My brother has decided he wants to enter the design field as well now. Not as an architect, but in the creative side of advertising- which, of course, will require a lot of graduate school on top of his German lit degree. It’s been interesting watching him create the materials he is going to need to get into a design program as I am simultaneuously working on materials that will get me a design job. The emotions of the process that run through him are much more acute because of their newness- sometimes I miss that excitement.

They tell you that as a designer, you are much like a bottle of wine- you only get better with age and experience. They tell you to not expect to do any good work before the age of 50. But as you age, the emotional excitement dies as well, and the process becomes more like a well-worn sweater. It’s still warm and beautiful, but not your Sunday best. You can switch up your process, much like changing your sweater, but the fact remains that it is still a design process, something you have learned to work through over and over again. Just like a sweater is still a sweater.

Is design better with age? You certainly learn to channel and control your inspiration to a much greater extent, gleaming more out of each morsel and perfecting the outcome from experience. But there are less morsels, and they are in constant danger of becoming stale. The trick seems to be changing your process often enough so that your design does contain enough of the acute emotion that comes with novelty while also improving upon your old bag of tricks. Perhaps you do grow better at this balancing act with age. I do know that I would never prefer to go back to the emotional rollercoaster of being a new designer now that I have a grasp on the strength and control that comes with a strong process. Here’s hoping age works.

I don’t think I could write a blog about architecture without mentioning the current nationally-scaled housing crisis.  Architects, although occupying only a nominal portion of what is mainly a speculation/development driven market, are still affected by this bust, and it would be silly to ignore it.  For those of you living under a rock, most of the nation is currently experiencing a major contraction in the housing market: i.e., there is way more available than can sale, particularly in the McMansion sector (speculative houses valued at $500,000 or above).  Rapid speculation due to rising prices and easy-to-get house loans ballooned the market for a good 15 years, and with recent economic slowdowns in other sectors, the bubble simply burst this past year.  Normally this wouldn’t be so problematic- housing bubbles have burst before- but due to profound changes in how the housing market fundamentally works, it is now a huge problem.

It used to be that when the economy was good, and people wanted new houses, the local contractor went out and built a few.  During bad times, this contractor hunkered down, doing smaller renovation-type projects until the market picked back up. Architecture firms in the housing market, much like the old independent contractor, operate on a similar basis both then and now.

But while architectural practices in the housing field have remained much the same, contractor practices have not.  Development companies have gone national, building massive subdivisions and planning projects years in advance.  When markets slow, they can’t just shut down- they are too big and corporate to do so.  Toll Brothers, Inc.,  is one such company- because they cannot stop building until the next market boom, they are having to sell their goods at a financial loss, hoping the economic boom returns before complete bankruptcy (for more information).  In the meantime, their goods continue to flood an already overflowing market.

This, unfortunately, is only part of the problem.  The other half, and potentially the more crippling “oops” in this whole debacle pertains to the loan practices that made both this bubble possible and are causing its collapse to be truly scary to the financial world. In the past 15 years, loans were easy to get, easier than they had ever been.  Both banks and those that approached them were certain of the paybacks that could come out of the rising home prices, so they threw much of the previously-relied upon caution to the wind and went for it.   Unfortunately, once the market started crashing and people realized the money they owed was higher than the current worth of their property, they defaulted on their loans just as casually as they had sought them previously.  In the meantime, their loans had been bundled, bought, and sold so many times by financial organizations that no one really know who holds the defaulted loans anymore.  Because this can mean potential billions of dollar losses to these financial giants, people are scared, and the fluctuating stock market and constant new reports are reflecting it.  ”Subprime,” a word that refers to the type of home loans that are creating this crisis, has recently been voted 2007’s word of the year by the American Dialect Society.  In other words, it’s a really big deal that could potentially have far-reaching affects.

Luckily, unless the “worst nightmare” scenario is reached and the economy completely collapses, architecture firms will not be heavily affected by this debacle.  Most architects are not in the business of speculation; rather clients approach them to build high quality, custom work.  It is a niche market which operates slightly separate from the mainstream market, with a certain clientele.  Unless a massive economic downturn occurs that vastly reduces the economic stability of even these niche clients, the architectural home market should remain stable.  And with all the economic checks placed in the system since the massive crash of 1929, this really shouldn’t happen to that scale.  Even if the market turns and the need for architects shrinks and firms have to shut down even as much as they did in the 1970’s, the crisis currently hitting the overly corporate speculative home market should be avoidable.  Architects recovered from the last housing bust, albeit slowly, and they can again.  In fact, the fluctuations in the speculative market may in fact help the architectural home market in the long run as people realize the financial benefits of investing in a unique, well-built and thereby more marketable home.

So while I certainly am concerned about the effects of this subprime speculative fiasco, I have to privately smile and think, “This could be good for architecture.”