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 The Design 
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 A Reappraisal of the 
 Architect's Role 
 
 ROBERT GUTMAN 
 
 Sponsored by the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts 
 
 Publishing Center 
 for Cultural Resources 
 New York 
 
To Sonya, John, and Liz 
 
 Copyright © 1985 by the Publishing Center for Cultural Resources. All rights 
 reserved. 
 
 This publication was produced under a cooperative agreement between Robert 
 Gutman and the Design Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. 
 
 The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily 
 reflect those of the National Endowment for the Arts or the Publishing Center for 
 Cultural Resources. 
 
 Frank S. M. Hodsoll, Chairman 
 National Endowment for the Arts 
 
 Most of Chapter 4 is included in Robert Gutman, "Architects in the Home-Building 
 Industry," in Judith R. Blau, Mark LaGory, and John S. Pipkin, eds., Professionals and 
 Urban Form (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1983), pp. 208-223. 
 
 SOURCES OF ILLUSTRATIONS: 
 
 Figure 1, George Ballis. Figure 2, U.S. Superintendent of Documents. Figure 3, Mark 
 Glen. Figure 4, courtesy of Barry Berkus, ALA Figure 5, Scholz Master Builders, Inc. 
 Figure 6, reprinted from Architectural Record, December 1944 © 1944, by McGraw- 
 Hill, Inc., all rights reserved. Figure 7, Venturi, Rauch and Scott-Brown, Architects. 
 Figures 8, 24, and 26, Robert Gutman. Figure 9, courtesy of Robert A.M. Stern 
 Associates. Figure 10, Herman York, AIA. Figure 11, reprinted from Architectural 
 Record, May 1960 © 1960, by McGraw-Hill, Inc., all rights reserved. Figure 12, 
 courtesy of John Henderson, Inc. Figure 13, courtesy of the National Association of 
 Home Builders. Figure 14, Moore Grover Harper, PC. Figure 15, from the book 
 Arkitektur der Zwanziger ] ahre in Deutschland by W. Muller-Wulckow, published by 
 Langewiesche Konigstein (West Germanv). Figure 16, courtesy of the Louis I. Kahn 
 Collection, University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Historical and Museum 
 Commission; photograph by Gottscho-Schleisner. Figure 17, Harris Publications, Inc. 
 Figure 18, Garlinghouse, Inc. Figures 19 and 20, John D. Bloodgood, AIA. Figure 
 21, courtesy of the National Home Planning Service. Figure 22, Mason Andrews. 
 Figure 23, Fleetwood Enterprises, Inc. Figure 25, Sears, Roebuck and Co. 
 
 Illustrations on the cover and title page are from drawings for St. James Townhouses, 
 Cincinnati, Ohio; Michael Graves, Architect, drawings bv Keat Tan. 
 
 Designer: Sue Bishop 
 
 Printed by: Princeton University Press 
 
 Distributed by: 
 
 Publishing Center for Cultural Resources 
 
 625 Broadway, New York, N.Y 10016 
 
 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 
 
 Gutman, Robert. 
 
 The design of American housing. 
 
 1. Architects and housing developers— United States. 2. Housing development 
 United States. 3. Architectural services marketing — United States. I. National 
 Endowment for the Arts. Design Arts Program. II. Tide. 
 
 NA7115.3.G87 1985 728'.068 85-6325 
 ISBN 0-89062-196-9 
 
Contents Foreword 
 
 Preface 
 
 Acknowledgments 
 
 VI 
 
 I. Housing Production and Architectural Employment 1 
 
 II. Independent Architects and Development Housing 13 
 
 III. Architects and Nonmarket Housing 28 
 
 IV. Stock Plan Services and Plan Shops 35 
 
 V. Captive Architects 45 
 
 VI. Design-Build 51 
 
 VII. Conclusion 55 
 
Foreword This book is the first in a series to be published by the Design Arts 
 
 Program of the National Endowment for the Arts on issues facing 
 the design field today. The purpose of the series is to stimulate a 
 discussion of design arts issues that relate to the quality of the built 
 environment, especially to those elements in the environment that 
 affect our daily lives — the houses we live in, the offices we work in, 
 the streets we walk on, the furniture we use, the buildings that sur- 
 round us, the parks where we seek recreation. 
 
 Like any art form, the design arts depend on new ideas and new 
 ways of looking at the familiar. Each of the monographs in this new 
 series will analyze issues from a fresh point of view — a point of view 
 that may be highly individual, may challenge our comfortable as- 
 sumptions, may provoke controversy. But the aim of the publications 
 is not to be controversial but to search for a deeper understanding 
 of the way things really are and to challenge others to join in that 
 search. 
 
 We are pleased to launch our new series with the publication of 
 Robert Gutman's study of the role of architects in American housing. 
 Thoroughly researched and documented as the study is, we believe 
 that the opinions expressed here will nevertheless challenge many of 
 the standard assumptions on that topic. Readers may disagree with 
 the book's conclusions, but if it enables them to look at housing from 
 a new perspective, to better understand the problems surrounding 
 the architect's role, or to come up with some new ideas about how 
 designers and architects can have a greater effect on housing, then it 
 will admirably have fulfilled its purpose. 
 
 Adele Chatfield Taylor, Director 
 Charles Zucker, Deputy Director 
 Design Arts Program 
 National Endowment for the Arts 
 
 November 1984 
 
PrefaCG This monograph discusses the participation of professional architects 
 
 in the housing industry in the United States. The principal conclu- 
 sion of the study is that architects are indeed active in home- building 
 design and related operations, although the forms their practice takes 
 differ very much from the idealized description of the architect's role 
 that is common in professional circles. The various forms of housing 
 practice are the main subject of the monograph. However, since the 
 conditions of architectural participation are affected by the way in 
 which housing units are produced, the structure of the housing in- 
 dustry in this country is discussed in the first section. A concluding 
 section summarizes the findings of the study and suggests some is- 
 sues for the profession to examine as it considers its future role in 
 American housing. 
 
