house size - my rules

okay, lets see if this can get me into a few good arguements!my square foot standards for house size: Tiny < 750 Small 750-1500 medium 1500-2500 LARGE 2500-5000 immoral and irresponsible >5000

I would perhaps make an exception to the last category for adopting a large quantity of children.

I like to throw about the term "functional square feet"  I hate it when people come to me with a list of specific room sizes.  I also don't mind designing a large house when I know it's going to be filled with children and in-laws and  parties.  If you try to design too small, you get into the issue that the house may not be flexible enough.  Hopefully the house will be around a few hundred years and who knows what families will live there.  If you design a 1200 square foot house that fits the current client perfectly, what happens 20 years down the road when somebody else adds on?  I would rather focus on the idea that a good house should: 1. last 300 years 2. use very little energy to maintain / heat / cool 3. be flexible enough in plan to adapt to a wide variety of occupants, not just the current ones. 4. be responsible in materials usage.  No granite from half way across the country, No non FSC  tropical wood etc. The actual size is secondary to all these.

December 09 update: When I travel to Maine for family shindigs, I find myself looking at all the "housing stock" between here and there. about 30% of houses are under 1200 s.f. or so and have 1.5 bathrooms max. I then start to think about all the large happy families raised in these small homes, kids sharing bedrooms, waiting for the toilet etc. Clients who come to me - whether they have any money or not - all would be horrified at the thought of their kids sharing a room or sharing a bathroom with their kids or "guests" or not having an "away room" (thanks Sarah Susanka) It is the sad state of where our culture has taken us. I suppose one could say that being an architect isolates me from the lower financial half of society.

Wilmington Pergola

Pergola in Purgatory - Brattleboro Reformer article.

The neighboring town of Wilmington just erected a lovely little pergola in a park where an old building burned down at the main intersection.  Wilmington is a minor tourist trap on the way to Southern Vermont Skiing complete with historic buildings repurposed as restaurants and souvenier shops.  Some folks think that the new pergola looks, well, new.  As if the vinyl siding, all the shop signs and the monster Rite-Aid don't look new.  so I wrote a reply to the reformer article.

"I was sad to see the Reformer article on the petition to remove the pergola in the park in Downtown Wilmington but I wasn't surprised..  People in Vermont are, on average, as conservative architecturally as they are liberal socially.  I am also not so ignorant that I don't understand that anachronism and nostalgia sell and if your town is a "tourist trap" you need a certain amount of it.  In Wilmington, if you stand on the corner at the intersection of  9 and 100 where the pergola is and you ignore the cars, the touristy signs and forget about the Right-Aid up the road, use some imagination and squint a bit you can see a bit of old Vermont.  People also come to Vermont for Art and the pergola brings to Wilmington a much needed liveliness that tells visitors that Wilmington cares about art and not just kitsch."

net zero? my house?

It just occurred to me that my own house is almost net zero.  We use no fossil fuels.  We heat with wood grown and havested on our own property (by me - gas in the chain saw) and use a modern high eficiency wood stove.  we use a few hundered dollars of additional electricity for the radiant ceiling panels, mostly when we are away for a few days in the winter.  There is no other heat system and we don't need one.  I have about r40 fiberglass in the attic and our walls are 2 x 4 with (not very intact) fiberglass batts. windows are single glazed with aluminum storms and an additional layer of plain glass by me.  no low e.  In short,the house is insulated to an average level and does not meet code for new construction.  We heat our hot water and cook with electricity and use 500 to 700 kilowatt hours per month.  With the addition of photovoltaic panels, we could achieve net zero!

More on Process

I think I need to be more clear up front about how I work on the early stages of a project.  People expect floor plans from an architect.  That's fine, they should. But floor plans are just a part of the deal. I won't say a small part but floor plans tend to be relatively flexible.  It's easy to get them perfect.  It is much more work to get the overall form of a project correct and I tend to dive into that with ferocity early on.  This means a  lot of hours up front working on form.  After all these years of experience, the floor plan feels like an undercurrent while I work on what the new house or addition will look like and think about light and space and mood and in general, try to explore all the inherent potential in a particular approach before I trash it or put it on the shelf for further exploration and development.  This is a fairly time consuming part of the project that I think most architects don't pay enough attention to. (The ones that do eventually rise to the top)  I hate to visit a job site during framing and realize that I missed a great opportunity to capture the view in a certain way or take advantage of morning light in the kitchen in April before the leaves come out.  Or worse, visit a job site and have the client or builder point out the missed opportunity.  The goal is for someone to walk into the project when all is said and done and simply "get it" and understand that this is what it's all about.

