On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Lawrence Kestenbaum wrote:
>
> In other words, it's below the dignity of an Architect to design
> single-family habitation for ordinary middle-class families?
>
> Or: if an Architect designs a building, and a speculative builder makes
> thousands of copies, then those copies are un-Architected no matter how
> perfect their resemblance to the original?
>

I believe the point was that most tract housing *is* designed like crap,
not that housing for real people *should* be poorly designed or that they
somehow deserve it.

And yes, a copy automatically makes both itself and the original less
interesting and less "good".  If your designer was doing a good job, then
this house is attuned to its specific environment and tenants, and simply
replicating its form eliminates these relationships.  If I put a window
just so to give you a view of a really nice church across the block, and
then you copy this house somewhere else, that window is pointless.

 From an psychobabble point of view, your house becomes not
"your" house at all, but "a" house, the same as your neighbor.  You lose
your sense of identity, your sense of power over your piece of the pie.
Interestingly, this means that people almost immediately (where not
forbidden by some sort of faustian neighborhood pact) start customizing
their home, with everything from the whirligigs of the countryclub to the
rock gardens of my grandma's neighborhood to the rainbow victorians of SF.
Levittown looks much different nowadays then when they took that picture
you're thinking of right now, to a large degree as a result of this drive
to make your house your own.

Variety is interesting (yes yes, subjective, but whatever. it's true)  A
sea of identical housing is not. People come
in a wide variety, and I believe they are happier when they can show that
in their dwelling.  Hundertwasser (nutty Viennese architecture guy)
believed that apartment-dwellers should be allowed to alter the outside of
their building as far as their arm could reach from their window, thereby
giving a sign of the person living there.

I think most architects would be very excited to create community housing.
The great problem is that there is no money not simply in it for them, but
for it at all...and therefore we the people get stuck in crappy houses.
Other countries believe that public housing is just that, housing for the
public at large, and as such devote big resources to it...but our
government seems a _bit_ backward on the issue... but that's another rant.


Sole Worldly Arbiter of Taste,

-brad

(Also, if you get drunk and stumble home from a party to a housing
development, you might very well go into the wrong house.  Not that I
would know.  ;)