Essay Page - 3
When a builder builds a house on spec, he is probably looking for particular things in the plans that he uses.
He knows that he wants to sell the house to a certain market, and he knows that he wants to be able to build
the house with a certain degree of economy. His judgment may not extend very far into the realm of what
makes the house beautiful or comfortable. Cutting edge design and careful attention to detail may well lose out
to acceptability and availability. A lot of raised ranches are still being built every year. Plenty of luan
mahogany veneer doors make their way into brand-new houses.
House plans today are bound to have at least a living room, dining room, and kitchen, and a number of
bedrooms and bathrooms. That these rooms appear in the plan seems more important than whether the
rooms are comfortable, whether appropriate furniture fits into them, what their inter-relationships are, or even
whether they are useful rooms for the occupants of the house. For a builder, what may be most important in
the design of the rooms may be whether he can span their width with a 2X10 instead of a 2X12, or how much
materials waste he will have overall. As a result, cheaply built houses often have cramped rooms with irritating
circulation patterns, inadequate storage, too-small closets, inefficient kitchens, and just plain ugly spaces.
Even if you manage to avoid the practical and aesthetic pitfalls that dot the field of “homebuilding,” it’s all too
easy to drift along with the conventional way of doing things and thinking about things. We expect things to
look a certain way, and these expectations are sometimes so ingrained that they a virtually unconscious. We
all know that leaves are green and the sky is blue, that snow is white and wood is brown. We still draw pictures
in our heads that echo the same kind of iconic representations that we see in children’s drawings. We buy the
products that are offered for sale at Home Depot or Sears. Because builders are like the rest of us, the
ordinary builder house is not likely to surprise us very much. This is comforting, in a way. Who wants to have to
figure out their house? A lot of raised ranches are still being bought every year, and many of them have luan
mahogany veneer doors.
But, if we want to live comfortably, we have to think about our lives and how we want to live them, and then look
at our house and see how it answers our needs and desires, even if it leads us beyond the realm of the
conventional. This requires that we actually spend some time thinking, a hard thing to do today, when radio,
TV and other media wash us continuously with all kinds of information, both aural and visual. When we look at
a house that we want to buy, or the plans of a house that we want to build, we must be able to inhabit it in our
imagination. We must see how it fulfills the needs of our way of living, and, at the same time, we must see how
it opens the possibility of living in ways that are perhaps new to us.
We may find that we want to stray from the conventional.