worked our way through a project. Wasn't as though we came to the site stupid; then as now we'd talk shop wherever we went throughout each day until bedtime brought us sleep. In those decades, the site was there right before us, tools and materials at hand. Time to build, the design of it whirling around us as we worked. Driving us along.
Now, we live inside the design whirl. We're driving. It's the tools and materials and the site that are conjured as our lines and notes layout on the screen and sheet one by one. And as I draw, I'll still hold that top plate to its corner lap before I rap that 10-penny; I'll still stare to find the cable's imprint for the wire gauge even while I'm not so idly pushing on the insulated conductor to test its bend to my sense of size; I'll still recheck the screed board for pitch no matter what my eyes tell me; I'll still wonder why there are so many big plumbers when there are so many small spaces for them while I struggle to get my girth around the backside of a water heater to measure for a length of blow-off pipe. Mud still sucks my shoes as I take a corner to get a better view of the East wall. There's the smooth wet air hanging over a fresh placement, the varnish cracking to my tread, the feel of a finely joined newel. Sometimes, these imaginings and I get mighty close in a long day's draw.
What's new? No more cuts and punctures, no more stitches; no more bruises, no more really close calls. No waiting lifetimes waiting for drop-shipped goods. No digging deep to set those last ten tiles or take down a rafter for a bad bird's mouth. Once lived, now imagined.
What's not new? Nothing. Every day, it's a feast of adventure.
Same table, different chair.
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Be assured that there are plenty more materials with which to build than you've got the bucks with which to buy them. It's mighty hard to stare down reality when you're sketching and dreaming on your own. Beware: those sugar plums can turn bitter when the bids start coming in. Our society makes it so easy to mix need and want into the same pot.
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In a larger sense, Christopher's [Alexander's] pronouncements can be framed with others. Let's see - straw bale builders, Susanka's, Tolpin's (et al.) smaller house designing, Arcosanti's arcology, various applications of concrete to construction, geodesic domes, water-borne cities, etc. The collective aim of these developers can be summarized as cheaper, easier, faster design and construction of habitable dwellings. These efforts are altogether laudable and uncommonly wise, however individually misguided or myopic. They're all onto something good, each holding a handful of hairs of the elephant's hide. While it's satisfyingly smug of me to pot this heady brew, I've no idea what will become of the tasting. In that sense, I am less well off than they.
To me, it's as though I'm near harbor in the fog, can hear the lighthouse horn, but cannot see the beacon's glow. There must be significantly better materials, means, and methods to make up a person's residence than those items at mind and hand before us today. I stop briefly to contemplate the hundreds of architectural styles and types and structures itemized on my website's Overview pages. Much of that is humanity's self-expression. But I think not all that energy is spent in self-reflection. Some elements of design and construction are demonstrably better than others. Each one of those in my frame of developers picks at bits - size, cost, light, adaptability, layout, construct, safety, and so forth.
None of these portends let alone proffers a paradigm shift. You know, bigger than Wal-Mart, smaller than human hygiene. So I haven't a clue where this gets us; all that about which I am confident is we're going somewhere probably to our better, and I'm glad of it.
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There are few things in my life more pathetic than bearing witness to someone acting superior, as though I am beneath him, because I have a problem and have come for an answer. One thing more pathetic is when the answer is miserably wrong and the bill for it is humongously large. Failing well is not without its own honor.
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Buyer beware. Buyer be wise. Or buyer be sorry for leaving it all up to someone else.
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From a strategic vantage, my aims for "House Construction Design Standards" run along these lines -
For individual owners and buyers, the meaning and purpose of this work are to provide an opportunity to become familiar with significant aspects of residential design and construction and offer materials and methods which in my opinion are superior to conventional standards
For designers, builders, and other contractors, the meaning and purpose of this work are to provide practical options for residential property development, improvement, and repair which are a) defined and described in their builders' language; b) written for good and practiced reasons; c) above regulated, basic norms for bare necessities of safety from catastrophic hazard.
For all, a mutual assurance, especially between client and contractor that each understands what the client more knowledgeably than most has chosen and expects and what the contractor more clearly understands will be built.
That's what I'm after.
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Building to views is building well. Most other building considerations can be granted their due compensation in broader perspective, thoughtful design, and restructure.