 Although the study makes use of information obtained from the 
 literature dealing with the history of housing and architectural prac- 
 tice in the United States, the principal source material was a series 
 of interviews conducted with architects who represent the different 
 types of practice now current in the housing field. These interviews 
 were supplemented by discussions with housing producers, officials 
 of professional design associations, and members of government 
 agencies with responsibilities in the housing field. 
 
Acknowledgments I want to thank the Design Arts Program of the National En- 
 dowment for the Arts for supporting this project; and in particular 
 Michael Pittas, the former director of the program, whose idea it was 
 to initiate it. In addition, I am grateful for the encouragement and 
 good advice, especially during the final stages of the project, of three 
 other officers of the program: Charles Zucker, the deputy director; 
 Margot Villecco, special adviser to the director; and Marcia Sartwell, 
 the editorial director. 
 
 Several students have been very helpful in gathering background 
 information that relates to the history of housing and the involve- 
 ment of architects with this building type. The assistance of Daralice 
 Dankervoet Boles, Mason Andrews, Natalie Shivers, and Ted Hopf 
 was unusually important to me. Barbara Westergaard's good judg- 
 ment on editorial matters is a skill that I have relied upon in many 
 previous projects, and I appreciate her assistance again on this mon- 
 ograph. 
 
 Finally, a special word of thanks to Sue Bishop, Sally Inda, and 
 Judith Martin Waterman of the Princeton University Press for their 
 help in the production of the monograph. 
 
 May 1984 
 
Housing Production and Architectural 
 
 Employment Housing in the United States has traditionally been produced by 
 owner- builders. Land has been cheap compared to other modern 
 nations, and timber and other necessary materials have been plentiful 
 and available in close proximity to housing sites. For most of its 
 history the United States was a largely rural nation, and this condi- 
 tion fostered the development of a single- family, detached house form. 
 Owners building their own homes were able to take advantage of 
 the cheap land and materials. Although it is difficult to come up with 
 accurate statistics for the percentage of housing that was owner-built 
 before World War II, it is safe to say that because of the prevalence 
 of farming communities and suburban settlements, half the housing 
 starts in a typical year before 1900, and perhaps as many as 25 per- 
 cent between World Wars I and II were produced in this fashion. 
 Information collected by the Census Bureau since 1964 indicates that 
 even recendy 15 to 20 percent of single-family housing production 
 was owner- built. 1 
 
 Because they can use their own labor and that of their family and 
 friends — what the housing field refers to as "sweat equity" — owner- 
 builders can reduce their costs substantially. Some of the more diffi- 
 cult jobs, such as wiring, plumbing, or interior 
 finish work, are often subcontracted. The por- 
 tion of single-family housing production that 
 is owner- built is smaller when the economy is 
 expanding because then more people are able 
 to afford the housing that the large commercial 
 builders produce for sale. 
 
 Owner- builders rarely hire an architect to 
 develop a design for their house or to supervise 
 construction. Paying an architect the standard 
 fee of 12 percent for an individual house de- 
 sign would be inconsistent with the owner- 
 builders' goal of getting the most space for the 
 least cost. Owner- builders sometimes draw up 
 their own plans from the drawings they find in 
 the house and garden magazines or the popular 
 science and mechanics journals; more often they 
 rely on stock plans which can be purchased from 
 firms that advertise in the house magazines or 
 
 Figure 1 . California farm workers constructing their own housing. Each family contrib- 
 utes 1,100 hours to the group enterprise. The units take six to eight months to build. 
 Projects of this kind were begun in the early 1960s under the sponsorship of the Amer- 
 ican Friends Service Committee and are still continuing in California with the support 
 of Self-Help Enterprises, Inc. 
 
 1 U.S. Department of Commerce, Construction Reports: Housing Starts, Series C-20 
 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, November 1983), p. 10. 
 
which they order out of catalogues available at lumber and building 
 supply dealers (see Chapter 4). 
 
 A second standard category of housing producers consists of the 
 owner-sponsors. Unlike the owner- builders the owner-sponsors do 
 not use their own labor in consmiction, but hire a professional builder 
 or contractor. Owner-sponsors perform only a managerial function. 
 They choose the site and the design and assume the responsibility 
 for raising the capital to underwrite the land purchase and construc- 
 tion. Most of the great houses, villas, and palaces that are illustrated 
 in Bannister Fletcher's historv of architecture or displayed in coffee- 
 table books about country houses fall into this category. So do the 
 houses built bv more affluent families today. We would therefore 
 have to consider as examples of owner-sponsored houses most of the 
 individual houses that figure in design award competitions like the 
 annual awards of the American Institute of Architects (ALA) or Pro- 
 gressive Architecture. 
 
 The owner-sponsored house, therefore, constitutes a tremendously 
 significant type for sustaining new ideas in the profession. So often 
 today, as in the past, it serves as the vehicle through which innovative 
 formal and technical concepts are first explored and through which 
 thev come to influence architectural theory and the application of 
 theory to other building types and larger projects. As a market for 
 architectural sen ices, however, the design of owner-sponsored indi- 
 vidual houses is not so large as some might infer from the fact that 
 over the past twenty- years approximately 15 percent of all single- 
 family housing falls into this category. 2 Although there is more de- 
 mand for architects from this segment of housing producers than 
 there is from owner-builders, many owner-sponsors do in fact use 
 stock plans, just as owner-builders do. 
 
