With all our grand thoughts along comes a contractor who tosses out those ever enduring words, "We could Value Engineer this project and reduce the cost of your project by 20 %." Then were stuck, because our fees don't allow us to make a comeback and say if you want to Value Engineer the project let us take a closer look at the project and see if we can do better. Maybe we need to add a dollar amount to all contracts which is for Value Engineering once the project is designed and priced. So that we are able to afford to fight the fight over quality decissions instood of inferior products being proposed by a contractor, and really make them work with you to obtain the best home possible for the home owner.
Before I start marinating my short pants, you said this:
"i think what your describing as a change of state, im calling the point at which a population adjusts back to what its context can support."
The key term being "to what its context can support." Isn't that the DEFINITION of sustainability?
Let's take the rabbit scenario. When The predator population decreases, this allows the rabbit population to swell. When there's not enough food for the rabbits in that one spot, they either have to move, OR, more likely, they start dying. In the grand scheme of things, that's sustainable. Maybe the immediate environment can't support infinite growth, but eventually the population gets adjusted by starvation, predation, and the natural cycle of life and death.
In other words, this cycle has been going on since time immemorial, and if we as humans left the planet, it would be just fine without us.
We, on the other hand, have so far NOT been killed off in large enough quantities to make a difference - we keep growing and growing and growing. It's not sustainable. Maybe it's just a matter of time scale, I don't know. For rabbits, maybe the cycle is once a year. For us humans, maybe it's every few hundred thousand years?
I'm sure we're talking about different sides of the same coin, but the point I was trying to make is that energy cycles 'in nature' are never wasteful.
The cherry falls from the tree, which feeds a bird, which shits on the ground, which feeds the tree, which grows cherries, which fall on the ground........
Human activity doesn't seem to fit that pattern. At least not in my lifetime.
were on the same page no worries slant six... the whole point was that it is the nature of all species to grow until their habitat can no longer support growth.
we grow like that ceiling will never be reached, which is not in fact true. that ceiling will eventually be reached, and it has been reached before.
european plague, late 1800's early 1900's influenza, ice ages etc. though we over the past 100 years have figured out how to minimize all the limiting factors that used to slow our growth (disease, suitable habitat, food availability), there must be other limiting factors that will eventually slow the growth or cause a sharp decline as is seen in almost all other populations when their ceiling is reached.
whether we have the foresight to make that correction less cataclysmic is what this subject is a part of, granted, a small part.
"The problem with suburban sprawl isn't solely its lack of density. It is the fact that it consumes ravenous amounts of greenfield, of which a large percentage is paved for large amounts of roads that end up chaining the residents, not freeing them."
Captain X, I think this is an important observation. I would add that it is also a problem that the home is treated as a commodity, a marketed/branded product created by an industrialized process. A home is very expensive and really important in peoples lives. It also consumes a vast amount of resources. It desreves to be created with a more appropriate degree of sensitivity and thoughtfulness (whatever the style and cost).
Postal and Snooker, your frustration about the Contractor value engineering things is very valid. That is the main reason we expanded our practice to became a general contractor.
In single family residential work in particular, the architect has a very ambiguous role during construction. The industry is set up with the builder in charge and in direct contact with the client. Drawings are only a suggestion and anything the contractor doesn't want to do mysteriously becomes "too expensive".
We got so sick of listening to this that we decided to take matters into our own hands. After ten years, I would never go back. We are in control of the building process and if there is something we really don't like we can change it ourselves and absorb the cost (we don't do this very often).
I know that this is a process that is tailored to small projects but I don't think that that nullifies its applicability. The construction of small scale projects accounts for about 65% of the entire construction expenditure each year (I am remembering the stats without looking them up again so they may be a bit off). That is an enormous amount of work that we, as a profession, are almost totally uninvolved in. My concern is that the schools train graduates to be starchitects and we tend to ignore or dismiss the other 95% of the built environment and leave it for builders and developers.
Anyways, I seem to have drifted off the topic of slow home, density and suburbia and into professional practice. I will now get off my soap box.
This is a great thread! Thanks John Brown, for engaging in the discussion.
I think I'm basically caught up now, and I appreciate most of what's been said, but I think the point that I'm really interested in lies in this comment:
What I am interested in is bringing some design literacy to the public in a somewhat entertaining way so that more people can at least start to look at their surroundings more clearly. I don't have a problem with someone deciding, in a more informed way, that they like doric columns. I do mind them having them just because some slick marketing brochure sold them on them as an "idea of home". For me that is too shallow and disrespectful to the person living there. Homes are too important and too expensive to be sold as a marketing proxy.
I think the 10 principles of the "Slow Home" movement are ones that we, as designers, can more or less get behind. I think it's the education of our clients that's difficult for us to wrap our minds around. They don't really cover that in college, do they? "Oh and by the way, 90% of the people you are going to design for have little to no concept of what a well designed home should be". I think that I was even a little perplexed as to what sort of value could be had in creating a *movement* like this until I realized that it would be most helpful to the people that we design for. To get them even thinking about these things before they rush to buy their cookie-cutter homes is a step in the right direction.
lletdown, you hit the nail on the head. We've never dealt with these problems on such a large scale before, and that means new challenges that'll have to be dealt with if we want to keep our quality of life anything near decent for the coming generations.
I don't want this to get too off-topic, I'm sorry.
Topical discussion: I live downtown in my city of 600,000, in a small 130-year-old house, surrounded by similar but slightly newer houses (most date back to about 1900). When I was born, my house was turning about 100 years old! I like to imagine what's happened in this house - people dying, giving birth, moments of love and hate and everything else. A whole lot of it, considering the age of the place. I mean, imagine how many renovations this place has undergone! There's even one scheduled for this fall, after I move.
