The Path Back to Quality
A Half-Baked Idea
Many, if not most, people today lament the architectural design and construction quality of the typical newly built home or apartment building, where materials and styles are pasted together with no relation to regional craft traditions, local climate, structure or waterproofing. We “break up the massing.” We build “ransom note architecture,” frenetic buildings with nearly a dozen facade materials like letters cut from magazines.
Here and there a new construction building is built with a calm exterior, well composed, and sensible to the climate and region.
But the Crap Makes Money
The truth is these bad buildings keep being built because they work in the most fundamental way: they rent up and make money. Nice buildings can make money too… but it’s not clear that they are more profitable than crappy buildings. Today with our very tight housing markets, any new apartment—great or crappy—is going to rent. So without negative feedback, we plow ahead building like this:
Wait, but Why?
So why do architects and developers choose to design like this? Every building has a unique story behind its design, but I suspect there a few common themes predominate:
First, actually, some architects and developers like buildings like this, or at least how they look in computer rendering before construction. They are “fun,” “interesting,” “playful.” In the 20th century, the modernism movement transformed elite architectural taste and architectural training such that traditional materials, proportion, and ornamentation fell out of favor. Today too few architects even know how to detail a building with traditional calm proportion and ornamentation.
Second, the evolution of building materials (and building code requirements) means that the exterior skin of the building is basically just ornamentation that can be whatever you feel like. The structural and insulation requirements are all happening behind. Traditional materials such as masonry are harder to navigate through seismic and energy codes, than cheaper stick framing. Advances in engineering mean that fanciful forms are relatively easy to build. Water is held out with plastic wrap, tape and other materials with the facade forming just a “rain screen.”
Third, as elite taste and construction technology and requirements changed, materials and construction labor for traditional construction has become relatively more expensive. Where once there were many finish carpenters who could build you custom windows, or trim out a facade, assembly has moved to far away factories. If you stop commonly working in brick… the brickyards close, masons become fewer, and masonry becomes an expensive specialty and luxury, where once it was common.
The Design Review Temptation
One possible path out of this situation, is the suggestion that we should require new buildings to undergo public design review. The theory being that we can keep those bastard developers from building such ugly buildings if appointed boards (and the public) have the opportunity to weigh in on the design. Faced with the proliferation of crappy, thoughtlessly put together buildings, I can empathize with this impulse. I too wish I were just in charge and could tell the bad developers what to do.
But I suspect this path is a dead end. First, design review boards will be stocked with (politically connected) architects who are just as likely to be devotees of and trained in modernist architecture. Second, design by committee is generally not an effective path to quality design and development. Too many differing voices are hard to reconcile, drag the design in disparate directions, and greatly delay much needed development and homes. Indeed, we have ample evidence of this tendency already, from cities like Seattle, which has ample design review… but whose new buildings are not noticeably better than any other American city.
(The exception may be the Town Architect model adopted in some Traditional Neighborhood Development (TND) communities, where the existence of singular design reviewer (and not a committee) may be able to get better results. I don’t know that such an approach would be practical or politically feasible in a major existing city. I suspect it would be worth trying, but that it would strike many as somewhat despotic and authoritarian to endow the architectural trajectory of a community in one person… however better the result might well be!)
Now, as my subtitle says, I don’t know that I have an answer to this problem. But I do have a half-baked idea.
What if the only way out is through?
What if we build enough that we reach housing abundance, and switch from a seller’s market to a buyers market?
In abundance, my thinking goes, there may be a competitive advantage for good design in a way there isn’t now. The market and public taste will be able to discipline and distinguish good design and construction from bad design and construction. If a significant market advantage emerges for quality, the industry will turn toward making quality easier, cheaper, and better.
A few caveats
This path back to quality through abundance has a certain attractiveness as a synthesis of the New Urbanism and the YIMBY movement. But this medicine is not likely without some significant, undesirable side effects.
The build, baby, build approach I’m suggesting here is a pretty radical departure from the way that we do development today (but is much more like the development environment when ~all of the historic districts we love today were built). Planners, community orgs, and politicians would have to give up a lot of their power to micromanage. Which is going to be especially hard, because…
A lot of crap is going to get built along the way. Both ugly infill boxes, and unsustainable sprawling suburbs. This path is going to be painful. I hate it already.
But we may have to resist the urge to stop the crap, because the crap is actually part of reaching abundance.
And it’s only in abundance that we can restart the market for quality.
Please leave a comment below if you have ideas on how to improve this baking project or whether this baking project is worth saving!
I mean, we could have housing shortages with crap architecture or housing abundance with crap architecture. Seems like the latter still wins
It's counterintuitive, but the idea seems full-baked to me! True luxury apartment buildings—not just the ones where they slap some marble on a countertop—seem to be built to a higher aesthetic standard than those aimed at the mass market. When we reach (and sustain) abundance, the ugly stuff may serve as long-term reminders of the consequences of not building, and old urbanists can dodder around with their grandchildren pointing and yelling, "See what happens to us???"