 For most of the United States' history- probably one-half or more 
 of the owner-sponsored housing consisted of multifamily or congre- 
 gate dwelling units, most of them until World War I two- or three- 
 family houses, but now largelv apartment houses, garden apartments, 
 and row- house complexes. Some of these were built for resale, but 
 most were intended for rental. The owner-sponsors included not just 
 speculative builders and real estate investors, but also government 
 authorities, philanthropic foundations, and limited dividend corpo- 
 rations whose aim was to provide dwellings for low-income groups 
 and other special populations that could not afford the housing pro- 
 duced by the private market. 
 
 The owner-sponsors of multifamily housing were the first impor- 
 tant group of American housing producers to hire architects. In die 
 mid-nineteenth century, these architects doubled as contractors and 
 builders, a standard combination of roles at that time. Toward the 
 end of the century, architects had begun to separate themselves from 
 
 2 Ibid. 
 
the building business in an effort to improve their reputation with 
 the public. One consequence of this movement for professional rec- 
 ognition was that home builders went ahead on their own, and ar- 
 chitecture became a profession identified almost exclusively with the 
 design of major public works, such as museums, city halls, universi- 
 ties, churches, and, of course, grand houses for the wealthy classes. 
 The demand for architects' services in the housing field picked up 
 again, however, when, under the influence of the European modern 
 movement around the time of World War I, the profession empha- 
 sized its interest in space standards and building safety and when the 
 institutionalization of housing codes in cities created the need for 
 experts who could interpret them and also deal persuasively with 
 local building commissioners. The confidence shown in the archi- 
 tects' expertise by housing reformers who were suspicious of the 
 commercially oriented builders also helped to enlarge the market for 
 their services. These nonmarket projects have continued to involve 
 architects to the present day. 
 
 Architects also gained valuable experience in dealing with housing 
 as a building type toward the end of World War I when they de- 
 signed housing for defense workers; during the New Deal, when 
 public housing authorities and the Federal Housing Administration 
 were first set up; in World War II when they were again involved in 
 housing for defense workers; and right up to the present in the var- 
 ious projects subsidized by government agencies. The know-how ac- 
 quired in these projects proved applicable to the work required by 
 the developers of modern suburbia, even though the suburbs were 
 made up of single- family, not multifamily, units. Architects also ben- 
 
 Figure 2. A group of fifty -five dwelling units built by the US Housing Corporation in 
 Waterbury, Connecticut in 1918 for workers in defense industries. The units contained 
 a mix of detached and semidetached houses and were situated within walking distance 
 of the plants. The architects were the Connecticut firm of Murphy and Dana. 
 
efited when some of the principal managers who ran the governmen- 
 tal and other programs for low-income groups during the 1930s and 
 1940s moved out of the public sector into the private real estate 
 industry and transferred their reliance on professional architects to 
 their commercial operations. 
 
 There are several reasons why private architectural firms are hired 
 by owner-sponsors to work on their larger projects. Owner-sponsors 
 of medium-sized developments in particular are unlikely to have in- 
 house the knowledge and skill required to deal with the variety of 
 issues that arise during the design and construction of apartment 
 houses or other large rental complexes. These issues range from ques- 
 tions about the feasibility of different sites to the mix of dwelling 
 units that will enhance rentability. Although some bigger developers 
 who build mainly apartments are fairly sophisticated in analyzing 
 these issues, they too can benefit from the wider range of experience 
 possessed by the firms that specialize in designing these building types 
 and are generally familiar with similar projects in other parts of the 
 same city, in other regions of the United States, or in Europe. Even 
 if the architectural firm is not a housing specialist, it will have access 
 to the experience of other professional firms and real estate specialists 
 which it can then integrate for the benefit of the client (who can use 
 it to supplement the information he obtains from other developers). 
 
 Owner-sponsors of nonmarket housing almost always hire archi- 
 tectural firms. Indeed, this is the area in which the professional tends 
 to have the most control over the project and which, next to the 
 individual house for an affluent client, represents the best opportu- 
 nity for architects to explore original approaches to housing. The 
 strong position of independent architects in this field of housing be- 
 gan with their design of the defense workers' communities built by 
 the US Housing Corporation during World War I. The government 
 had originally intended to use staff architects to design these units, 
 but the AIA was able to persuade the Corporation that the work 
 should be done by private firms. The policy thus established was 
 eventually adopted by other government departments that later be- 
 came active in the housing field, such as the Emergency Housing 
 Corporation of the New Deal, the Housing and Home Finance 
 Agencv, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. 
 Although the federal government continues to employ staff archi- 
 tects, their functions are mainly to develop program requirements, 
 recommend codes and other administrative regulations, and review 
 the work of private firms to make sure they meet official standards. 
 The importance of private firms in nonmarket housing design has 
 persisted right up to the present, when government agencies are less 
 likely to do their own contracting and construction supervision, and 
 instead use private developers to produce so-called turnkey projects. 
 
 The community presumably benefits too when architects are hired 
 by owner-sponsors. Licensed professionals are trained to consider the 
 
relationship between a specific new housing complex and the existing 
 housing stock in the neighborhood in which construction takes place. 
 This does not mean, of course, that professionals necessarily agree 
 about what constitutes the right solution, but including an architect 
 on the design-building team should result in the debate being con- 
 ducted with greater concern for relating the new construction to the 
 existing urban fabric. Architects are also likely to make sure that the 
 building is constructed according to high technical standards and 
 that the project conforms to prevailing codes, although we also know 
 that in view of the complexity of modern projects and the great num- 
 ber of experts who must come together to form the building team, 
 there is room for slippage. Issues of this sort are always more critical 
 for the kind of large project owner-sponsors are likely to produce 
 today, since apartment houses and row-house complexes can quickly 
 ruin or upgrade the quality of a neighborhood. 
 