Anyway.
A few years ago, I lived in a high-rise. The place was about 30 years old, and crumbling. When I was there for about 8 months, crews were working on replacing the deteriorating concrete balconies. There were mushrooms literally growing in the halls.
If that's what density looks like, no wonder people don't want a part of it! I think it's important that if we decide that "material honesty" is a goal to be pursued, that we also invest in good materials that will last a long time. Concrete is not one of these materials, which happens to be a material that many architects boast of 'exploiting' in their forms.
While I'm on the topic of concrete, I will mention that there are many dolostone quarries within a 20 minute drive of my house. As we speak, a multinational company is trying to expand their existing quarry on a site that has been deemed not only "provincially significant" by our government, but is also supposedly a protected biosphere reserve, as determined by the United Nations.
If the the quarry is allowed to expand, it means ruin for its neighbours - water quality and supply are destroyed, vibrations causing headaches, endangered species (including the butternut tree) being cleared completely. It's ridiculous.
It's to make roads and buildings. I suddenly don't feel so great about perpetuating this wasteful system. So, 'modern architects,' please think hard before designing your next concrete bunker!
ditto wonderk.....and i would like to add, the point of anything like this is not just to get clients educated in the value of these decisions but also politicians and other influential people. the interesting thing about the slow food movement that i think we as architects can learn from is that it not only became a point of reference for chefs and patrons of restaurants, but also for politicians, for labor negotiations, for trade discussions, etc. i have to congratulate mr. brown....the concept of creating this type of baseline for the discussions is very important and missing in most discussions within the profession. I have my own issues with some of the 10 points, but the baseline concept is pretty easy to see the value in...question that which people tend not to question...then give them a framework for understanding the larger context of that question. that is the role of education, it's not necessarily going to make everyone think like you or act as you would like them to act, but at least be a bit more knowledgable in the concepts that will be key to their making a good decision for their belief framework.
to go back to an earlier allusion in my post (and i seem to say this a bit too often and might be accused of being a broken record) but the value of our profession and the ideals of sustainability will inevitably be most informed by the legal statutes that constrain growth and the tax benefits or penalties that are paid for particular decisions. in this vein i have my greatest hope for the successes of a discussion such as this....not to sway the person choosing to buy a house (although that is a very noble and worthwhile goal) but also the lawmakers, the politicians, the economists, etc. that quanitify the value of our actions or assign benefit or penalty to those actions. a friend told me that in a recent lecture a developer stated that a brand name starchitect can add 30% to the end sales of a development and a decent designer/architect can add between 12 and 15%. that is quite a bit of information that seems not to be discussed or understood by our very own profession. we do have value and we do have arguments to counter the contractors but they are more difficult to quantify and will require a change in the manner in which we think about what we do and how we believe our business unfolds.............
i watched a fascinating documentary on p.o.v. last night about gentrification in an east columbus ohio neighborhood. a very frank film about the tensions between urban homesteader gentrifiers and the folks who had lived there for decades. the role of historic boards and zoning played a huge part in the film as the longtime residents saw those comissions as prejudicial against them. also, there was tension because most of the gentrifiers(at least the people feature in the film) were gay.
one guy who had lived in the hood since the sixties was in court because someone had complained about a sign that hung on his porch. it was a sign with his name and address but was afro centric etc. the guy had been made a chief while on a visit to nigeria. (he was also a sculptor) he showed up in court decked out in tribal chief threads. the judge asked him if he knew he lived in a historic district. the chief answered, "judge when i moved here in the late 60's, the television news proclaimed this area the ghetto."
they also tracked the decline of a woman who vehemently refused to sell her house or to repair its decay. she was a black miss haversham. in the end of the film she dies and the film is dedicated to her. i thought she was about sixty or so. turns out she was four years younger than me. the final scene is of the gay realtor/developer going through the house.
right on futureboy, and it goes beyond money... the thing is we've been written out of all the "your first home for dummies" (though I haven't verified, it just seems like an entire lack of awareness by the general public that architects even exist or are a valid option)
so isn't this an idea that should be championed by AIA or what have you... though i appreciate the grass roots approach much much more...
these values that we talk about, reasons why we live, breath, draft, once brought to the attention of everyone, should carry over into all parts of the industry...
once people become cognizant of architecture in everyday life, they can't help but carry it over into their work...
just because you can get financing to buy a tract house in whispering meadows doesnt mean you can get a construction loan to build an architect designed home from scratch.
Without getting bogged down in a lengthy discussion about history and the changes in the profession, doesn't this show a change in the goals, at least at some levels, of architects? Though we might argue about their actual level of success, most of the original "Modern Masters" worked, in theory or actual built work, on the ideas of construction for the average person, from Wright's Usonian Houses to Le Corbusier's ideas for reshaping the city (which, yes, contributed to the mess in which we find ourselves today).
There are many hardworking architects who devote their whole careers to helping individuals and families find good, sustainable, wholesome housing. Yet, as pointed out by others, there are probably thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of average Americans (and or course citizens of other countries) who either don't understand what an architect can do for them, or simply assume that a custom-designed and built home is far outside of their reach. Most starchitects seem more interested in designing the next skyscraper or multi-billion dollar art museum than solving the problems of the rank and file worker who just wants a decent home for his family. Those glossy ads by the AIA about needing a consultation with an architect are great, but if they only show up in Architectural Record, isn't that just preaching to the choir?
