It’s easy to write off the typical suburban house as “un-designed,” and assume that whoever was responsible for it didn’t know what they were doing or didn’t care. In short, no one could have possibly wanted this to happen. But in reality such houses and their communities are as intentional as any work of architecture, and the people who create them are as serious about their business as architects are. Most suburban houses today are produced by merchant home builders – vertically integrated companies which control the development, financing, design, construction and marketing of their projects. Builders can vary significantly in size and may conduct all phases of the project in-house or may contract portions the work to outside consultants or sub-contractors. In a typical project, the builder will acquire a large piece of property, subdivide it into individual lots, and build the streets, utilities and other infrastructure to serve each home site. A buyer will choose from a small selection of standard house plans, purchase a lot, and the builder will construct the house. The builder will also typically guide the buyer through the financing and purchasing process. This organizational structure and building process is designed to allow the builder to build and sell houses as efficiently and cheaply as possible and, in turn, maximize their profit from the development.
When it comes to design, the suburban house is a highly refined product, intended to appeal to a carefully targeted range of buyers, but at the same time be cheap and easy to construct in large numbers. Marketing and cost become the primary drivers of design. The results are standardized houses that use a common material palette and standard construction details. Extra money for details and higher-quality materials is spent only in places where prospective buyers will notice it on their first walkthrough. Surprisingly, there are often architects involved, though they play a more limited role than they would in a traditional private practice. The builder may have architects on staff, or they may hire an outside architect who regularly contracts with homebuilders. In either case, the architect’s role is primarily as a design consultant, providing design ideas that will serve the builder’s market-driven vision and priorities. Builders are careful to hire architects that understand the priorities and processes of home building, so the builder will know exactly what they’re going to get. Architects that do this type of work tend to focus primarily on design and drafting, as technical issues will be delegated to engineers and the standardized construction process does not require the architect’s supervision.
If the builder does not use an architect directly, they may use a stock plan service. Plan services mass produce complete sets of house plans to which they sell to builders or to individuals who want to build them. Like those produced by builders, the houses produced by plan services are designed to be cheap to build and easily marketable, in addition to being able to be built anywhere. Plan services also employ architects, or people with architectural training, in purely design and drafting roles.
How did architects get pushed into the background of housing design? It wasn’t for lack of effort. During the first half of the twentieth century, as America experienced a rapid increase in its urban population, there were countless architects attempting to solve the problem of how to provide housing for the masses. The ideas they produced ranged from Buckminster Fuller’s pre-fabricated, one-size-fits-all Dymaxion House, to the 40,000-person towers of Le Corbusier’s Radiant City. While ideas like these attracted a lot of attention, neither saw wide-spread, long term application in the US. Instead it was William Levitt, a real estate developer and builder of the suburban community of Levittown that succeeded. Levittown was not the first suburb, but Levitt’s development strategy of mass producing standardized houses on cheap farmland became the model for suburban housing development that persists to the present day. Despite its success, architects were not impressed, and began to distance themselves from mass-market housing design for the sake of their professional stature. The result was a self-perpetuating cycle. As architects were less involved, housing design became increasing driven by builders and developers, which alienated architects even further.
If architects want to stop this cycle and become more involved in the design of housing, they will have to start by changing their attitude toward housing design and the people who practice it. They will have to lessen their attachment to completely unique, one-of-a-kind buildings and allow widely-applicable solutions to be considered valid architectural ideas. They will have stop viewing issues such as marketing and cost control as enemies of good architecture and learn to design with them. Architects will also have to be willing to change the way they practice and accept different roles in the building process. The profession tends to view anything other than the traditional private practice as a lesser form of architectural work, but there is no reason why architects working directly for a builder or for a plan service could not make equivalent contributions to the profession and the built environment.
This is not to say that architects must pander to builders and surrender their values just to be heard. Architects do have a great deal to offer in the design of mass-market housing, thought they must understand the context they are working in before their ideas can be put to use. Home builders today are facing an increasingly strict regulatory environment, where even the most mundane projects must comply with highly technical environmental and construction regulations. Furthermore, many communities are demanding higher quality design and forcing builders to deviate from their standardized practices. Architects are well equipped to deal with issues like these, and they can use their expertise in these areas to gain a higher standing with home builders and developers.
Where architects can’t appeal to builders, they can go straight to the consumer. The demand for mass-market housing is largely driven by marketing ideas perpetuated by home builders that have succeeded in convincing most people that they want to live in standardized, cheaply constructed homes. Architects, meanwhile, are seen as elite specialists whose skills are reserved for the wealthy and sophisticated. If they are willing to appeal to the mass market, architects can easily change this attitude. Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big House, is an architect who has attempted to do so. While not terribly ground-breaking from an architectural perspective, her work has been very successful in challenging the conventions of home builders, and showing typical home-buyers how an architect-design house can work better for them.
Architects can also take advantage of the fact that home builders work almost exclusively in low-density suburbs, while more cities are focusing on higher density, mixed-use development. The scale and complexity of these projects goes beyond the capabilities of most builders, so architects, along with developers, have much more control over design. Architects have been leading the movement to bring housing back into cities for many years, and if they continue to do so they will have an increasing large influence over housing design and the shape of cities as a whole.
Architects have long been critical of mass-market housing, and should continue to be. As it exists today, it is unsustainable, increasingly unaffordable, and fails to meet the housing needs of many people. But architects need to do more than criticize. They need to understand the forces driving housing design and how they can influence them. If they can do that, architects will have the chance to put real solutions into action and have a profound impact on the quality of the built environment.
Sources:
Davis, Howard. The Culture of Building. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Gutman, Robert. The Design of American Housing. New York: Publishing Center for Cultural Resources, 1985.
Susanka, Sarah. The Not So Big House. The Taunton Press, 2001.
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