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Architectural design and drafting are akin to working atop a three-legged stool. Each leg has strengths and weaknesses. One leg of the stool is the client’s interests, understanding, motivations, wants and needs – all of which are tempered by disinterest in matters of design, by ignorance of construction means, methods, and materials, and by values that grossly overweight the importance of a curtain to the wall on which it hangs and to the window it drapes. One leg of the stool is the designer’s and draftsman’s vantage to forestop construction shortcuts and code shortfalls while permitting the field application to proceed at reasonable discretion of the contractors and clients. One leg of the stool is the designer and draftsman’s own standards of consideration, presentation, and completeness burdened with limits of both skill and software.
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How? Yes, how do people communicate about building? The builders' language is the language of building materials, dimensions, levels, angles, views, elevations, schematics, and details, legends, symbols, and keys. This is not chicken-and-egg time; the builders' language rules.
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It's an exciting adventure to us. It's just another deadline to them. Exceptions are just that. It's human to objectify; however, may I not become disconnected from my work. I'll take vulnerable any day over vapid, vacuous, and vainglory. Saying "Talking heads" is aiming way too high up on the anatomy.
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Never send a .dwg file to a client. Never, never, never. It's like a fox's key to the chicken coop. A commercial builder in Chicago taught me that one. That was a $2606.25 lesson.
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A building inspector is a government employee whom you might rightly reckon as an adversary, but never, never, never as an enemy. This is so, grasshopper, because in the former instance you should be able either to withstand the challenges or to learn something new from them, and in the latter instance only you will suffer.
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Whose house is this, anyway? Well, for the time-being it's ours — yours and mine. You can have it back free and clear when our work together is done.
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Ah! Sweet mystery of life. These are the days of the self-absorbed, the instantly gratified, the here and now. I call it "Generations Me". You know, "It is because I am." Philosophically, it's an argument. Psychologically, egocentricity works. Physically, they've got a point. When it comes to my neck of the woods, they've got diddly.
Limits madden the Me crowd. Limits poison their ponds. For example, the limits to architectural design and drafting chill ardent expectation of the here and the now. Makes 'em itch where they can't scratch. "Can't take that long." "Can't be that tough." "Can't cost that much." Elementally, "It can't, because I can't."
Just add water. I swear that sometimes that's the sense of it I get. "Here's what I want, just add water." Say, it's a horse named Just Add Water that pulls the house stock plans cart. They ask for a house, and it shall be given to them here and now.
Would that it were never thus: kids grow up as fast as dogs; interpersonal, lifetime commitments fade; you don't have to have done it, just say you did; we remember only our successes; all come together gathering sticks and stones to build their homes, and let the houses build themselves; there are no mirrors; all the traffic lights are green and highways straight and golden as the road to Hell.
What a wonderful world it would not be.
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[Design and construction] standards have diminished; that is, both standards expected and standards delivered. Buyers focus on five-peak façades and not what’s holding them up, the drapes and not the wall on which they’ll hang. Designers and builders echo that superficiality. Minimum safety standards, a/k/a building codes, are goals to achieve, not grades to surpass. As for added safety, durability, convenience — forget about it.
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I pass by a house now and then – an old house, here and there – with floors way off level even viewed from a goodly distance. Maybe the place was built that way or gave it up a little at a time. Folks live in that house, and probably have for years, maybe generations. The house stands at odds with its norm, but not with the people who tread those boards. They stay put. Resident princesses may grouse about the errant pea, but I'll bet there's nary a word uttered about that floor. It's the way things really are. It's home. The paradox: it isn't quite right, but it's the way it should be. The human condition is as variant as human adaptations to it. We may be all alike, but not exactly.
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Before The Architect designs and drafts custom home plans nationwide. Its principals Ralph and Jean Pressel have worked hands-on together since the ‘60s in custom home design, drafting, consulting, plus building and repair in every major trade.Their plan sets are extraordinarily detailed; their clients' active involvement throughout is essential.
Home Design Standards - Home Building Standards 4Q08 Edition e-book at 823 pages and the website www.beforethearchitect.com at nearly 1000 pages of text and illustrations are enterprises of Before The Architect’s principals.
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