Point being, it seems that many of those in the profession with influence don't seem interested in talking about this or addressing this untapped audience. This site is obviously a great tool in moving this agenda forward. But as a profession, I think we do need to consider what we can do at both the grassroots and broader levels to elevate the discourse and bring a larger group of people to the table, and not just those that can afford a twenty-seven story single-family residence.
"just because you can get financing to buy a tract house in whispering meadows doesnt mean you can get a construction loan to build an architect designed home from scratch".
vado retro makes a very important point - something that is missed by most architects. The financial system is stacked against the traditional way in which we work.
An example.
Say a 1,000 sq.ft. developer house sells for $200,000. (The actual numbers don't really matter in this example it is the principal). A young architect develops a design for a beautiful house that is the same size and can be built for $100./sq.ft. (all in). She charges $15,000 in fees and has found a lot in an established community that is for sale for $85,000.
Same end price. All she needs to do is find a client right? WRONG.
While the end cost to the consumer is the same, this house will never get built because the cash flow doesn't work.
This is what I mean----
Her client will have to buy the land. In most jurisdictions the maximum mortgage you can get on raw land is 50%. That means that the client will need to have about $40,000 in cash.
That wipes out 98% of the people who want to spend $200,000 on a home.
For the remaining 2%, they then need to pay their young ambitious architect her fee before she releases the drawings - that's another $15,000. in cash before any lender will even start to think about construction financing.
That wipes out 1.8% of the remaining people.
For the last 0.2% of potential clients, they will need to quality for a construction loan for $100,000. for the 8 months it takes to build the house. At the same time, they will be carrying a mortgage for the current place they are living in. Almost everyone, however, lives in a house financed with the maximum mortgage they can get. This means that these people would not qualify for the loan unless they sold their current house and rent for the time their house is under construction.
This is possible and some fraction of the 0.2% would be willing to do it. Most, however, would think it would be too much hassle and would drive an hour to whispering meadows where $5,000 and a letter of acceptance from their bank is all they need to execute a contract to build that first, ugly, developer house....
That is why, most of the time, only the well off can afford to build a house. It doesn't really matter what the end cost is. However, because they can afford the cash flow issue, they also have enough money to build a fancy house.
As a profession, I think we get off base by focusing on the aesthetic, spatial, tectonic, or technical dimension of that 1,000 sq.ft. house without realizing that we need to come up with a creative response to the systemic issue at hand before we can talk about the other architectural elements.
For example, if the young architect was able to defer her fees until the construction mortgage was in place, the bank would be paying her rather than her client. That reduces the cash flow load by $15,000. If she was able to get a business loan for $30,000. she could put her money where her convictions were and help finance the cash for the land (of course she would then be on title which would secure her position for getting her fee paid). Or she could go into partnership with one of her college friends that went into law and wants to invest $30,000 in a short term investment. Better yet, make it $45,000 and she will get paid up front. The financing cost of that for a year is probably $4,000 - $6,000, depending on how good a friend the lawyer is. That gets added to the cost of the house and results in a 3% price premium. For the client who is going to mortgage the purchase, it means about $5./month in additional mortgage. No one would even look at that.
Now, this architect is able to compete much more effectively with the developer house in whispering meadows. Her potential client base is probably up to 50-60% of everyone that could afford it. Much much better odds. If she could reduce the down payment another $5,000. it would be even.
In this model, the architect has not become a developer. She is still working in a traditional consulting role. She isn't taking on any more risk. All she has done is creatively design her way around the systemic roadblock that prevented people (no matter how much they might like it) from buying her idea of the good life.
John Brown - Fascinating breakdown of some of the non-design issues facing architects, particularly residential architects. I see it as a return to the more traditional role of the architect as the client's advocate, helping them through the process from start to finish. I find it infinitely frustrating that we seemed to have parceled off our expertise and guidance and allowed other professions, particularly contractors, to take so much of our power and responsibility, essentially leaving us as the people that "make it pretty."
With the recent problems in the subprime lending market, getting loans for new construction could soon get more difficult. Yet, isn't it also a prime time for us to start pushing alternate financing structures, whether like the ones you suggest or others that could be developed, to allow for average people to buy/build a good home without falling into the sprawl developer trap? Also, it seems like the recent success of microlending in Africa and other places might serve as a model for this financing structure and allow us another avenue for finding clients and building good homes.
The question is, even if our young architect devises this strategy and figures out how to make it a success, how does she find clients? How does she seek out people before they just head down to the Whispering Meadows sales office and hand over their $5,000?
John Brown.....these are excellent points. The financial system that we have to work within is fairly daunting when we look at it that way. It seems to be set up to favor developers and it's easy to understand why the large majority of clients wouldn't want the hassle....
So the question becomes how do we address the problem as professionals. Your idea about getting a business loan sounds risky but it makes sense. Surely there are additional ways of dealing with this.....of course, then I start to think about organizations that could help us enact standards for such a process and I realize that the AIA certainly won't help. :o/
Is there a correlation between industrial boom towns of the late 19th early 20th century, and the typical suburban model? I wonder, as these new homes with cheap financing age and begin to lose value, will these brand new suburbs empty out and die as so many mining, factory and mill towns before them did? I wonder if the boom in investment spurring such one dimensional growth which occurred in both Factory towns and modern suburbs will lead to the same end? Are suburbs as they are commonly constructed now, the new factory towns for white collared workers?
i feel as if i have seen the bust with my own eyes in both the inner ring suburbs of Chicago and Kansas City (the two places i am most familiar with but by no means the only place this is occurring im sure).
granted, this is a little bit of a tangent but i feel it goes right to the heart of both how we invest in single family homes as well as how we invest in building new towns.
lletdownl, the continual construction of new suburbs and abandonment of old is a cycle that has been ongoing for forty or fifty years now. There are many parts of the country where one can find these abandoned or rundown grey belts in numerous cities. The curse of sprawl is that it is unchecked, unplanned growth. People buy into the hype and try to escape the "city" by moving into the suburbs. This leaves the city center struggling and lacking density, and the movement brings the city to subsume the formerly outlying suburb. In the end, you just have ring after ring of sprawling development that was supposed to be suburban, but is now stuck in the middle of an unchecked city growth.