New Home Energy Priorities

A lovely little quote lifted from BSI-014 "Deciding on Energy Priorities when Building New" from Buildingscience.com

Hence, if you doubt energy prices are going to triple over the next 25 years, and have a hunch that PVs will soon get cheap enough to compete with grid-supplied coal power, you might choose to skip the ground-source heat pump, R75 attic insulation and R25 basement insulation, HRV, and LED lights in your next house design. If your hunch is wrong, and energy prices double over the next ten years, or if natural gas becomes very expensive, the owner has a number of significant, low-cost, and easy-to-implement energy-saving upgrades available. For around $5000-7500 all of these changes, except the GSHP, could be implemented in a typical 2200 square foot house. And perhaps just as importantly, ensuring that the design includes a good area of sloped unshaded south-facing roof provides the future occupant of the house the potential to add PV and/or solar hot water.

Charging for Architectural Services

Recent polling by me of friends and via online group discussions as well as some good old fashion research about compensation for architectural services resulted in some interesting data. It seems the traditional method of billing a percentage of construction cost, usually 8 to 15 percent, is not all that common anymore. Much more common is a fixed fee based on an hourly guesstimate or percentage of construction cost or just plain hourly billing. Or some combination thereof. Some architects also bill on a $ per square foot basis although this seems to be more the territory of drafting services companies. It also seems that architects make a very low hourly wage, particularly if not billing straight hourly due to the nature of architects to want to get everything perfect. You look at a project and think “I should be able to do that in 250 hours and estimate a number based on three hundred hours then spend 500 hours on it and bill for 310. Young architects seem especially susceptible to this. Under charging is a common hindsight of many young but now established firms. I know from experience that only about half to two thirds of my own working time gets billed out. I spend lots of time researching materials and methods, networking, swearing at my computer, replying to e-mails and phone calls, learning new software, checking out potential jobs, site visits, blogging… before I know it I have only 20 billable hours in a week to show for what seems like a long and intense week of work. My own method is to bill hourly at a rather low hourly rate (for an architect) which allows me to do small simple small-town-architect local work and, for more complex projects I add a very small percentage of construction cost which brings my price to a more normal level and helps to compensate me for some of the hours I would never otherwise bill for.

Grumpy Musings of a bike riding architect

I will probably read this post tomorrow and pull it. I just came in from a midday bike ride during which I thunk things.  Before my ride I was poking around the Thermotech windows web site.  Thermotech makes very nice triple glazed, orientation tunable (heat gain) windows that work very nicely in our primarily heating local climate.  I would love to use them on a project but they cost 1/2 again as much as Marvin Integrity windows which are also very good windows but only double glazed and designed to block solar heat gain.  So on a typlical 300 or 400k house that means 30-40 k in windows versus 20 to 30k. This is the grumbly architect part: Clients typically come to me with a budget and a non-negotiable wish list. Sometimes (usually) the two are incompatible.  Always the client says "I want to go green!"  Always the first thing to go is the triple glazed windows, not the third bath or the granite countertops.   When it comes down to it, very few people are really willing to "go green" if it affects their desired lifestyle.

Graduate School

Graduate School

In these days of reconnecting with former classmates via facebook and linkedin I discovered that many of them later went to grad school. Most of us were fried by the time we graduated and there was little if any discussion of more schooling. I have often thought that if I were to go back to school, it would be to study estuarine biology and ecology. Definitely not more architecture. A large part of my practice involves furthering my education (read: un-billable hours) I spend a great deal of time keeping up with the rapidly changing field of residential design. The science is changing on all levels from products and detailing to sustainability and energy use issues to how we as architects actually convey what we design. Many architects and firms have their heads in the sand and follow the models they were taught back in the last century. I think the architects that will emerge at the top in coming years have to be a different breed.

My version of graduate school, in retrospect, was the half-dozen years I spent carpentering after college. It was a good compliment to architecture school and the required internship. At 10 to 13 dollars per hour – no benefits and weather dependant, it also left me rather in debt (similar to graduate school) while my friends started working at larger firms and made much larger salaries.

It's the Economy

Business is generally good for me despite the economy.  I have work enough to keep me busy but I do get nervous.  Right now I have four houses on hold for one reason or another.  If everybody calls and says "go" next week, I will be in big trouble. Also, if nobody calls in the next few months I will be in big trouble although the phone does always seem to ring.   I have a colleague working on getting Vermont Simple House up and running. (Vermont Simple House is my fledgling and not yet up-and-running stock plan business with huge potential)

Cotton Mill Office in Brattleboro

The new office in the old Cotton Mill has proven to be an asset.  It is a much better place to meet clients than the cafe. It is very quiet and has very few distractions.  The building is filled with industry, artists and dogs but is amazingly peaceful and quiet.  My office is good for one person but may feel tight for two.  the windows are big and face west and north to Mount Wantastiquet.  We (my wife and I) are busy writing a business plan, partly because we need to and partly for the yearly business plan competition put on by the BDCC. it concerns the question of the growth of my business and how to structure that growth.  big scary stuff.

trending modern

I have been noticing a trend in my contact with clients and potential clients in the past several years.  the statistics mean nothing due to the small numbers involved. It seems that older people are often more adventurous and less conservative than younger people when it comes to architectural style.  young couples send me messages from thier I-phones while driving around in their Prius's saying " eek! - too modern looking" and the older folk are saying " what if this wall were entirely glass?