 The involvement of architects in owner-sponsored housing is also 
 testimony to the profession's aggressiveness in developing this mar- 
 ket for its services. In many ways multifamily housing is a more 
 attractive field in which to operate than the single-family suburban 
 house. The projects present more of a challenge to design ingenuity, 
 they test the professional's competence at integrating a wide range 
 of program issues, they make a bigger mark on the landscape, and 
 they are generally more profitable. Owner-sponsors of large projects, 
 whether they are private developers, nonprofit organizations, or gov- 
 ernment agencies, generally intend to continue to own their units 
 and therefore wish to maintain the economic value of their housing 
 over the long term. They are therefore more concerned about the 
 matters that also concern architects — the effect of the project on the 
 city as a whole, its durability, and its appeal to occupants — than are 
 most other housing producers. Therefore the budgets for these proj- 
 
 Thousands 
 of units 
 
 2,500 
 2,250 
 1,000 - 
 1,750 - 
 1,500 
 1,250 
 1,000 - 
 
 750 - 
 
 500 
 
 250 -| 
 
 
 In structures with: 
 F1 one unit 
 
 | two units 
 
 ^ three or more units 
 
 — T— 
 
 1909 
 
 1918 
 
 1936 
 
 I 
 
 1945 
 
 I 
 
 1963 
 
 1 
 
 1972 
 
 United States annual housing starts: 1900-1981 
 
ects, even sometimes those built by public authorities for low- income 
 tenants, are often generous enough to give the architect a chance to 
 use better materials, add amenities, and improve the quality of in- 
 door and outdoor public spaces. 
 
 Unfortunately for the profession's opportunity to realize some of 
 its ideals through housing design, owner-sponsorship constitutes, as 
 I have said, only a small part of housing production in the United 
 States today. This is so especially for single-family houses, whether 
 detached or in row-house form, practically all of which today are 
 built for immediate sale by merchant- builders. But the conclusion 
 applies to housing production generally both because single-family 
 housing dominates the production system and because an increasing 
 portion of apartment units are built to be sold as condominiums. 
 Considering only single-family housing production, owner- builders 
 and owner-sponsors together constitute probably no more than 30 
 percent of the market; and for housing production as a whole, the 
 figure cannot be over 20 percent and is likely to be lower. This sug- 
 gests that for the housing market considered as a whole, the mer- 
 chant-builders and manufacturers produce 80 percent of the units. 
 
 Merchant- builders do just what their name implies: they sell at 
 retail houses they themselves build. Thus they differ from real estate 
 brokers who sell houses but do not usually build them, and from 
 ordinary builders, who construct houses under contract for owner- 
 sponsors. The merchant- builders' product is not designed for an in- 
 dividual client or purchaser but in order to appeal to a class of po- 
 tential owner-occupiers defined according to income level, preferred 
 life style, and the decor popular in different geographical regions. 
 Housing manufacturers also sell finished units, but unlike the mer- 
 chant-builders they do not ordi- 
 narily develop and sell the land on 
 which the unit will be located. 
 Many of the manufacturers were 
 originally builders of mobile 
 homes, who have expanded their 
 operations to produce units that are 
 designed to stay in one place. Many 
 of the manufacturers also produce 
 modular units, and parts for units, 
 such as wall and ceiling panels. It 
 is difficult to distinguish the share 
 of the market held bv merchant- 
 
 Figure 3. In an effort to upgrade the image of the depressed South Bronx area in New 
 York City, the Development Corporation chose to replace the abandoned tenements .\n<.\ 
 gutted apartment buildings with a suburban-style settlement of single-family homes, 
 called Charlotte Gardens. The houses themselves are made from two prefabricated mcxl 
 ular units shipped from a factory in northern New York State and are joined together 
 on the site. The factor)' is owned by architects who also design the units. 
 
builders from that held by manufacturers. We do know that in the 
 realm of single-family housing, completely finished factory-made units 
 constitute between 15 and 20 percent of total production. 3 But when 
 it comes to differentiating the remainder, however, so many big mer- 
 chant-building firms now own factories in which they make their 
 panels and other parts, that it is hard to discern the boundaries be- 
 tween the merchant- builder and the manufacturer. The trade associ- 
 ation of home manufacturers claims that they now produce one-third 
 of all dwelling units in the United States, 4 but this estimate is based 
 on the portion of units that include major manufactured elements in 
 their structure. 
 
 The merchant- builders and manufacturers are the contemporary, 
 albeit more responsible and efficient, version of those much maligned 
 organizations, the jerry-builders and spec builders. Unlike their pred- 
 ecessors, however, almost all merchant- builders include the land along 
 with the units they construct, whereas as recently as forty or fifty 
 years ago, land development was carried out by land speculators and 
 subdividers from whom the spec builders purchased lots. Some of 
 the major merchant- building firms, such as Levitt, Ryan, Centex, and 
 US Homes, not only develop land and manufacture precut parts for 
 the units, but design and plan the project, provide the appliances to 
 go into the house, and, of course, handle the marketing and sales. 
 Increasingly, the merchant- builders and housing manufacturers also 
 warrant their products and arrange to service them for a year or 
 more. 
 