It's ugly, it's unhealthy, and the only answer that the developer cartels have is to build another ring, just a little further out. Surely, this one will work and bring lifelong happiness to the buyers, right? Just because the experiment has failed every time for half a century doesn't mean it might not work *this* time. And even if it fails, they'll just build a newer, better one, just like the previous ones, for residents to purchase.
The problem I see with the 'business loan' plan outlined by John Brown is this: $30,000 business loan vs. $15,000 fee. The risk is full double the reward, which would make it a no-go for me (and lots of other practical folk). I know we started out saying that the $200,000 total amount didn't matter, but I think it does. As that amount goes up, the fee goes up, whereas the price of land may stay the same, so as the total project budget goes up, the risk/reward ratio becomes more and more reasonable. So even this model that is supposed to bring good design to people who wouldn't normally afford it would be skewed towards those with a bigger budget if you really tried it.
in terms of sprawl and strip malls the real villain is discounted cash flow accounting methodoligies which run counter to the real value of construction.
some people certainly think/hope so, lletdownl (kunstler for one).
nice responses above john brown. i especially get your pov re financing. my partner in office (just 2 of us) is a developer and an architect, trained by starchitects and with high aspirations and very good intentions...but as we work our way through various projects (usually millions of dollars at least, so scale is different, but still...) we have come to similar understanding. many of the things we would like to do, worthy things even, like converting an empty office building into homes in central tokyo (instead of demolishing and building new), and others are very hard to do in the current legal and economic setup. we are learning to deal with this, and how to deal with financing (a very big headache, defintiely NOT designed for consumers) and starting to see where the walls are and why. it can be very frustrating and requires sometimes an immense ammount of work to just try to do something worthwhile that it is easy to understand why so many just don't bother...
anyway, that is neither here nor there...
as an interesting comparison tween japanese and NA suburbs, houses in Japan DEPRECIATE in value as soon as they are built. Which means moving is expensive and people tend to stay in their homes for a long time. Financing is therefore not based on resale value and all kinds of mixed use stuff goes on (law allows it of course) and communities tend not to be income segregated....AND most homes in Japan already use a fraction of what north americans do energy-wise (quick example, nearly 95% of households air dry their clothes; huge energy saving nationwide), so there is a certain amount of sustainability already built into the system.
that doesn't stop planners here from promoting the compact city model (largely to def ears), nor phenomenona like emptying older suburbs. In this respect I think there is a fundamental problem with cities and changing culture all over the world that is going to lead to really innovative solutions/adaptations (which maybe does not include the compact city)...
perhaps naive, but i see the crisis of the city (if there is one: ? ) as an opportunity to take part in developing a new kind of urbanism and maybe even a new kind of architecture...of course i have no idea what form it will take, but somehow the status quo simply doesn't seem likely to me to be possible for much longer.
As a kind of hopeful speculation I would be quite thrilled if lars lerup got a chance to build some of his offbeat versions of modified suburbia....
"The problem I see with the 'business loan' plan outlined by John Brown is this: $30,000 business loan vs. $15,000 fee. The risk is full double the reward, which would make it a no-go for me (and lots of other practical folk)".
Rationalist, in my experience it is not as risky as you may think. First, you set up the agreements so that the money is put up only when the project is a sure thing. Second, it is being used as a short term loan rather than the purchase of products (as in retail) or equipment/personnel (as in a small business). The terms of the agreement would have this paid out first (in fact you might even be able to get the money back from the first draw on the construction mortgage.
Third, taking a business loan is only one of two options. If someone did go that route and assume the risk of borrowing that money from a bank, say as a line of credit, they would get the additional $4k-$6k that comes from looking after that risk. For an eight month term, the interest on a line of credit of $30,000 would probably be no more than $1,500. so they are making an additional $2.5K - $5k in addition to your fee. Do that 6 times or so and they have built up the $30k as equity in their business and no longer need the bank. They would still charge the $4-$6k fee for the money but now there is no interest to pay so it is all in the bank.
The other way to do it is to take up my suggestion of having a third party take the $30k risk. Their return is $4k - $6K for letting the client use their money. In return for that return of this they are taking the risk not the architect.
There are always risks in life. In fact, I am amazed at how much risk we as professionals assume in the course of our daily practice for such comparatively small return. The model I quickly proposed is actually very low risk in comparison to a lot of other endeavors. If the architect is doing this on the side (like most people do with start ups) they can leverage their expertise further by putting up their time (fee) as collateral. That reduces the economic risk even further.
For example, when I was just developing our practice we had no work. I had just completed my real estate license, but I didn't have any clients. I drove by a piece of land in the inner city that had been listed
for a long time and not sold. I went to the owner and said that I would design a house for the site at no cost to him if he would give me the listing and pay me for the design when, and if, the project was sold to someone. He agreed, I got my first commission and a whole lot of free marketing because my design drawings were on the mls real estate computer service for 3 months. It was all very low risk - basically my time, just as if I had entered a design competition but with a much greater probability of success.
slowhome
With all our grand thoughts along comes a contractor who tosses out those ever enduring words, "We could Value Engineer this project and reduce the cost of your project by 20 %." Then were stuck, because our fees don't allow us to make a comeback and say if you want to Value Engineer the project let us take a closer look at the project and see if we can do better. Maybe we need to add a dollar amount to all contracts which is for Value Engineering once the project is designed and priced. So that we are able to afford to fight the fight over quality decissions instood of inferior products being proposed by a contractor, and really make them work with you to obtain the best home possible for the home owner.
