Housing

An op-ed in today’s New York Times, by Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava of Mumbai, comments on a proposal for a $300 house as a solution for slum-dwellers in Third World countries. The authors correctly criticize the idea. Architects never cease to be fascinated by “minimal” housing (preferably prefab), and a $300 house sounds like the housing equivalent of the $100 one-laptop-per-child computer. But it isn’t. Twenty-five years ago, when I was doing research on slums in Indore, we discovered several interesting facts that contradicted the conventional thinking about how the poor live (available as a report,

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My friend Stan Runyan sent me this photograph the other day. Stan, an architect, collects photos of extravagant houses, what most people call McMansions. Wiki defines McMansion as “a pejorative term for a large new house which is judged as pretentious, tasteless, or badly designed for its neighborhood.” I’ve argued elsewhere that it is not so much size that is an issue as design—or rather, it’s lack. Look at this cabane. It has columns, but they’re too tall. It has gables, but too many of them. It has quoins, but they are too prominent. And the picture windows seem to have been lifted from a 1960s ranch house.

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A photograph accompanying an article in the New York Times on the troubled Irish economy shows a planned community with a street of unfinished houses, their construction halted by the slump. What surprised me was their appearance. Despite being in a different culture, and being constructed out of different materials—solid brick rather than a wood frame—the houses could have been in an American suburb. They exhibited the same traditional domestic features: pitched roofs, dormers, divided lights. Many reports about the bursting Irish housing bubble refer darkly to “McMansions,” but that is hardly the case with these modest houses on what appear to be small lots.

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I recently judged an architecture competition organized by the Southern California Chapter of the Institute for Classical Architecture/Classical America and Habitat for Humanity in Los Angeles. The topic was how to design four houses on a very skinny (typical for LA) ¼-acre lot. The challenge for the architects was not only to accommodate parked cars—this is California, after all—but also how to fulfil home-buyers’ demands in 3-bedroom houses that were about 1,100 square feet. That’s more than 50 percent smaller than the average new home being built this year. Smaller houses are not only more affordable (they not only cost less to build,

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