In a recent blog post by Clem Labine, publisher of Traditional Building magazine and Period Homes magazine, takes on the topic. Here’s a little of what he had to say in his post entitled Hard-Edged Houses for Those Who Love Machines:

Modernist architects once again are trying to sell hard-edged houses to the American public. A new home plan service called Hometta has been set up to offer “modern homes for the masses.” Hometta is a collaboration of several architectural studios whose goal is to provide “small, sleek, sustainable, affordable house plans for middle-class buyers.” Few would quibble with the goals of “small” or “affordable” or “sustainable.” Whether the market will applaud their version of “sleek” and “modern” remains to be seen.

His suspicion of how the public will receive the modernist offerings is shared by me. If you were to poll the public you would find a strong majority favoring houses that match their image of “home.” By that I mean a house with a pitched roof, windows of a human scale, comfortable places for comfy furniture, and not a house that looks like a museum for modern art.

I like to believe that a home-like house can be created in a modern or contemporary style. But nearly every modern house I’ve seen recently is not homey and would not even qualify as good modern design. Last year I was attending an architectural conference in Charleston and we took a tour of “significant houses” in the area. Much to my disappointment we did not visit any houses that were traditional. One after another they were severe, unfriendly and hard-edged. Clem Labine would have hated them. In my book, Designing Your Perfect House, I discuss how to “people” spaces. What I mean by peopling is making the spaces feel right for people to occupy and feel like you would expect people to be there now or soon. This has everything to do with providing the proper scale, materials that are indicative of requiring the human touch, and places where people fit properly.

Modernist house in the Charleston area. This is actually the front side that greets the owners and visitors when they arrive. Not only is the scale, use of materials, and form unappealing to human beings, there is no sense of arrival and the front door is totally invisible. The purplish material is oxidizing copper.

Later in his article, Clem Labine compares the Katrina Cottages by Steve Mouzon to the modernist houses and claims they are meeting the sustainability, cost, and size goals the modernist houses strive for, yet the Katrina Cottages also meet the goal of feeling like “house” and “home” to everyday people (like me). He says:

Ironically, the Katrina Cottages designed by Steve Mouzon offers the emotional reassurance of traditional architecture – but is actually the product of technology and the machine. The cottage is a low-cost modular house designed to be “small, affordable and sustainable.” But rather than an in-your-face declaration of machine-love like the Binary House, the Katrina Cottage offers the softer outlines of traditional architecture and conveys the aura of hand-built houses.

KATRINA COTTAGE VIII by Steve Mouzon/Housing International, Miami Beach, FL

I posted a comment of my own:

Clem – You’re right on the mark. I was trained in a Modernist philosophy, like most architects these days. We get heavily indoctrinated in the mantra that anything traditional must be rejected and modern is the only proper architectural language. I agree with Bob’s comment (author of an earlier comment than mine) that this kind of thinking ignores the lessons learned over the years about how to deal with rain, sun, wind, etc. But more importantly, strict modernism ignores the psychological lessons that are a part of our culture and grown within the human experience. It is pure vanity on the part of architects to say that all that has come before was wrong and only we, the modern architects, can create the forms that properly respond to mankind.

I think that this kind of attitude hinders our profession and is a disservice to the public. I wrote my book, Designing Your Perfect House precisely to empower homeowners and clients to help them understand why they feel the way they do about their houses and help them understand that they can ask for more than what’s on the architect’s menu. The solution to the blight in house design is not simply convincing the architects to do better, but to help the public feel more confident to demand better.

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Probably the most important thing must do before even looking for floor plans is to write a “program” for your new house. Before architects begin a design, we write out a list of the required spaces or rooms, target room sizes, and desired characteristics and features for each room. This list is called the program. It is essential your goal for your house design. Lesson Eight in my book, Designing Your Perfect House, we discuss how to do this properly and effectively.