Before I start marinating my short pants, you said this:
"i think what your describing as a change of state, im calling the point at which a population adjusts back to what its context can support."
The key term being "to what its context can support." Isn't that the DEFINITION of sustainability?
Let's take the rabbit scenario. When The predator population decreases, this allows the rabbit population to swell. When there's not enough food for the rabbits in that one spot, they either have to move, OR, more likely, they start dying. In the grand scheme of things, that's sustainable. Maybe the immediate environment can't support infinite growth, but eventually the population gets adjusted by starvation, predation, and the natural cycle of life and death.
In other words, this cycle has been going on since time immemorial, and if we as humans left the planet, it would be just fine without us.
We, on the other hand, have so far NOT been killed off in large enough quantities to make a difference - we keep growing and growing and growing. It's not sustainable. Maybe it's just a matter of time scale, I don't know. For rabbits, maybe the cycle is once a year. For us humans, maybe it's every few hundred thousand years?
I'm sure we're talking about different sides of the same coin, but the point I was trying to make is that energy cycles 'in nature' are never wasteful.
The cherry falls from the tree, which feeds a bird, which shits on the ground, which feeds the tree, which grows cherries, which fall on the ground........
Human activity doesn't seem to fit that pattern. At least not in my lifetime.
were on the same page no worries slant six... the whole point was that it is the nature of all species to grow until their habitat can no longer support growth.
we grow like that ceiling will never be reached, which is not in fact true. that ceiling will eventually be reached, and it has been reached before.
european plague, late 1800's early 1900's influenza, ice ages etc. though we over the past 100 years have figured out how to minimize all the limiting factors that used to slow our growth (disease, suitable habitat, food availability), there must be other limiting factors that will eventually slow the growth or cause a sharp decline as is seen in almost all other populations when their ceiling is reached.
whether we have the foresight to make that correction less cataclysmic is what this subject is a part of, granted, a small part.
were way off topic now...
i like it ...
slow software... Rhinoceros
"The problem with suburban sprawl isn't solely its lack of density. It is the fact that it consumes ravenous amounts of greenfield, of which a large percentage is paved for large amounts of roads that end up chaining the residents, not freeing them."
Captain X, I think this is an important observation. I would add that it is also a problem that the home is treated as a commodity, a marketed/branded product created by an industrialized process. A home is very expensive and really important in peoples lives. It also consumes a vast amount of resources. It desreves to be created with a more appropriate degree of sensitivity and thoughtfulness (whatever the style and cost).
Postal and Snooker, your frustration about the Contractor value engineering things is very valid. That is the main reason we expanded our practice to became a general contractor.
In single family residential work in particular, the architect has a very ambiguous role during construction. The industry is set up with the builder in charge and in direct contact with the client. Drawings are only a suggestion and anything the contractor doesn't want to do mysteriously becomes "too expensive".
We got so sick of listening to this that we decided to take matters into our own hands. After ten years, I would never go back. We are in control of the building process and if there is something we really don't like we can change it ourselves and absorb the cost (we don't do this very often).
I know that this is a process that is tailored to small projects but I don't think that that nullifies its applicability. The construction of small scale projects accounts for about 65% of the entire construction expenditure each year (I am remembering the stats without looking them up again so they may be a bit off). That is an enormous amount of work that we, as a profession, are almost totally uninvolved in. My concern is that the schools train graduates to be starchitects and we tend to ignore or dismiss the other 95% of the built environment and leave it for builders and developers.
Anyways, I seem to have drifted off the topic of slow home, density and suburbia and into professional practice. I will now get off my soap box.
This is a great thread! Thanks John Brown, for engaging in the discussion.
I think I'm basically caught up now, and I appreciate most of what's been said, but I think the point that I'm really interested in lies in this comment:
What I am interested in is bringing some design literacy to the public in a somewhat entertaining way so that more people can at least start to look at their surroundings more clearly. I don't have a problem with someone deciding, in a more informed way, that they like doric columns. I do mind them having them just because some slick marketing brochure sold them on them as an "idea of home". For me that is too shallow and disrespectful to the person living there. Homes are too important and too expensive to be sold as a marketing proxy.
I think the 10 principles of the "Slow Home" movement are ones that we, as designers, can more or less get behind. I think it's the education of our clients that's difficult for us to wrap our minds around. They don't really cover that in college, do they? "Oh and by the way, 90% of the people you are going to design for have little to no concept of what a well designed home should be". I think that I was even a little perplexed as to what sort of value could be had in creating a *movement* like this until I realized that it would be most helpful to the people that we design for. To get them even thinking about these things before they rush to buy their cookie-cutter homes is a step in the right direction.
lletdown, you hit the nail on the head. We've never dealt with these problems on such a large scale before, and that means new challenges that'll have to be dealt with if we want to keep our quality of life anything near decent for the coming generations.
I don't want this to get too off-topic, I'm sorry.
Topical discussion: I live downtown in my city of 600,000, in a small 130-year-old house, surrounded by similar but slightly newer houses (most date back to about 1900). When I was born, my house was turning about 100 years old! I like to imagine what's happened in this house - people dying, giving birth, moments of love and hate and everything else. A whole lot of it, considering the age of the place. I mean, imagine how many renovations this place has undergone! There's even one scheduled for this fall, after I move.