 Many of these characteristics of the merchant- builders and manu- 
 facturers follow from the scale of their operations. In 1938, when 
 the first survey of merchant- building was undertaken in the United 
 States, there were only 33 home builders who constructed as many 
 as 100 units in a year, but in 1976, a survey conducted by the Na- 
 tional Association of Home Builders (NAHB) reported several thou- 
 sand in this class. There are now also a dozen or more firms that 
 produce 10,000 or more units per year in a mix of single-family, 
 row-house, and apartment construction, and between 300 and 500 
 so-called housing giants, with annual sales of over $10,000,000. Some 
 of the big housing manufacturers, such as Skyline Homes or Fleet- 
 wood Enterprises, have been selling 25,000 to 50,000 mobile homes 
 annually, thus exceeding the production rate of even the giant build- 
 ers who sell land along with the house. If companies are to function 
 at this scale, they must rationalize their operations, which means being 
 able to control most of the constituent elements that influence the 
 quality of their products and the price at which they can be sold. 
 
 From the perspective of the architectural profession, the domina- 
 
 3 Arthur D. Bernhardt, Building Tomorrow: The Mobile/Manufactured Housing Industry 
 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980), p. 491. 
 
 4 A. M. Watkins, The Complete Guide to Tactory-Made Houses (New York: E.P. Dutton, 
 1980), pp. 5-7. 
 
tion of housing production by these organizations has both positive 
 and negative effects. The positive side is that the large builders rep- 
 resent a tremendous potential market, which the profession has be- 
 gun to tap. This was not so when the merchant-building industry 
 first began to flourish during the 1950s. As Edward Eichler describes 
 the activities of his father's firm, "few merchant- builders used archi- 
 tects or took them seriously. Plans were drawn by draftsmen or a 
 building designer who specialized in such work. Their role was largely 
 technical and limited to putting builders' ideas and decisions in a 
 form suitable for bidding, construction and government process- 
 ing." 5 The smaller builders did not even use their own designers but 
 relied mainly on stock plan services, sometimes redrawing the plans 
 before submitting them for local government approval (see Chapter 
 4). Gradually, however, this situation has been changing. In 1969, 
 some fifteen years after the period described in Eichler's account, a 
 survey of NAHB member firms indicated that almost 30 percent 
 used the services of independent architects. By 1979 the national 
 average among member firms was over 45 percent, with the giant 
 builders making even greater use of independent architects. 6 There 
 is, however, no evidence that comparable trends exist among the 
 home manufacturers, who generally rely on their in-house staffs, which 
 are made up of trained but unregistered architects and interior de- 
 signers. 
 
 There are several reasons merchant- builders make increasing use of 
 independent architects, one of which is the emergence of a group of 
 architectural firms that understands the special constraints under which 
 this type of client operates and is able and willing to respond to 
 them. These very constraints, however, and the demands they place 
 on architectural practice, constitute for some architects a negative 
 effect of the merchant-builders' growing domination of the housing 
 field. Because these builders encourage the integration of all aspects 
 of their operation, the architectural firms that specialize in working 
 on merchant- built housing tend to become assimilated into the builder's 
 production system. Even when the architects remain nominally in- 
 dependent, the builders call the tune on a broad range of operations, 
 including the so-called design prerogative — the right of the architect 
 to determine the form and style of the dwelling unit. For those who 
 believe that architecture is not possible when architects lose control 
 of the design, the increasing power of the merchant-builder is ob- 
 viously anathema. The resulting adversary attitude of architects to- 
 ward the housing industry so beclouds the consciousness of some 
 members of the profession that it leads them to conclude that archi- 
 tects design no more than 5 to 10 percent of the housing constructed 
 
 5 Edward Eichler, The Merchant Builders (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982), p. 86. 
 
 6 Michael Sumichrast, Gopal Ahluwalia, and Robert J. Sheehan, Profile of the Builder 
 (Washington, D.C.: National Association of Home Builders, 1979), Table 70, p. 139. 
 
in the United States. 7 This is true, of course, if one insists on limiting 
 "architect-designed" to those cases in which architects have the kind 
 of autonomy over design that often happens when housing is owner- 
 sponsored. If, however, one admits a broader definition and includes 
 the considerable use merchant- builders make of architects in helping 
 or consulting on a wide range of issues that emerge during the design 
 and production of mass housing, then a fair estimate is that about 
 one-half of all housing involves the use of independent professionals 
 in a design or supervisory role. (Incidentally, using this definition 
 one finds that in the 1940s some 20 to 25 percent of housing in- 
 volved the use of architects, suggesting that architects have doubled 
 their involvement over the last forty years.) 8 
 
 The changing characteristics of housing types are also a factor in 
 increasing architects' involvement in housing. As Montgomery has 
 argued, the rising costs of land, construction materials, and house 
 maintenance over the past two decades have forced merchant- build- 
 ers to shift away from single- family detached houses on individual 
 quarter- to half- acre lots in the direction of higher density projects, 
 including cluster plans, row houses, and even garden apartments: 
 
 Figure 4. By placing the house itself close to one side of the lot and building a fence on 
 one or more of the other boundaries the architect and developer can construct units at 
 higher densities and still retain the character and privacy associated with single-family 
 housing. This example of such a "zero-lot-line" development is located in the San Fran- 
 cisco Bay Area. The architect was Barry Berkus of Santa Barbara, California. In 1982, 
 Money magazine referred to Berkus as "probably the most imaginative and influential 
 designer of high density housing in the U.S.'" 
 
 7 A characteristic example of this view is presented by Kenneth Frampton in "Polemical 
 Notes on Architectural Education" (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban 
 Studies, 1971). Frampton cites other sources that argue the same point. 
 
