[GSBN] Square footage of straw-bale homes

[Andrew Webb]

Architects design something like 5% of houses; it may be less.  My 
impression from blogs, magazines and awards is that architecture that is 
considered good design has nothing to do with size (perhaps with the 
exception of Dubai).  The Australian Institute of Architects has a 
handful of award categories, and one is Small Architecture.  The others 
are Residential, Public, Urban Design and Sustainable Architecture, from 
memory. Most projects I remember from university also had nothing to do 
with (large) size; one project I remember was to design a single 
self-contained room.

I don't think the education of architects is the major problem.  The 
education of clients is.  The housing market is dominated by large 
project home companies of various levels of so called prestige, which is 
supported by mainstream press which is thinly veiled marketing of Large 
and Excess.  I have often had questions from clients such as "we only 
need two bedrooms, but should we have four for resale value?" or, "we 
would be happy with a carport but I suppose we need a double garage for 
resale?".  Typically these people have no intention of selling.  But, as 
a house is a huge cost and a mortgage is a huge burden, they are scared 
and believe, or at least question whether they should believe, what most 
newspapers, magazines, TV lifestyle programs, and particularly real 
estate agents tell them.  Compounding this, of course, is the 
overarching growth fetish and consumerism of capitalist society in general.

I always try to design to a budget; almost every project is a struggle 
to rein in the client to theirs.  I like what Bob Borson says on his 
blog - from a list of desirable client traits,
"*Understand their budget: *this is not the same as knowing your budget. 
It's sort of a glass half empty versus glass half full mentality -- but 
with money. One has an empty "budget bag" that they think they can put 
stuff in until it's full; the other has a bag with their budget in  it 
and they take things out until the budget is expended. It might seem 
like the same thing but it's not. The group putting stuff in the bag 
will continually try and jam more stuff in, well beyond when the zipper 
will close (just sit on it and then try...). The other, well, when you 
take the last thing out, that's it, there's nothing left. Whenever we 
have clients that stress quantity over quality, it's a harbinger of 
things to come. It's not the clients job to know what things cost, but 
when they keep increasing the square footage of the project, or continue 
to add program requirements without ever thinking that these things have 
costs associated with them, it's shows that they aren't thinking about 
the very base fact that everything has a cost associated with it."

-Andrew


On 12/05/2011 10:21 PM, Derek Roff wrote:
>
> I have wondered about the education of architects, and perhaps some of 
> the architects on this list can comment.
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