[GSBN] Square footage of straw-bale homes

[Bohdan Dorniak]

Derek
What Andrew says is correct. Architects are generally taught sustainable
design and I remember being taught to look at "architect's bibles" like the
AJ Metric Handbook - which gave minimum spaces required for various
functional rooms to design. There are many such standards around.
Maybe the high volume builders need to employ architects.
I have many owner designers produce monstrous houses in the name of "green
design".
Bohdan
 
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From: GSBN-bounces at sustainablesources.com
[mailto:GSBN-bounces at sustainablesources.com] On Behalf Of Andrew Webb
Sent: Friday, 13 May 2011 12:33 AM
To: GSBN at sustainablesources.com
Subject: Re: [GSBN] Square footage of straw-bale homes


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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