knobmaker's Journal: Good House Building

Good design beats hard work (Score:2) by knobmaker (523595) on Sunday March 16, @07:14PM (#5525705) (http://handmadeknobs.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday February 25, @11:14PM)

The main factor in the longevity of buildings is not the quality or type of construction, given reasonable competence on the part of the builders. It's whether or not the people who live in the houses are happy with their dwellings. If they are, they will maintain them lovingly and they will last. If not, they will rapidly decay. For an example of the latter, taken to an extreme, see public housing like the infamous Cabrini Green. Using exactly the same construction techniques could have yielded buildings that would have been considered wonderful places to live.

To that end, I can recommend a terrific book called A Pattern Language. In short, this book is a collection of "rules" for making communities and buildings as livable as possible. The rules are distilled from centuries of vernacular architecture-- in other words, homes built by those who would live in them, rather than by architects working to somewhat theoretical design parameters. To a large extent, these rules were developed based on the kinds of buildings that have survived many generations.

It may seem unscientific to base a home design on these simple rules, rather than by some organized system of thought (like Bauhaus, to give a really dreadful example of design detached from the requirements of real people.) But once you read some of these rules, their validity seems unimpeachable. Just as one example, see if you don't agree that this rule is a very good one: a room should have natural light coming from at least two directions. Think about the submarine rooms you've been in that have only one set of windows at one end of the room. Compare this to rooms that have windows in at least two of the walls. Which room would be more pleasant to live in?

Houses that are well-loved endure. All else decays rapidly.