[Porsche-O-Phile]

As an architect I have to agree with what's been said. What has happened to our open spaces and urban landscapes is pretty sad. The last 20-or-so years have seen precious few good designs and more than enough junk, sprawl and poor planning.

The guilty parties (as I see it) are firstly buyers, but those of us in the design field aren't immune. Buyers create the problem by being fickle, cheap, and undervaluing the design and architectural character of the housing in which they want to live. Context becomes unimportant, function becomes unimportant, harmony to existing surroundings is overlooked or an afterthought at best and preservation of existing features or neighborhood characteristics is completely absent in the vast majority of cases. All they care about is "is it big?" or "will my wife like the colors?" or "can I get a 25%-a-year return on it?" It's ridiculous. And developers are all-too-willing to step in and "meet the demand" for such ill-concieved ideas. The designs reflect the society's values - cheap, big, bland, dumb.

I also partially blame the architectural profession for not taking a more aggressive role in providing quality design solutions for "average" housing. If more people realized that they really COULD have a custom-designed home for about the same as what they pay for some POS cookie-cutter developer garbage McMansion, they might be a little more receptive to the idea. But very little is done on the parts of individual practitioners or the AIA (American Institute of Architects) to make people aware of it. Naturally developers have no interest in making this information available to the public.

Secondly, most architects have little or no interest in doing residential work (except for high-end residential). There's very little fee in it for the amount of work required. Residential clients are typically very fickle and wishy-washy and unclear/vague on what they want. Having to re-work a design five or six times because a client "changes their mind" is not uncommon. Although contracts stipulate that this is "extra services" in most cases and subject to additional fees, a lot of times owners simply refuse to pay it, it corrodes a good working relationship existing to that point, etc. It makes the entire process ugly and uninviting and "not worth it".

One possible solution is for architects to force themselves to offer their services to less-than-"high-end" residential projects occasionally either on a pro-bono basis or low-fee basis - for the betterment of society and not necessarily maximizing firm profitability. In this way, we would end up with some built work out there that is better than the typical junk being thrown up and it would speak for itself in terms of the value of architectural services. Long-term it would undermine the developer-driven garbage supply-side of the equation and offer a meaningful alternative to buyers. Everyone would benefit.

I plan to do this down the road when I get my own practice going. I may not be able to do it all that often, but even doing one or two residences a year, offsetting costs with "bread-and-butter" commercial work to pay the bills and keep the firm financially sound certainly seems viable and in the best long term interest of the profession, and society at large.