On Mon, 27 Sep 1999, Ralph Walter wrote:

> Let us pray that standards have not fallen so low that new tract housing (or
> old tract housing, for that matter) is designed by Architects.  Although some
> old codger may have gotten conned into stamping  drawings by the carload, you
> can be sure that the design was done by some house designer, developer,
> developer's spouse, or other highly evolved life form.

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'm not an afficionado of tract houses, far from it, but as I understand
it, those floor plans must satisfy a whole gauntlet of legal and economic
and practical constraints.  Friends of mine who were looking to purchase a
yet-to-be-built house discovered (ground not yet even broken for the
foundation) that only very minor modifications to the plan could possibly
be accomodated without some very expensive trade-offs.

Designing tract houses may not be as sexy as designing a sports arena or
corporate headquarters, but it sounds like demanding work.

---
Lawrence Kestenbaum, [log in to unmask]
The Political Graveyard, http://politicalgraveyard.com