 8 Miles Colcan, American Housing, Problems and Prospects (New York: Twentieth Centurv 
 Fund, 1944), p. 97, n. 4. 
 
10 High density housing defied the simplicities of surveyors' plats and plan serv- 
 
 ice stock dwelling designs. In single-family detached house sprawl the space 
 between dwellings and the perimeter of the lots gave a margin of error nec- 
 essary to make the old design system work. When dwellings were tightly 
 clustered there was no room to play . . . Dwellings joined tightly together in 
 multiple-unit buildings or town houses needed a lot of professional care to 
 fit them to each other and to the land. There was no room to fudge discrep- 
 ancies in site grades. Planting could not remedy privacy problems among 
 dwellings placed cheek to jowl. 9 
 
 Montgomery has suggested, in addition, that builders have be- 
 come more sophisticated, partly in response to an elevation in the 
 level of taste of the consumers who participate in the mass housing 
 market. Builders have also become increasingly concerned about the 
 image of the builder or developer as a person oblivious to questions 
 of environmental quality. The greater use of architects has been one 
 result of this soul searching, to the point that in the mid-1960s de- 
 velopers in California were advertising the names of their architects. 
 
 A change in management thinking within the home-building in- 
 dustry has also had a role. The housing industry has for a century or 
 more been unusually sensitive to shifts in general economic condi- 
 tions, and small builders have tended to undergo a series of bank- 
 ruptcies and revivals during the course of their careers. The capital 
 structure of the large merchant-building firms has enabled them to 
 introduce advanced management techniques and thereby stand a bet- 
 ter chance of surviving. In the search for economies, many builders 
 tried to provide design skills in-house, but it has proved to be more 
 efficient in weathering economic turbulence to hire design services 
 only when they are required for a specific project. 
 
 Private architects have also benefited from the fact that despite die 
 emergence of national firms, home building is still tied to specific 
 localities with their particular site conditions and regional vernacu- 
 lars. This is a major limitation on the ambition of the industry to 
 imitate manufacturers of odier expensive commodities, such as au- 
 tomobile producers. The Chevrolet intended for the California mar- 
 ket is more or less the same as the Chevrolet sold in New Jersey, but 
 a Kaufman and Broad house built in the Bay Area is likely to differ 
 in floor plan, house type, and decorative style from a house the same 
 company builds in the New York or Philadelphia metropolitan areas. 
 (The mobile home manufacturers are also constrained by regional 
 markets, but largely because the cost of transporting a modular house 
 or a finished unit from factory to site is such a large portion of the 
 price of the unit itself.) Although the large merchant-builders and 
 developers continue to use xhcir in-house staffs to formulate the basic 
 layout of their projects, they have found it advantageous to employ 
 
 9 Roger Montgomery, "High Density, Low-Rise Housing and Changes in the American 
 Housing Economy," in Sam Davis, ed.. The Form of Housing (New York: Van Nostrand 
 Reinhold, 1977), p. 101. 
 
11 
 
 locally based architects as well. Architects with a regional base are 
 generally familiar with the locally popular styles and dwelling types; 
 more than that, the local firms are attuned to the requirements of the 
 municipal and state codes and regulations and often know personally 
 the officials who have to pass on project proposals and plans. 
 
 The demand for independent firms has also been enhanced by the 
 increasing competitiveness of the mass housing market. No longer 
 are most builders in the very favorable market situation that prevailed 
 during the 1950s, when the combination of pent-up housing de- 
 mand following the war, the rapid pace of family formation, and the 
 lack of restraints on the building process made it possible to sell 
 almost any new house. Buyers have become more sophisticated, there 
 are more builders large enough to operate efficiently, and it is prov- 
 ing more difficult to produce units at a price that large numbers of 
 prospective purchasers can afford. This increased competitiveness means 
 that it is tremendously important for builders to be alert to any in- 
 novative ideas that can give them a market edge. Many firms fear 
 that if they rely only on the expertise available within their own 
 organizations, they will miss out on some of these developments. 
 The use of private architects for specific projects, or on a retainer, is 
 seen as insurance against this danger, and the architects are of course 
 delighted to serve in this role. 
 
 I have focused on the conditions internal to the merchant- building 
 and manufactured housing industry that have helped generate the 
 
 Figure 5. Scholz is one of the large merchant- builders with operations in different re- 
 gions that constructs single- family houses using the same floor plans but varying the 
 facade to correspond to the vernacular domestic architecture of the area. 
 
12 
 
 market for private architectural firms. But it is also important to ac- 
 knowledge that, like the owner-sponsors, the merchant- builders, de- 
 spite their need to keep production costs down, have been forced to 
 hire architects to help them deal with external pressures. These pres- 
 sures include the higher standards of quality for houses established 
 by government authorities, the increasing power of consumerism, 
 especially in the last decade, which has forced builders to assume 
 more liability for their products; and the increased strictness of the 
 review process for gaining subdivision approval and building per- 
 mission. Sometimes merchant- builders in their response to these 
 pressures have exhibited a rather cynical use of professional expertise. 
 There are many cases on record of merchant- builders and developers 
 who employed high-powered, well known, and respected private de- 
 sign firms during the early stages of the review process so as to es- 
 tablish their virtuous intentions, and then dumped their outside ar- 
 chitects once approval was granted. But even this approach has become 
 less common, in part because builders have been able to find archi- 
 tects who were useful to them in subsequent stages of the building 
 process, but also because local governments caught on to this trick 
 and made final approval contingent on builders fulfilling their prom- 
 ises. 
 
