It's a mystery, sometimes, why some new homes looks as if they "belong" where they are, "fitting in" with their surroundings, and others seem to appear out of place and awkward. By the same token, some new home floor plan designs seem to "flow" in logical ways and others seem "chopped-up," confusing us as we tour them. Worse yet, do you sometimes feel, no matter how many builders' home you tour, they all end up seeming indistinguishable from one another? When you see new home communities whose homes seem better sited, designed and constructed, it may very well be that an architect was directly involved in their creation. The truth is, however, many homebuilders have dispensed with the services of architects except for custom revisions or site-specific changes that must be made to the cookie-cutter variety of production home designs.

I find it curious how architects and new production homebuilders can co-exist with a modicum of interaction, and I have come to realize that architects are not a mainstay in the production home process. The answer could lie within both camps, with the overriding factor being a colored perception of one another's disciplines. Architects and builders began to specialize and diverge long ago, robbing the builder of a valuable resource and the architect of a much-needed expression and platform for his profession, according to Boston-based architect Jeremiah Eck, FAIA, in an article discussing this dichotomy in the winter, 1999 edition of Architecture Boston.

"It probably started when some medieval master builder was just too busy to both design and build that next cathedral," says Eck. "Architects and builders became . . . opposite sides of the construction coin-and they've been flipping each other to see who wins ever since."

In the long term, the chasm between production homebuilders and custom, architect-involved homes is now immense. With between one and two million new homes being built every year in the U.S., architects are used for only a small percentage of them, with homebuilders relying, instead, on the "off the shelf" plans that somehow get consistently repeated from neighborhood to neighborhood primarily because they "worked."

Developers and homebuilders will be the first to admit that risk-taking is not on their list of favorite activities when they have millions of dollars in capital invested in a production home area. They seem to see architects as unnecessary luxuries, when they can routinely and successfully build and sell homes without having to pay to have architects involved. But builders may also realize, down deep, that they may be shortchanging the buying public by offering home designs that lack innovation and diversity. For many of us who want to see even production homebuilding heightened into more of an art form, something must happen to bridge the gap between the practical artist (the architect) and the creation of this art (the builder).

The Architecture Boston article uses the analogy of the mass introduction of foreign cars to the U.S., when once only the domestic-built "sleds" graced our freeways in great numbers. Many of us Baby Boomers remember (even us girls) being able to recognize and name every car on the road in our childhood, just as we thought IBM and Xerox were the two computer and office machine companies in the land. Those times have indeed changed, however, and now it's difficult to track of all the domestic and foreign cars, computers, and products laid before us.

So, must production homebuilding metamorphose into neighborhoods that suit our diverse needs, lifestyles, and wishes, while preserving our natural surroundings for future generations. Continuously slapping warmed-over versions of the same houses into homebuilders' fancy brochures won't help this phenomenon take place any sooner, however.

In the article, Eck suggests several ways for the "twain" to meet and for production homebuilding to become the next industry for change and innovation. He at first ideally suggests that not just architects, but all of us, get an early art education, forcing us to produce objects with shape, proportion and color that stimulate right brain experiences. "Once you've done it yourself, you're more likely to appreciate the process of making beautiful objects," he says, "and you'll appreciate better houses. "Without such an education, you will come to rely on advertising slogans and images to make up your vision of a house." On a more advanced level, says Eck, it's time for students of architecture to study the single-family house again, and is heartened by the existence of three such studios recently offered at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

In a more immediate sense, Eck encourages architects to offer various kinds of residential architecture services with a variety of fee structures, for "consumer" clients, who want practical, generic floor plan designs with universal appeal. He also calls on architects to emphasize their talent at controlling the quality/cost equation. Says Eck, "As unresponsive design and poor construction in the suburbs become more evident, value-in both good design and good construction-is of increasing concern to consumers."

Eck admits that bankers, brokers, builders and borrowers don't seem to see the value in working with architects on most single-family homes, and most architects don't know how to provide the services needed for them.

He calls for a 'new cooperative order' to arise from the ranks of the current generation of homebuilders and architects. This order could create a spirit of symbiotic goal-reaching that makes sense to both camps, and the ability to understand how keenly both are needed for the benefit of new homebuyers everywhere to design, site, and build the quality homes of tomorrow.

Published: June 21, 2000

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A veteran of the real estate and homebuilding industries since 1986, Dena Kouremetis first joined Realty Times as a new homes writer in 1998. Since then, she has authored four books, written consumer columns on new homes issues for websites and newspapers all across the country, contributed to builder trade magazines, appeared as a guest expert on several radio shows and even created a ten-chapter podcast for LendingTree.com’s homebuilder website, iNest.com, now available on iTunes, entitled Uncharted Waters; Navigating the Purchase of a New Production Home. Kouremetis recently joined her local Folsom, CA Coldwell Banker office as a broker associate while continuing to write for the real estate industry. For the past three years, she has been training real estate agents for both the resale and new homes industries, putting her experience, research expertise and gift of expression to work to help others entering the business.