Just over a year ago I wrote an article titled “Modern House, Friendly Neighbor?” which was about a house that was going up along my drive to work. It was a very modern style house set in an area consisting of a mix of small bungalow and new larger homes. To this day, this post gets a lot of views and the comment section started a great conversation about scale/ context and the responsibility of clients and architects – if there is even any required. In that post I said I would keep an eye on this project and provide an update at some point as the progress developed.
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This is a picture taken from Google maps, the green house in the middle is the site of the new project – prior to demolition. This picture pre-dates my post from last year.
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This is a what the project looked like on June 20, 2010 when I wrote the original post. There was work going on as evidenced by the dumpster out front. Sadly, I found out after the fact that there was a tour of this project just a few days prior to me writing about the project. If I had known, I would have enjoyed walkig through – I heard from other architects who did take the tour that the house was really interesting.
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So here is the project as it looks today: more than a year later and there hasn’t been any progress on the site. In fact, there hasn’t been anybody on the site doing anything other than removing the dumpster. What happened?
I was really disappointed to see that for some reason, everyone was removed from the project and work halted. When I originally posed the question whether an architect had a responsibility to its neighbors, the comment section on “Modern House, Friendly Neighbor” lit up with mostly negative comments. Out of all the posts I’ve written on this site, this is the only one where the people I worked for expressed some sort of reservation. Luckily, they realized that I didn’t say anything negative about this project, just wanted to know what other people thought. One of my favorite comments from tat original post was left was from Doug, aka “architectrunnerguy” and he summed it up in the following manner:
One thing hammered into us at architecture school (Va. Tech) is to think, not in terms of creating objects, but to think in terms of creating relationships and let the object be born out of that.
The reason so many buildings fail is the relationships fail. For this house, the relationships may or may not work well on the inside but from the outside it’s a disaster (and the inside/outside issue is a relationship right there). As a matter of fact it looks to me like it was designed with the intent of breaking any relation to the neighborhood.
But at least it appears intentional. What’s really more sad is the huge McMansions being built in places like Arlington, Virginia. There, there are these 5000SF 3 story boxes crammed on these small lots surrounded by 1700SF 1 1/2 story bungalows. And of course, the architect slaps some shutters on the windows so the house “relates” to the neighborhood.
Small consulation but at least the HP house is honest.
The comment section on the original post was really good and I can imagine getting a roundtable group together of those people and having a quality conversation on this topic. I was really hoping to provide an update on this project that would help that discussion along but it looks as though something has gone horribly wrong.
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Cheers and thanks for reading Life of an Architect.
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