 Thus some of the changes that have taken place in the system for 
 producing houses in the United States, from owner-building and 
 owner-sponsorship to merchant-building, have worked to the advan- 
 tage of the architectural profession. The demand by big builders for 
 the services of private firms has certainly increased. The growing im- 
 portance of manufactured housing, on the other hand, has not re- 
 sulted in any increase in the profession's participation in home build- 
 ing. Housing manufacturers have sometimes sought the advice of 
 private architectural firms for developing new products or for eval- 
 uating the products they develop 
 in-house, but these experiments 
 have not generally resulted in a 
 continuing use of private practi- 
 tioners. The major reason for this 
 difference between merchant- 
 builders and housing manufactur- 
 ers is probably connected to the fact 
 mentioned earlier — that the units 
 are not site specific. Only when die 
 dwelling unit has to be fitted to 
 the land and to the conditions pre- 
 
 
 
 F -* 
 
 fjjjf 
 
 
 
 ^3|jE 
 
 Figure 6. A minimum cube house designed by Walter Gropius in 1944. It was typical 
 of the work of modernist architects looking to the expansion of the single-family housing 
 market after World War II. The Gropius proposal could be built quickly using the pit- 
 fabrication system he and Conrad Wachsmann invented, which they marketed through 
 the General Panel Corporation. 
 
13 vailing in a particular region do the skills represented by the architect 
 
 seem important to the manufacturer. There is some confirmation of 
 this interpretation in the operations of the franchised local builders 
 who are the regional representatives of the companies that produce 
 house packages and of the developers who build mobile-home parks. 
 Both these groups often use architects; nevertheless, such work is 
 not a significant portion of any private office's practice. 
 
 It is ironic that architects lack opportunities in the manufactured 
 housing industry, since it was the Utopian tradition rooted in mod- 
 ernist architecture that first called the attention of the housing in- 
 dustry to the possibility of industrializing the housing process. In- 
 deed, many of the current operations of the manufactured housing 
 industry were first developed by leaders of the profession in both 
 Europe and the United States during the interwar years, and many 
 of the first prefabrication firms were set up and led by members of 
 the profession themselves, including such masters of the modern tra- 
 dition as Le Corbusier and Gropius. But clearly certain artistic values 
 of the architectural culture make it difficult for architects to remain 
 committed to the ideals of their profession and at the same time 
 undertake the entrepreneurial and management functions that the 
 home-manufacturing industry demands of its participants. As a con- 
 sequence we have the current situation in which architects who are 
 at the forefront of the development of the new styles and theories of 
 their field have little to do with housing production, while the hous- 
 ing industry relies increasingly on members of the profession who 
 are able and willing to accommodate their practice to what the in- 
 dustry itself requires. In the following chapters, various forms of 
 accommodation are described in detail. 
 
 Independent Architects and Development 
 
 Housing The most common type of architectural practice in the United States 
 
 is the private office. One architect, or a group of architects, sets up 
 a firm, which can be individually owned, a partnership, or a profes- 
 sional corporation, and offers its services to a client — in the case of 
 housing, an owner or a housing producer. The range of services the 
 architectural firm provides — the subject of this chapter — is highly 
 variable and in the long run is determined largely by the owner or 
 producer. It can be limited to the provision of designs and floor plans 
 for the dwelling unit, which is what stock plan architects do, or it 
 can extend well beyond this to include fully constructed units, which 
 is what design-build practices sometimes do. Usually, architectural 
 firms provide services that fall between these two extremes, offering 
 what the profession calls comprehensive or expanded services. 
 
 Firms providing comprehensive services typicallv help their clients 
 choose the site, evaluate the feasibility of alternative types of housing, 
 
14 develop the plans for the site and the individual unit, prepare the 
 
 building specifications, and supervise construction. This range is 
 modified depending on the capacity of the housing producers or clients 
 to handle some of these functions themselves or with the assistance 
 of in-house staffs. Generally, the profession has resisted these modi- 
 fications, claiming that the client obtains a superior product if the 
 independent firm is involved in the decisions relating to all these 
 aspects. In the housing field, however, particularly when the client is 
 a large merchant-builder, the client sets the agenda for the architec- 
 tural office, and there is not much architects can do about it if they 
 want the job. This means that architects sometimes have to give up 
 what is most important to their self-image as professionals, namely 
 the exercise of the design prerogative: the privilege of determining 
 the site layout, house plans, and style of the development. Some 
 prestigious firms are confident of their power to find work that does 
 not subject them to these restrictions and refuse to operate under 
 these limitations. This is one reason why many of the leading offices 
 do not operate in the housing field. 
 
 Housing constitutes the single most important market for the ar- 
 chitectural profession. Over half of all firms typicallv do some hous- 
 ing work during the course of a year, even though such work may 
 make up onlv a small part of their annual billings. 10 And this estimate 
 does not include the many architects who work as junior personnel 
 in large firms that concentrate on other building types or as staff 
 members of government agencies or building companies, but who 
 design houses and additions and renovations as sidelines, after hours. 
 The one- or two-man firms often support themselves by designing 
 full housing units or additions to units of varying sizes for clients in 
 all income ranges, whereas the firms with ten or more on their staff 
 restrict their housing work to large projects for merchant- builders or 
 owner-sponsors. 
 
 The significance of housing to the architectural community cannot 
 be measured only by the volume of building work it generates. The 
 design of the individual house has been the means by which young 
 architects have first gained the attention of professional peers and 
 critics, especiallv during the past century. To mention a few well 
 known examples, Morris is known to us in part because of his col- 
 laboration in the design of the Red House, the de Stijl aesthetic is 
 often represented by the Schroder- Rietveld house, the various villas 
 and town houses designed by Corbusier in Paris and its suburbs 
 during the 1920s are still regarded as among his finest work, and 
 Venturi's fame and the beginnings of postmodernism are often dated 
 to die house he designed for his mother outside Philadelphia. 
 
