No matter the season, we drive through neighborhoods and often see inexplicably hideous buildings. “How could they have done that?” mutters across our lips. Whether it is the blank boxes of apartments, or the unending tear-downs of history that are replaced by bloated homes, or just the hundredth brand new “Farmhouse” with a tiny “farm” of mowed grass, thousands of acts of disappointing structures explode in a building boom.
After forty years of helping to make buildings as an architect, I know that there are reasons for ugliness. Of course, you can blame the designer, or the builder, even the homeowners that can be relied upon to buy a home — any home, if the location is good, and the price tag is acceptable. But the numbers of those perpetrators of ugly explode during a housing boom.
Construction lives on a bizarre rollercoaster. Homebuilding projections approached 3,000,000 new units in 2006 and fell to 300,000 units per year in 2009. Today, the United States is at the end of its latest building boom. Less than a year ago the number of new home building starts was at a healthy 1,800,000 annual rate — not the frenzy of 2006, but fully 600% above its nadir a dozen years ago. Now the Census Bureau says we’re at the beginning of the next bust with housing starts slumping 8.1 percent to under 1,500,000 units in September.
No other economic sector has these rapid, reciprocal, manic booms followed by the deep depression of building busts. If the automobile industry or farming or electronics had a 90% rise or drop in sales every few years, job security would simply not exist.
In a building boom, there is more work for architects and builders. This economic sling shot makes those who build buildings suddenly necessary. When these building booms happen there is a rush of validation for those who were often struggling in noble devotion during the bust. The sudden popularity found in usefulness feels like a personal reward for architects and builders, and that overload of opportunity can often become a burden, albeit a paradoxical one: The lack of work architects and builders have during busts makes each job more precious, with each project becoming a focal presence in an office.
But in a building boom there is a lack of time for designers and builders to spend on each new opportunity and that pressure makes beauty harder to obtain. Additionally, building booms make design a commodity without much value in whatever beauty that is possible – so many designers are hired that can simply answer the immediate need rather than go beyond the predictable. So, a building boom results in quick and often ugly buildings that surprise and depress us.
Bashing McMansions is now almost a cliche, but these overblown, badly built homes popped up during the previous two building booms: first the Reagan Recovery Boom brought on by lowered interest rates in the mid-1980’s and then the 21st Century Housing Boom between 2000 and 2008. These poorly built monsters cashed in for their developers by checking off scores of “features” for their sales pitch, and the built results abide in our regrets for this and future generations.
The shallow and cynical marketing of homes in a building boom is not limited to buyer want lists. “Selling a lifestyle” in marketing often just means manipulating buyers with aesthetic triggers. Today, the explosion of black windows and trim, the gratuitous use of “Farmhouse” porches and shed dormers is just as arbitrary as any McMansion. Even though built before this boom, the now accelerated explosion of ever-blanker “Stick Frame over Podium” apartment boxes ignore any possibility of enriching the built environment in favor of providing product to frenzied Building Bubble consumers.
Architects never lead our culture; we reflect it in our work. Whether the culture is in an economic meltdown or an ecstatic reverie, our work is impacted. Beautiful and hideous buildings are constructed every year. The explosion of architectural outcomes in a boom produces more hideousness that we must live with long after the boom fades.
Busts follow every boom in construction, and less will be built in the coming years. More architects and builders will once again lose their sense of entitlement and rediscover the gratitude for the faith of those who trust them with creating a built outcome. But all of us live with the ugliness each boom helps build, long after the irrational exuberance has subsided.
Duo Dickinson is a Madison-based architect.