Anyway.
A few years ago, I lived in a high-rise. The place was about 30 years old, and crumbling. When I was there for about 8 months, crews were working on replacing the deteriorating concrete balconies. There were mushrooms literally growing in the halls.
If that's what density looks like, no wonder people don't want a part of it! I think it's important that if we decide that "material honesty" is a goal to be pursued, that we also invest in good materials that will last a long time. Concrete is not one of these materials, which happens to be a material that many architects boast of 'exploiting' in their forms.
While I'm on the topic of concrete, I will mention that there are many dolostone quarries within a 20 minute drive of my house. As we speak, a multinational company is trying to expand their existing quarry on a site that has been deemed not only "provincially significant" by our government, but is also supposedly a protected biosphere reserve, as determined by the United Nations.
If the the quarry is allowed to expand, it means ruin for its neighbours - water quality and supply are destroyed, vibrations causing headaches, endangered species (including the butternut tree) being cleared completely. It's ridiculous.
It's to make roads and buildings. I suddenly don't feel so great about perpetuating this wasteful system. So, 'modern architects,' please think hard before designing your next concrete bunker!
ditto wonderk.....and i would like to add, the point of anything like this is not just to get clients educated in the value of these decisions but also politicians and other influential people. the interesting thing about the slow food movement that i think we as architects can learn from is that it not only became a point of reference for chefs and patrons of restaurants, but also for politicians, for labor negotiations, for trade discussions, etc. i have to congratulate mr. brown....the concept of creating this type of baseline for the discussions is very important and missing in most discussions within the profession. I have my own issues with some of the 10 points, but the baseline concept is pretty easy to see the value in...question that which people tend not to question...then give them a framework for understanding the larger context of that question. that is the role of education, it's not necessarily going to make everyone think like you or act as you would like them to act, but at least be a bit more knowledgable in the concepts that will be key to their making a good decision for their belief framework.
to go back to an earlier allusion in my post (and i seem to say this a bit too often and might be accused of being a broken record) but the value of our profession and the ideals of sustainability will inevitably be most informed by the legal statutes that constrain growth and the tax benefits or penalties that are paid for particular decisions. in this vein i have my greatest hope for the successes of a discussion such as this....not to sway the person choosing to buy a house (although that is a very noble and worthwhile goal) but also the lawmakers, the politicians, the economists, etc. that quanitify the value of our actions or assign benefit or penalty to those actions. a friend told me that in a recent lecture a developer stated that a brand name starchitect can add 30% to the end sales of a development and a decent designer/architect can add between 12 and 15%. that is quite a bit of information that seems not to be discussed or understood by our very own profession. we do have value and we do have arguments to counter the contractors but they are more difficult to quantify and will require a change in the manner in which we think about what we do and how we believe our business unfolds.............
i watched a fascinating documentary on p.o.v. last night about gentrification in an east columbus ohio neighborhood. a very frank film about the tensions between urban homesteader gentrifiers and the folks who had lived there for decades. the role of historic boards and zoning played a huge part in the film as the longtime residents saw those comissions as prejudicial against them. also, there was tension because most of the gentrifiers(at least the people feature in the film) were gay.
one guy who had lived in the hood since the sixties was in court because someone had complained about a sign that hung on his porch. it was a sign with his name and address but was afro centric etc. the guy had been made a chief while on a visit to nigeria. (he was also a sculptor) he showed up in court decked out in tribal chief threads. the judge asked him if he knew he lived in a historic district. the chief answered, "judge when i moved here in the late 60's, the television news proclaimed this area the ghetto."
they also tracked the decline of a woman who vehemently refused to sell her house or to repair its decay. she was a black miss haversham. in the end of the film she dies and the film is dedicated to her. i thought she was about sixty or so. turns out she was four years younger than me. the final scene is of the gay realtor/developer going through the house.
right on futureboy, and it goes beyond money... the thing is we've been written out of all the "your first home for dummies" (though I haven't verified, it just seems like an entire lack of awareness by the general public that architects even exist or are a valid option)
so isn't this an idea that should be championed by AIA or what have you... though i appreciate the grass roots approach much much more...
these values that we talk about, reasons why we live, breath, draft, once brought to the attention of everyone, should carry over into all parts of the industry...
once people become cognizant of architecture in everyday life, they can't help but carry it over into their work...
just because you can get financing to buy a tract house in whispering meadows doesnt mean you can get a construction loan to build an architect designed home from scratch.
Without getting bogged down in a lengthy discussion about history and the changes in the profession, doesn't this show a change in the goals, at least at some levels, of architects? Though we might argue about their actual level of success, most of the original "Modern Masters" worked, in theory or actual built work, on the ideas of construction for the average person, from Wright's Usonian Houses to Le Corbusier's ideas for reshaping the city (which, yes, contributed to the mess in which we find ourselves today).
There are many hardworking architects who devote their whole careers to helping individuals and families find good, sustainable, wholesome housing. Yet, as pointed out by others, there are probably thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of average Americans (and or course citizens of other countries) who either don't understand what an architect can do for them, or simply assume that a custom-designed and built home is far outside of their reach. Most starchitects seem more interested in designing the next skyscraper or multi-billion dollar art museum than solving the problems of the rank and file worker who just wants a decent home for his family. Those glossy ads by the AIA about needing a consultation with an architect are great, but if they only show up in Architectural Record, isn't that just preaching to the choir?
