How would I characterize the house designing and house building business today?
These are not the good old days, mortgages aside. People can search hard, travel far for good design and construction, find less, and pay more. Do it yourself or get it done to you. It's been heading that way for a while, going on a large part of a century.
The craft of house design and house construction is in declining health, in my opinion —
- House design: See the house designer mangle an architectural style; layout the dining area half its convenient size; draw the inconvenient, even unsafe kitchen; present elevations without scheduled windows; override dimensions so elements seem to fit; not define the sites of slab-on-grade plumbing fixtures; omit lighting metrics; bloat a dormer; and so forth. “Classical Order?" “No, we’re Country, you know, Willie, Merle, and Emmylou."
- House construction. Smart and impassioned and skilled craftsmen are scarcer and scarcer, older and older on jobsites. Open web, metal plate-connected trusses and the like, prehung and cased poofy doors, faux stone, speedbase, etc. have become bigtime, because trade masters are harder and harder come-by. Fewer and fewer. Who knows how to build a fireplace from scratch? Artfully combine two Traditional architectural styles? There’s the work crew about to place a footing over loose soil, frame without a level, unable to a man to work with fractions other than one-half, consistently miswire 3-way switches. “Fast roof?" “Only with more men."
Finally, most buyers – consumers – of houses, additions, remodeling haven’t a clue about home design and home building at all, let alone doing it better. Residential consumers, in the majority, like what they know and that’s not much to like. Same goes for a lot of house designers.
Why these changes?
Form follows function: crucially, it’s about people spending major money more or less blindly, in appreciation of the achievement, proving to this author once again that price is a psychological phenomenon. People know little-to-nothing about house design and house construction, so their expectation slips to less over time and they get less over time – around and around. Designers design and builders build what buyers buy. Generations of Me-Me-Me buyers learned to be more selfish and less responsible, to demand instant satisfaction. So to speak, “Here’s a stock house plan, just add water." "Here's a farm field, just reverse the same house 20 times or 200 or whatever."
Isn’t this view one-sided?
Yes, there are always other sides to my stories.
Generations Me fostered some good. Take, for example, Cyberville. Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Hotmail, online trading, cell phones — all are about cheaper, easier, faster communication — benefits to means and ends. But in house plans and home building, means are better some to none, ends are none to worse. No, not everywhere, just way more than I’d like to have witnessed. That’s because 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 chandelier and not the wiring, the sink and not the drain. Designers and builders easily, naturally echo their markets’ superficiality, ignorance, and inattention.
Aren’t buyers protected?
You know, there are rules and regulations. Right? We have a saying about folks who gather round when you build a house or add on, “It's your dream home; it's their business deal."
Now first off, I absolutely must say that there surely are excellent house brokers, house builders, house inspectors, and others involved in house constructing and remodeling houses. Even I have met a few. And second off, I absolutely must say again that the marketplace for services and goods doesn’t just happen – it’s organized, it’s demanded and supplied, it’s formed and shaped by the players. Buyers demand, sellers supply in the natural tensions of the marketplace.
Of whom little is demanded, little is expected. And little is delivered.
Let’s see more particularly about house brokers, house designers, house builders, house building codes, house building inspectors, and the law – the major players – and allow for the exceptions. These are all my opinions learned at the granite knee of experience –
- House brokers sell you what you want to buy; you’ve got to know what that is you want to buy; and most buyers know diddly about important matters of house design and house construction. God didn’t make brokers to teach; God made house brokers to sell.
- House designers draw what sells, mostly stock house plans; see the pretty pictures and detail-starved house plan sets; look at all their stylistically incorrect, unartful, and otherwise not always too bright house designs by the books full.
- House builders build you what you or your surrogates specify; however, if that specifying doesn’t get done, then you get what they give. What do buyers know about specifying? More diddly.
- House building codes are minimum safety standards. Minimum standards – there’s little or nothing to them about durability, convenience, more than minimum safety, better materials and means, and methods, architectural style.
- House building inspectors – independents aside – are government workers whose pronouncements are without implied warranties of fitness – no guarantees that they get it right. They screw it up, they walk, and you pay.
- My house design and house building experience with courts and real estate lawyers is that they break hearts and pick pockets, respectively.
Of whom little is demanded, little is expected. And little is delivered.
Building better and best is primarily on the buyer. Buyer beware. Buyer be wise. Or it’ll be buyer be sorry for leaving it all up to someone else.
What’s going to change things from your view of residential design and house construction?
Nothing lasts forever.
On the big screen, long-term view it’ll be cheaper, easier, faster house design and house construction that benefit both means and ends. Sea changes. Paradigm shifts. You know, bigger than Wal-Mart, smaller than antibiotics. We see probes into our future all around us - geodesic domes and biospheres, various applications with concrete, water-borne cities like Norman Nixon's Freedom Ship, the smaller houses of Sarah Susanka, Jim Tolpin et al., Paolo Soleri’s arcology and the Cosanti Foundation’s Arcosanti, Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language. They’re worthy probes and prospects, but they’re not roadmaps into our future. You need to stir in –
- Independent, even individualized means of total-use energy production
- Cultural insistence on and acceptance of more efficiently designed, more attractive, smaller-sized, affordable house structures
- Less economic dependence on big cities as we know them
For starters, that ought to do it. Since this is my wish list, let me add –
- High-speed, wireless computer technology simple and seamless both in software and hardware acquisition, adaptation, and application
Well, whose list is this, anyway?
On the small screen, near-term view, change if at all noticeable will come from social and economic elements already in play like a cat stalking – slowly, patiently, and probably just as messy in its intermittent outcomes.
- Folks buying and building smaller — for me, a given from US demography
- People propelled by accumulated wealth and accumulated experience to demand better and best whatever the magnitude of the residential enterprise
- Fewer house design and house construction craftsmen to deliver better and best, thereby assuring their premium, possibly, their repopulation
- Marketplace economics of house design, house construction, and house ownership that penalize poor materials and methods while rewarding demonstrably better ways and means to design and draw and build. In the latter instance, disconnects between supply of both knowledge and goods and of their demand are commonplace, notwithstanding important, intermittent flashes of connection, e.g., Texas Department of Insurance work on wind resistant construction and the residential Wood Construction and Engineering achievements at Virginia Tech, and certain manufacturers across the gamut of building materials
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