In a recent Facebook post my friend and colleague Steve Mouzon, author of Original Green, posed an important question:

"Why is it that when there is an attempt to recover a lost tradition, that which is built is not the tradition but rather a cartoon of that tradition --have we lost the ability to see clearly?"

I think our habits of building are fractured and out of sync. We can't seem to capture the rhythm of the mechanics of design and construction well enough to transcend a stilted mechanical approach. The people who built the traditional houses of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had habits of building that were reasonably intact. We try our best to be fluent in a language that, if not dead is at least seriously wounded. While some struggle to produce drawings that communicate well, others struggle to read them well and then launch ahead sure that they've "got it". We trust our brains when we probably have little reason to. Everyday tradeoffs in building present themselves with reliable frequency. We are not wired to be obsessive or hyper-vigilant when performing carpentry or ordering lumber. At some point, you believe that you have a handle on the task at hand. Even hearing someone explain that "We do this because..." can feel abstract and a somehow disconnected. Skipping over the surface of a tradition feels pretty profound, so you don't know that you are supposed to be diving deep. We are thrilled at building something that seems darned good compared to today's usual habits of building, so we can't see a more sublime experience just a few steps away.

Imagine that you are a housewright in 1889. You spent the winter producing window sashes, doors, moldings in your barn with the collection of hand planes and the Asher Benjamin handbook you inherited from your dad. In the spring you lay up a stone basement and start framing a house. When it comes time to install those windows, doors and trim your grasp of to how the pieces go together makes so much more sense than someone setting windows and coping trim today. Whether in the design studio or the field, it is rare for us to get Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 Hours in on the full arc of the work, on the habits of building. So, yes, Steve we have lost the ability to see clearly.  These days we see as if through a glass darkly. We need the discipline and structure of craft and habit to recover our sight. Today the flow that emerges from that discipline and structure is not available to most. On a good day some talented people provide us with some well-intended choreography of a dance few of us have ever seen performed by someone with real mastery.

 

Writing is hard.  Sarah makes it look easy.  Take a look at how she describes the mechanics of a team exercise from the Incremental Development Alliance's Small Developer Boot Camp.  She lays out that rather technical set of tasks and rolls right into the real world limitations of the moldering zoning codes you find in most cities these days.

Accidental Urbanist

My favorite quote from Sarah:

"Everyone has sexy dreams, but as a developer it’s important to maintain a long-term, monogamous relationship with math."

Fast Company put up a story that won't go away.  This sloppy clickbait piece does not help the cause of building housing at a price that working people can afford.

Here is the FastCompany piece: It costs $20,000 but it is nicer than yours

Here is a local piece From Arts Atlanta that puts the cost of building two of the $20K houses at  $135,000

So what's the deal?  The folks running the Rural Studio in Auburn University's Architecture Program set a goal of producing a house with a mortgage payment that someone living on Social Security in Hale County Alabama could afford.  That's how they arrived at $20,000 as the price of the house.  The target price.  The aspirational price. The price they hope to someday achieve.  They have not done it yet.  Not once.  It would be good to refrain from giving people the impression that they have delivered the house for $20,000, if in fact they have not. Link to the Rural Studio 20K House

What they have managed to do is generate a lot of press that give the casual reader the mistaken idea that the 20K House actually only costs $20K and the Fast Company piece is just the latest bit of lousy fact checking to reinforce that misconception.  Their idea is a well-intentioned one with a couple of important missing pieces. The Rural Studio site breaks their aspirational $20,000 number down into $12,000 for materials and $8,000 for contracted labor and profit.  Houses and mobile homes for that matter in Hale County need a municipal sewer connection or septic tank and a municipal water connection or well.  The cost of drilling a proper cased well, installing a pump , and building a septic system in Hale county is between $12,000 and $15,000. So even if $8,000 is enough to cover a builders labor cost, workmans' comp. insurance, general liability insurance, office overhead, and profit on the house (and it isn't) the project is $12,000 over the aspirational $20K budget if the homeowner does not have to pay for the land it will sit on.

An important lesson to teach young Architects in any studio course is that you should not leave large numbers out of a building budget.  Math is unforgiving and cannot be erased with good intentions or a lot of PR.  Maybe there is no such thing as bad publicity.  If that is true, I guess the Rural Studio Folks won't mind this blog post.