Point being, it seems that many of those in the profession with influence don't seem interested in talking about this or addressing this untapped audience. This site is obviously a great tool in moving this agenda forward. But as a profession, I think we do need to consider what we can do at both the grassroots and broader levels to elevate the discourse and bring a larger group of people to the table, and not just those that can afford a twenty-seven story single-family residence.
"just because you can get financing to buy a tract house in whispering meadows doesnt mean you can get a construction loan to build an architect designed home from scratch".
vado retro makes a very important point - something that is missed by most architects. The financial system is stacked against the traditional way in which we work.
An example.
Say a 1,000 sq.ft. developer house sells for $200,000. (The actual numbers don't really matter in this example it is the principal). A young architect develops a design for a beautiful house that is the same size and can be built for $100./sq.ft. (all in). She charges $15,000 in fees and has found a lot in an established community that is for sale for $85,000.
Same end price. All she needs to do is find a client right? WRONG.
While the end cost to the consumer is the same, this house will never get built because the cash flow doesn't work.
This is what I mean----
Her client will have to buy the land. In most jurisdictions the maximum mortgage you can get on raw land is 50%. That means that the client will need to have about $40,000 in cash.
That wipes out 98% of the people who want to spend $200,000 on a home.
For the remaining 2%, they then need to pay their young ambitious architect her fee before she releases the drawings - that's another $15,000. in cash before any lender will even start to think about construction financing.
That wipes out 1.8% of the remaining people.
For the last 0.2% of potential clients, they will need to quality for a construction loan for $100,000. for the 8 months it takes to build the house. At the same time, they will be carrying a mortgage for the current place they are living in. Almost everyone, however, lives in a house financed with the maximum mortgage they can get. This means that these people would not qualify for the loan unless they sold their current house and rent for the time their house is under construction.
This is possible and some fraction of the 0.2% would be willing to do it. Most, however, would think it would be too much hassle and would drive an hour to whispering meadows where $5,000 and a letter of acceptance from their bank is all they need to execute a contract to build that first, ugly, developer house....
That is why, most of the time, only the well off can afford to build a house. It doesn't really matter what the end cost is. However, because they can afford the cash flow issue, they also have enough money to build a fancy house.
As a profession, I think we get off base by focusing on the aesthetic, spatial, tectonic, or technical dimension of that 1,000 sq.ft. house without realizing that we need to come up with a creative response to the systemic issue at hand before we can talk about the other architectural elements.
For example, if the young architect was able to defer her fees until the construction mortgage was in place, the bank would be paying her rather than her client. That reduces the cash flow load by $15,000. If she was able to get a business loan for $30,000. she could put her money where her convictions were and help finance the cash for the land (of course she would then be on title which would secure her position for getting her fee paid). Or she could go into partnership with one of her college friends that went into law and wants to invest $30,000 in a short term investment. Better yet, make it $45,000 and she will get paid up front. The financing cost of that for a year is probably $4,000 - $6,000, depending on how good a friend the lawyer is. That gets added to the cost of the house and results in a 3% price premium. For the client who is going to mortgage the purchase, it means about $5./month in additional mortgage. No one would even look at that.
Now, this architect is able to compete much more effectively with the developer house in whispering meadows. Her potential client base is probably up to 50-60% of everyone that could afford it. Much much better odds. If she could reduce the down payment another $5,000. it would be even.
In this model, the architect has not become a developer. She is still working in a traditional consulting role. She isn't taking on any more risk. All she has done is creatively design her way around the systemic roadblock that prevented people (no matter how much they might like it) from buying her idea of the good life.
In my mind, that is what we need more of.....
John Brown - Fascinating breakdown of some of the non-design issues facing architects, particularly residential architects. I see it as a return to the more traditional role of the architect as the client's advocate, helping them through the process from start to finish. I find it infinitely frustrating that we seemed to have parceled off our expertise and guidance and allowed other professions, particularly contractors, to take so much of our power and responsibility, essentially leaving us as the people that "make it pretty."
With the recent problems in the subprime lending market, getting loans for new construction could soon get more difficult. Yet, isn't it also a prime time for us to start pushing alternate financing structures, whether like the ones you suggest or others that could be developed, to allow for average people to buy/build a good home without falling into the sprawl developer trap? Also, it seems like the recent success of microlending in Africa and other places might serve as a model for this financing structure and allow us another avenue for finding clients and building good homes.
The question is, even if our young architect devises this strategy and figures out how to make it a success, how does she find clients? How does she seek out people before they just head down to the Whispering Meadows sales office and hand over their $5,000?
John Brown.....these are excellent points. The financial system that we have to work within is fairly daunting when we look at it that way. It seems to be set up to favor developers and it's easy to understand why the large majority of clients wouldn't want the hassle....
So the question becomes how do we address the problem as professionals. Your idea about getting a business loan sounds risky but it makes sense. Surely there are additional ways of dealing with this.....of course, then I start to think about organizations that could help us enact standards for such a process and I realize that the AIA certainly won't help. :o/
Is there a correlation between industrial boom towns of the late 19th early 20th century, and the typical suburban model? I wonder, as these new homes with cheap financing age and begin to lose value, will these brand new suburbs empty out and die as so many mining, factory and mill towns before them did? I wonder if the boom in investment spurring such one dimensional growth which occurred in both Factory towns and modern suburbs will lead to the same end? Are suburbs as they are commonly constructed now, the new factory towns for white collared workers?
i feel as if i have seen the bust with my own eyes in both the inner ring suburbs of Chicago and Kansas City (the two places i am most familiar with but by no means the only place this is occurring im sure).
granted, this is a little bit of a tangent but i feel it goes right to the heart of both how we invest in single family homes as well as how we invest in building new towns.
lletdownl, the continual construction of new suburbs and abandonment of old is a cycle that has been ongoing for forty or fifty years now. There are many parts of the country where one can find these abandoned or rundown grey belts in numerous cities. The curse of sprawl is that it is unchecked, unplanned growth. People buy into the hype and try to escape the "city" by moving into the suburbs. This leaves the city center struggling and lacking density, and the movement brings the city to subsume the formerly outlying suburb. In the end, you just have ring after ring of sprawling development that was supposed to be suburban, but is now stuck in the middle of an unchecked city growth.
