Architects & Co-Housing (fwd)
From: J . Massengale (J.Massengaleeworld.com)
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 95 08:34 CDT
Since I've been away and quite a bit of time has gone by since Harry
Pasternak's reply to my message, I attach his entire reply below.


Yes. Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright were self-trained. They were also
geniuses AND if you look at their early work you will find that it wasn't
very good or distinguished. Even their genius did not spring full-blown out
of their heads. You don't have to go to school to make good architecture, but
it does take time -- you don't get it right the first time.

BTW, there are many others to add to your list, like Leon Krier and Charles
Platt. The same comments can be made about them. Although everything Leon
does always LOOKS good, he refutes the philosophy behind his early work.


I agree with Rybczynski 100%, but perhaps not in the way you think. All
prospective homebuilders should see the Sunday New York Times Magazine
special issue of a few weeks ago about "Art Houses" -- houses designed by
superstar architects. If you looked at each house individually, you would
probably think each was good. But looked at together, they were a stunning
indictment of architectural fashion, because each house was so aggressively
individual that it was clear the architects all felt that the most important
element of the design was making a personal statement. The fact that the
owners of the houses paid hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars to
live in houses expressing the architects' egos is, I think, absurd. They must
feel like guests in their own houses.


You're right, I don't know Gehl, at least not by name. I may have been to
visit his work, because I visited many award-winning Danish housing projects
in the early 1980s. I thought they were uniformly dreadful, never as good as
older Danish neighborhoods.

One reason for that is that they all had the modernist bias for "mass
positive" architecture over a "space positive" public realm. The staggered
massing that many of them had makes particularly bad public spaces, and
without public spaces that people feel comfortable in, there is no public or
civic realm.

Another reason is that many Danish architects felt that if you make enough
surveys the building will design itself (is Gehl in that group?). Which is
nonsense, of course. I could show you their common design biases, many of
which have no basis in function. 

My biggest problem with co-housing is that so many people equate co-housing
with bad Danish architecture and planning. Co-housing is not a style, but we
often act as though it is (nor was co-housing invented in Denmark - it was
merely re-invented, after a lack of use, and named and systemized there).


The answer, however, is to use good designers, not no designers. And as you
can see, I don't believe you become a good designer in 9 days. I haven't seen
the 80% of all single-family detached houses built in Ontario over the past
years, but if they're like 80% of the houses built here in America the last
14 years, they are a blight on the landscape and the city.

A third-rate building from the early part of this century is a first-rate
design today. We used to work from pattern books by people who knew what they
were doing. The typical builder today pays $500 for a house design, and s/he
gets what s/he pays for. It's part of the reason why so much of North
America, Canada included, looks like sh*t today.


Everything we build outlives us and affects future generations. Everything we
build affects the public realm and is a public statement as well as a private
one. I understand your complaints about architects, but the answer is not
that everyone should build their own house, any more than one would advocate
everyone building their own car (unsafe at highway speeds, polluting...) or
performing open heart surgery. That way lies visual illiteracy and the final
nail in the coffin of the public realm.



P.S.: I don't believe that Canadian architecture schools don't teach
drafting. This sounds similar to the rumor about the international Jewish
Communist banking conspiracy.
* *  *F o r w a r d e d  M e s s a g e * * *
John
Here are a few of my reasons for stating that the homeowner can design their
own home better than an architect:

* Two of the most "acclaimed" architects in the western world are Corbusier
and Frank Lloyd Wright. A large proportion of architecture schools in the
western world are based on their concepts, notions and designs. Neither
Corbusier or Wright trained as an architect! -Corbu was a cubist painter
(like Picasso)-Wright was a drop-out from civil engineering (I believe he
lasted three months).

* Witold Rybczynski, professor of architecture at McGill University and
author of many books on housing and house design (including "Home")  was
interviewed on Canadian Broadcast Radio's morning national show
"Morningside"-the host asked Rybczynski who was the best person to design
ones own home, the architect or the homeowner? Rybczynski replied, the
homeowner!

* In an open design competition held in Denmark for a
cohousing/collaborative/cooperative project- the winning design was by six
undergraduate landscaping students!-the development was built-within months
there was a line-up for people trying to get into that project. The project
was studied by Danish architect Jan Gehl and his students-the conclusion, it
"works" and the people love living in the community.

* I studied with Gehl for a year- his 30 years of  evaluative research 
across the western world - on the psychology, sociology of
cohousing/collaborative/cooperative housing as related to its design choices
-makes him the world authority in this field. How many architects are aware
of his work? ( I suggested Gehl to the authors of the cohousing book, they
had never heard of him.)

* According to the chief building inspector for Ontario, 80% of all single
family detached homes built in Ontario are designed and built by their
owners-over the past 14 years, approximately 2000 of these  people have
attended the Thousand Islands Institute's "The Knack of Home Construction" -a
64 hour, nine day intensive hands-on design and build workshop-yes they leave
and do it.

* Have I done evaluative research?  I was brought in by the Ontario Housing
Corporation, to study severe problems in a variety of
cohousing/collaborative/cooperative projects, all designed by architects.
They had ever problem conceivable-the project with the most problems had won
a national design award - of course, before the folks moved in .

Lastly, people do need to learn  a seven step design process-don't have to be
able to draw (use Broderbund's 3 D Home Architect)-yes, they need to send
someone to take a week long intensive "learn how to build a home" workshop. 

Did you know that many Schools of Architecture in Canada no longer teach home
construction or drafting!?
 
Harry (Harry_Pasternak [at] tvo.org)

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