My street runs east-west. In the 1960s when one was judged by the size of one’s house, rather than its quality, it was important to put the breadth of the house facing the street to at least give the appearance of a large house. So my front windows face west and the back windows face east.
Only two tiny windows face north. This is especially noticeable in July.
How I wish some giant scoop could pick the whole house up and turn it 90 degrees so all those western windows could face north. Too bad if only a narrow side faces the street.
Then there is the inside design. When I first moved in, 20 per cent of the area of the house was devoted to corridors, if one counts the unnecessary front porch. Since then various walls have been moved to reduce that percentage, but there is still more corridor than needed.
The house is brick veneer. The builders put in no wall insulation and only perfunctory roof insulation. Putting it in later took more time and money than if it had been done during building.
The windows were all single-glazed and it cost a lot more than the extra glass to double glaze them. It would have been a trivial extra cost to have had them double-glazed at the outset.
There are houses like this all over Canberra. Worse, they are still making them like it.
What I need is a post-hoc architect with a magic wand. Using exactly the same amount of bricks, mortar and timber and with the tiny addition of some insulation and glass, the post-hoc architect could create a house with more usable space and one easier to heat and cool.
I once lived in an architect-designed house. It was at a bizarre 45-degree angle to the block with precisely measured eaves. No sun came in during summer, but during winter the kitchen, lounge and dining room were drenched with it. In a four-bedroom house the extent of corridor was the width of two bedrooms plus the width of the third bedroom’s door.
You got a lot of bang for your bricks.
I also know of a house down the coast designed by an architect. People write all sorts of things in the visitors’ book about it being “romantic”, “splendid”, “an extraordinary ambience” and so on. They don’t even know why. It gets the best of ocean view, wind breaks, northern sun in winter, and so on. Every square metre of space has function. There are (ital) no (end ital) corridors. It is beautifully designed as a DINKS coast house because some intelligent person gave the architect a thorough brief.
Intelligent design has added huge extra value to the bricks and mortar, which in this house are very modest indeed.
I see many places in Canberra and down the coast that could do with a post-hoc architect and the big scoop machine to reorient them. Sad, isn’t it, that the first owners did not have the wit to get it right in the first place.
This point was made in a different context by the president of the ACT chapter of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Graham Humphries, at the annual award night on Saturday.
He said, “”Good design is as much a product of a knowledgeable client as it is a talented architect.”
He said the natural environment had had a good run, but the built environment had not got the same groundswell of community awareness.
“”It is amazing how much bad design is tolerated and even encouraged because of not understanding what is possible through good design,” he said.
Humphries was making a legitimate criticism about the Federal Government’s museum contest. In this case the client does not know what it wants. It has not provided an adequate brief, nor time to produce rigorous adequately developed designs. The thing should have been run in two stages. A general design competition and then an invitation to a short list to develop the detail.
On the domestic scale, one of the rewards of having a regular run or walk route around the suburbs is you see extensions, dual occupancies and rebuilds going up. People do some very dumb things with their bricks and mortar. Invariably they are the ones with no architect’s plaque outside — people who have “”saved” money by getting a draftsperson or builder to knock up some plans.
I don’t like the idea of compulsion to have an architect for domestic construction or the evil of the consequent architects’ monopoly, but there must be some way of encouraging better design (even some design at all) in domestic construction — perhaps, a reduction in building inspection fees or a fast-track reward for architect-supervised domestic projects. There are even grounds for an impost or tax on non-architect-supervised projects because ultimately the whole community’s resources are wasted.
As Humphries says, “”The design of our built environment is a most critical issue as it determines how effectively we use ever diminishing resources to sustain ever-increasing populations.”
How true. For there no such thing as a post-hoc architect or a big scoop machine to save us from the huge costs of bad design. Once built in haste the opportunity and money are lost, and you regret at leisure