It's ugly, it's unhealthy, and the only answer that the developer cartels have is to build another ring, just a little further out. Surely, this one will work and bring lifelong happiness to the buyers, right? Just because the experiment has failed every time for half a century doesn't mean it might not work *this* time. And even if it fails, they'll just build a newer, better one, just like the previous ones, for residents to purchase.
The problem I see with the 'business loan' plan outlined by John Brown is this: $30,000 business loan vs. $15,000 fee. The risk is full double the reward, which would make it a no-go for me (and lots of other practical folk). I know we started out saying that the $200,000 total amount didn't matter, but I think it does. As that amount goes up, the fee goes up, whereas the price of land may stay the same, so as the total project budget goes up, the risk/reward ratio becomes more and more reasonable. So even this model that is supposed to bring good design to people who wouldn't normally afford it would be skewed towards those with a bigger budget if you really tried it.
in terms of sprawl and strip malls the real villain is discounted cash flow accounting methodoligies which run counter to the real value of construction.
some people certainly think/hope so, lletdownl (kunstler for one).
nice responses above john brown. i especially get your pov re financing. my partner in office (just 2 of us) is a developer and an architect, trained by starchitects and with high aspirations and very good intentions...but as we work our way through various projects (usually millions of dollars at least, so scale is different, but still...) we have come to similar understanding. many of the things we would like to do, worthy things even, like converting an empty office building into homes in central tokyo (instead of demolishing and building new), and others are very hard to do in the current legal and economic setup. we are learning to deal with this, and how to deal with financing (a very big headache, defintiely NOT designed for consumers) and starting to see where the walls are and why. it can be very frustrating and requires sometimes an immense ammount of work to just try to do something worthwhile that it is easy to understand why so many just don't bother...
anyway, that is neither here nor there...
as an interesting comparison tween japanese and NA suburbs, houses in Japan DEPRECIATE in value as soon as they are built. Which means moving is expensive and people tend to stay in their homes for a long time. Financing is therefore not based on resale value and all kinds of mixed use stuff goes on (law allows it of course) and communities tend not to be income segregated....AND most homes in Japan already use a fraction of what north americans do energy-wise (quick example, nearly 95% of households air dry their clothes; huge energy saving nationwide), so there is a certain amount of sustainability already built into the system.
that doesn't stop planners here from promoting the compact city model (largely to def ears), nor phenomenona like emptying older suburbs. In this respect I think there is a fundamental problem with cities and changing culture all over the world that is going to lead to really innovative solutions/adaptations (which maybe does not include the compact city)...
perhaps naive, but i see the crisis of the city (if there is one: ? ) as an opportunity to take part in developing a new kind of urbanism and maybe even a new kind of architecture...of course i have no idea what form it will take, but somehow the status quo simply doesn't seem likely to me to be possible for much longer.
As a kind of hopeful speculation I would be quite thrilled if lars lerup got a chance to build some of his offbeat versions of modified suburbia....
"The problem I see with the 'business loan' plan outlined by John Brown is this: $30,000 business loan vs. $15,000 fee. The risk is full double the reward, which would make it a no-go for me (and lots of other practical folk)".
Rationalist, in my experience it is not as risky as you may think. First, you set up the agreements so that the money is put up only when the project is a sure thing. Second, it is being used as a short term loan rather than the purchase of products (as in retail) or equipment/personnel (as in a small business). The terms of the agreement would have this paid out first (in fact you might even be able to get the money back from the first draw on the construction mortgage.
Third, taking a business loan is only one of two options. If someone did go that route and assume the risk of borrowing that money from a bank, say as a line of credit, they would get the additional $4k-$6k that comes from looking after that risk. For an eight month term, the interest on a line of credit of $30,000 would probably be no more than $1,500. so they are making an additional $2.5K - $5k in addition to your fee. Do that 6 times or so and they have built up the $30k as equity in their business and no longer need the bank. They would still charge the $4-$6k fee for the money but now there is no interest to pay so it is all in the bank.
The other way to do it is to take up my suggestion of having a third party take the $30k risk. Their return is $4k - $6K for letting the client use their money. In return for that return of this they are taking the risk not the architect.
There are always risks in life. In fact, I am amazed at how much risk we as professionals assume in the course of our daily practice for such comparatively small return. The model I quickly proposed is actually very low risk in comparison to a lot of other endeavors. If the architect is doing this on the side (like most people do with start ups) they can leverage their expertise further by putting up their time (fee) as collateral. That reduces the economic risk even further.
For example, when I was just developing our practice we had no work. I had just completed my real estate license, but I didn't have any clients. I drove by a piece of land in the inner city that had been listed
for a long time and not sold. I went to the owner and said that I would design a house for the site at no cost to him if he would give me the listing and pay me for the design when, and if, the project was sold to someone. He agreed, I got my first commission and a whole lot of free marketing because my design drawings were on the mls real estate computer service for 3 months. It was all very low risk - basically my time, just as if I had entered a design competition but with a much greater probability of success.
lets give a bump to this thread. i think maybe some people may have missed it.
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