Why Designing a Person’s Home is the Most Challenging, Thrilling Task an Architect Can Face

Homes may be the most powerful projection of architectural value. Because shelter is essential for all of us, the home is architecture’s universal function. We’re all experts on what our own home must be, to us.

But architects often have a different view of home. Twenty years ago—during the recession before the last recession—I remember hearing an architect declare that he could earn a living designing houses until “real work came along.

universal reality of a home, the one place that everyone needs and knows, offers up value for architects, and it has nothing to do with style. There are extreme variations found in how homes are presented, from the most cynical pandering of homebuilder marketing, to the lazy thoughtless style-branding by realtors, to the dismissive prejudice of most academic or “serious” architects who discount “vernacular” (i.e. not modernist) homes.

Homes offer lessons to designers because they’re at once infinitely personal and culturally pervasive. They can be as simple as a glass of water, or as complex as an eight-course meal.

I thought it might be valuable to lay out the slippery realities that I have discovered designing, building, writing and talking about homes for the last 40 years:

• Homes are uniquely focused on beauty and expression, as well as protection: we do not blindly make burrows, hives or dams.
• Home is the one building everyone uses, everywhere: there are no options to having a place to sleep.
• Homes are uniquely controllable by a single person: the size of most homes can be conceived, evolved, detailed and built by one person (not so with almost any other design type).
• Homes have huge scale variations: there are very few puny prisons, huge chairs, or micro-hospitals, but houses can be as tiny as 200 square feet or as obscene 20,000.
• Homes are the one building type found in virtually every environment: they have relevance in both extreme density and absolute isolation.
• Homes can be built by their occupants or cost thousands of dollars per square feet: from favelas to “McMansions,” the same function can be almost infinitely interpreted.
• Homes are protection, but their deterioration and costs are an existential threat: each miscalculation is personal, each defect threatens those who use it.
• Homes are the largest set of clothing we own: no other building is as personal.
• Homes can be completely idiosyncratic or completely anonymous: but the most mass-produced structures in the world can also have the most intense personalization.
• Homes engender anger and love: the patrons care more about this building type than any other.
• Homes are some combination of mirror, portal, or wall: they uniquely symbolize their occupants’ devoted images and beliefs, invoking, evoking, and provoking, like no other building.