Building booms create more ugly homes

No matter the season, we drive through neighborhoods and often see inexplicably hideous buildings. “How could they have done that?” mutters across our lips. Whether it is the blank boxes of apartments, or the unending teardowns of history that are replaced by bloated homes, or just the hundredth brand new “Farmhouse” with a tiny “farm” of mowed grass, thousands of acts of disappointing structures explode in a building boom.

After 40 years of helping to make buildings as an architect, I know that there are reasons for ugliness. Of course, you can blame the designer, or the builder, even the homeowners that can be relied upon to buy a home — any home, if the location is good, and the price tag is acceptable. But the numbers of those perpetrators of ugly explode during a housing boom.

Construction lives on a bizarre roller coaster. Homebuilding projections approached 3 million new units in 2006 and fell to 300,000 units per year in 2009. Today, the United States is at the end of its latest building boom. Less than a year ago the number of new home building starts was at a healthy 1.8 million annual rate — not the frenzy of 2006, but fully 600 percent above its nadir a dozen years ago. Now the Census Bureau says we’re at the beginning of the next bust with housing starts slumping 8.1 percent to under 1.5 million units in September.

No other economic sector has these rapid, reciprocal, manic booms followed by the deep depression of building busts. If the automobile industry or farming or electronics had a 90 percent rise or drop in sales every few years, job security would simply not exist.

In a building boom, there is more work for architects and builders. This economic slingshot makes those who build buildings suddenly necessary. When these building booms happen there is a rush of validation for those who were often struggling in noble devotion during the bust. The sudden popularity found in usefulness feels like a personal reward for architects and builders, and that overload of opportunity can often become a burden, albeit a paradoxical one: The lack of work architects and builders have during busts makes each job more precious, with each project becoming a focal presence in an office.

But in a building boom there is a lack of time for designers and builders to spend on each new opportunity and that pressure makes beauty harder to obtain. Additionally, building booms make design a commodity without much value in whatever beauty that is possible — so many designers are hired that can simply answer the immediate need rather than go beyond the predictable. So, a building boom results in quick and often ugly buildings that surprise and depress us.

Architects never lead our culture; we reflect it in our work. Whether the culture is in an economic meltdown or an ecstatic reverie, our work is impacted. Beautiful and hideous buildings are constructed every year. The explosion of architectural outcomes in a boom produces more hideousness that we must live with long after the boom fades.