Writing a program is important so you will stay on track in your house plan search. If you don’t know your goal, you’ll never know if you’ve achieved it. With a good program, you will be able to choose between plans on a more detailed basis than simply how many bedrooms there are. For example, if you list in your program that you need morning sun in the kitchen, you will focus on floor plans that provide that and choose a building site that will allow the house to have the proper orientation that will place the kitchen on the eastern side of the lot so as to allow the morning sun to shine in.

This is simply one example. there are many other criteria you should be thinking about. If you develop a good program, you’ll end up with a good house.

Please look through the pages that explain my book , Designing Your Perfect House, and see if it might be helpful to you.

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    I think that one of the things that holds back pre-fabricated housing is that it often readily rejects the forms, details, and characteristics that define “home” to people all around the world. Metal and plastic boxes, unfortunately, convey impersonal, nameless, and robotic references. Gone are the symbols of shelter and safety, family and security, comfort and nostalgia. Maybe someone can find a way to mass-produce economical, well-built housing while maintaining our psychological connections to other human beings and our cultural past.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

But a lot can be achieved by simply doing some homework and thinking through what you want your house to be. Even if your budget can only afford the “cookie cutter” house, it can still be better and more “well-suited” to you and your family. There are a few books out there that can help. Sarah Susanka’s books, my book, and others will offer food for thought. Check out house design magazines for inspiration images to prod your imagination. Visit model homes and look at them critically. Make notes of what you like, what you dislike, and how things feel. Understanding how to create the feeling of a house is the hardest part. That’s where an architect can be an invaluable guide.

Some critical elements in every design are proper site selection, proper positioning of the house on the land, a tightly planned house without extraneous, useless spaces, an over-riding concept to the plan and the design, a sense of proportion, a sense of proper human scale, a good flow, and good construction materials and craftsmanship. None of these elements, with the possible exception of good materials and craftsmanship have to cost any extra. Good thoughtfulness and solid planning only cost some time and effort. The payoff, however, is huge.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

I was driving through a very nice neighborhood yesterday and I was struck by the number of houses that seemed so amatuerishly put together. It was almost as if someone worked at making them ugly. I could not help but wonder why this is. Who designs these houses? The answer is probably no one. Sadly, the majority of houses built in the United States are built from plans a builder has used and modified over and over, or from purchased plans that someone selected because they have the right kind of rooms the owners wanted or they fit onto the piece of property. Maybe the owners even sort of like the appearance.

Okay. I understand that not every house can be great. But do they have to be sooooo ugly. Good house design is not rocket science. It’s a matter of thinking about what you’re doing. It’s a matter of stepping back once in a while and looking at the larger picture. Just because all of the rooms fit together, a house isn’t necessarily good and your design isn’t necessarily finished. What can we do to help?

This is the official launch of a new feature for this blog I’ll call, “What’s Wrong with This Picture?” when I find a house or a portion of a house I think is particularly odd, wrong, or just ugly, I’ll post it and ask you what you think is wrong with it. The next day, I’ll post what I think is wrong and you can see if you agree with me. But I won’t just criticize the examples. I’ll offer suggestions for improving it.

I invite you to submit photos of things you find ugly, aesthetically offensive, or just plain funny. I’ll be glad to comment on those, too.

Bill Hirsch

www.designingyourperfecthouse.com

www.williamhirsch.com

      I was on an airplane from Los Angeles today and chatting with the fellow seated next to me about things to consider when designing and building a house. I told him that even if you were not designing a house from scratch, but simply buying a builder’s model home plan, there were avoidable mistakes you could sidestep. He nodded knowingly and said he had an example of one that he realized only too late.
      It seems that this man’s outdoor air conditioning unit, the compressor unit, the noisy part of the system, was located directly beneath the master bedroom window. He had thought to locate it away from the rear patio. He understood that he might be sitting out there on a nice, but warm day and the AC would be making noise he would not want to hear. But he never considered that it would be droning on and on throughout the night, too. What’s worse is he lives in Austin, Texas, so the air conditioning season is very long.
      So add this simple, but potentially annoying, consideration to your long list of things to watch out for, even when selecting a plan from the builder’s standard designs.

      Bill Hirsch

      www.designingyourperfecthouse.com