How much did you say that was going to cost?
This post was written by my friend Bob Borson, a Dallas Architect. He's also a blogger and writes Life of an Architect. He's entertaining, informative and nearly as prolific as I am. Check out Life of an Architect and give him a warm welcome please. Thanks! --Paul
Modern design, which includes cutting-edge structure, is experiencing a dramatic surge in recognition. More and greater of our customers are coming in and requesting present day designs with out understanding what it means to have a residence inside the "current" style. You can locate contemporary design everywhere now --the background to every vehicle industrial being made, to the checkout stands at your local grocery shop.
"I wasn't looking at that issue of Women's Fitness, I was looking at this issue of... Dwell. Besides, she's too fit for my taste anyways"
There is also a big disconnect between what it expenses to build a current residence as opposed to what humans assume it expenses. Modern houses, with their readability regularly fallacious for simplicity, are extraordinarily high-priced to build.
In the decade after World War I, current architects were interested by the "rational" use of modern-day materials (metallic and glass maximum appreciably), the concepts of functionalist making plans, and the rejection of ancient precedent and ornament. There changed into a huge belief that constructing bureaucracy should be determined through their capabilities and substances in the event that they were to gain intrinsic importance or splendor in modern-day phrases.
Okay - so put down that awesome issue of DWELL magazine - where the pages are adorned with the manicured images of kick ass looking houses populated by uber-cool, yet tragically forlorn, dual income homeowners. I am going to give you the starter kit of classic rules for modern architecture:
? Adoption of the system aesthetic
? Materials and useful requirements determine the very last product
? Emphasis of horizontal lines
? Specific the shape of the constructing
? Rejection of ornamentation - the simplification of shape elimination of "pointless detail"
and the maximum enduring, and maximum quoted rule of all:
• Form follows function
What does this all mean to the forty-somethings that are available trying a contemporary residence?
Nothing … yet. I don’t need for them to understand the maxims of modern architecture --I’m just happy they care enough to hire an architect. My job is actually a lot more fun when I get to go through this educational process with them. This is a period when everybody loves each other --we’re meeting for coffee, I’m loaning them books on Marcel Breuer , Richard Neutra , Le Corbusier and Mies van der Rohe . Things are going great and I am their hero --leading them from the dark ages and the soul-consuming blackness that is the gothic builder home and into the light.
When you introduce ?Fee? Into the verbal exchange, things begin to turn like a beef sandwich ignored within the solar.
Client: “It’s going to cost what? It’s a concrete box with glass walls on two sides”
Me: “But we’ve emphasized the horizontal lines”
Client: “There’s only 7 rooms!”
Me: “Form follows function”
Client: “I’m not getting you”
Me: “uummm, we’ve adopted a machine aesthetic and expressed the structure?”
These are the critical moments along with your customer that separate the wheat from the chaff. It would be so much simpler to take the customer to a present day style house that became poorly (or cheaply) built where each single wrong issue of craft is exposed. The ability level wanted from the contractor to devise in advance and alter for dimensional "nuances" so that the joint pattern of the tile aligns with the window layout and that there isn?T any remnant pieces of leftover tile just earlier than you get to the corner. Ever observed that the openings in brick partitions are the precise equal length of the home windows? That no bricks needed to be reduce? That intended the placement of each window in that wall was flawlessly placed months earlier than any bricks even confirmed up on web site. These things take skill to execute and just like the whole lot else, skill expenses cash.
I’m not trying to say that contractors who build traditional style houses don’t have skill. What I am saying is that the skill level needed to build a house without ornamentation is higher than traditional houses because there aren’t as many ways to hide errors or “nuances.” How many traditional houses have exposed concrete floors? If you are going to be covering them up with a wood parquet floor, why pay extra to get the concrete floor perfectly smooth and level? If you are going to be slathering texture on the walls, why bother floating out the entire surface with gypsum to make it flat. Ever wondered why those old Fox & Jacob homes from the '70s had popcorn texture on the ceilings? Aaahhhh --it's all becoming clearer isn't it?
The best rule of modern design is probably one you’ve heard before but you thought it meant something else:
Less is More