 10 Turpin C. Bannister, ed.. The Architect at Mid-Century: Evolution and Achievement, vol. 
 1 (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1954), p. 18; Architectural Record Survey, 
 Architectural Activity in the Housing Market (New York: Architectural Record, L979) 
 
15 
 
 Multifamily housing has also had a special role within the archi- 
 tectural culture. The Utopian tradition in architecture, dating from 
 the beginning of the nineteenth century, was defined by its interest 
 in the quality of the residential environment. More recently, Wright, 
 Gropius, Taut, and other great masters of the modern movement all 
 tried their hands at designing new forms of congregate living that 
 would provide inexpensive but salubrious quarters for industrial and 
 white-collar workers. 
 
 Despite the importance of house design in architectural thought, 
 the profession did not achieve a major role in housing production 
 for the mass of the population until fairly recently. The designs for 
 most speculative housing built in cities and suburbs in the United 
 States before World War II came from pattern books or arose out of 
 the cumulative experience of the speculative builders and developers 
 themselves. What the historian J. N. Tarn has said about the relation 
 of the architectural profession to housing production in Great Britain 
 applies to a considerable degree to the United States as well. Accord- 
 ing to Tarn, none of the designers who found a place in the history 
 of nineteenth-century English architecture also played a significant 
 part in the development of the movement to reform and upgrade the 
 quality of mass housing. It was not just that architects were not 
 perceived by the public as possessing the knowledge and skills to 
 handle the difficult problems of inexpensive worker housing, but also 
 that, like their hero Ruskin, the majority of nineteenth-century ar- 
 chitects regarded their discipline as primarily an art and themselves 
 as artists whose main job was to impress on the form of buildings a 
 "certain character, venerable or beautiful, but otherwise unneces- 
 sary." The result was that their market was restricted largely to public 
 buildings and churches, and did not include structures meant to house 
 the multitudes, where the crucial considerations were building econ- 
 omy, interior planning, and such 
 environmental control problems as 
 heating, fresh air supply, and san- 
 itation. The pattern began to 
 H <qKB change, Tarn savs, when Richard 
 
 IB •■'. j v Norman Shaw was selected to de- 
 
 H^^pr __5fi s *S n th e middle-class community 
 
 of Bedford Park, outside London, 
 in 1876. 11 
 
 In the United States, some ar- 
 
 Figure 7. Robert Venturi's house for his mother, Vanna Venturi, built in 1962. The 
 house is a prime example of the one-off private villa, the typical commission available to 
 young architects for exploring new ideas. It was one of the seminal buildings of the 
 postmodern movement and has already achieved canonical status in the architectural 
 tradition. 
 
 11 J. N. Tarn, Working Class Housing in Nineteenth Century Britain, Architectural Asso- 
 ciation Paper, no. 7 (London: Lund Humphries, 1971), chapter 4. 
 
16 
 
 chitects who were esteemed by the professional community, such as 
 Andrew Downing and A. J. Davis, did propose prototypes earlier in 
 the century that addressed the requirements of a large segment of 
 the population. Downing's book on rural cottages and suburban res- 
 idences was first published in 1842, and Llewellyn Park, a Davis 
 project outside New York City, was started in 1853. 12 These efforts 
 by important architects were encouraged by the enormous middle- 
 class market for housing in the United States, and by the easy avail- 
 ability of land for building sites. Nevertheless, Tarn's point is still 
 generally relevant in that major figures in the architectural culture 
 were rarely hired to design anything other than villas for the wealthy, 
 since cottages were generally constructed by owner- builders who could 
 figure out by themselves how to adapt single-family designs like 
 Downing's to the requirements of their own sites. 
 
 The involvement of American architects in mass housing was not 
 too much greater during the first half of the twentieth century. Ar- 
 chitects during these years were striving to attain professional re- 
 spectability and were therefore dubious about the advantages of 
 working with builders who for the most part 
 were not interested in design quality and con- 
 stantly tried to get the practitioners to lower 
 their fees. The only exceptions to this pattern 
 occurred when the client was an agency or or- 
 ganization that shared some of the public-in- 
 terest concerns of the profession and was in- 
 volved in the development of garden suburbs, 
 limited dividend housing, or housing for spe- 
 cial populations such as defense workers or low- 
 income workers. As a consequence, we find that 
 even as late as 1959, a study of the role of ar- 
 chitects in housing design concluded that 
 
 currently, the architect who really exerts a major in- 
 fluence on specific designs in the housebuilding field 
 is rare. Foremost is the man who has as his clients 
 operative builders [the term at this date for what are 
 now called merchant-builders]. West Coast architects 
 do most of this work, though individual practition- 
 ers work on a more or less standard architectural ba- 
 
 Figure 8. One of the many houses designed by Richard Norman Shaw in the late 1870s 
 for the middle-class residential development of Bedford Park, then on the outskirts of 
 London but now within the built-up area. It was said to represent the first occasion on 
 which a leading figure in the English architectural community was involved in housing 
 design. 
 
 12 J. S. Johnson, ed., The Architecture of Country Houses (New York: Dover Publications, 
 1969), pp. v-xv. Llewellyn Park and some other nineteenth-century suburbs designed by 
 well-known architects are discussed in the special issue of Architectural Design dealing 
 with the Anglo-American suburb edited by Robert A. M. Stern and John Massengale. 
 Architectural Design, vol. 51, no. 10/11, 1981. 
 
17 
 
 sis with builders in various other parts of the country. These architects are 
 few in number and rather specialized in their activity; they consist generally 
 of firms starting as designers of custom houses whose interest or experience 
 has led particularly in the direction of relatively low-cost housing. 13 
 
 A conference sponsored by the NAHB around the same time re- 
 ported that fewer than 50 AIA members in the whole United States 
 concentrated on residential work. By 1974, according to House and 
 Home, the number was up to 175 — a number disproportionately based 
 on the West Coast. Three hundred architectural firms are estimated 
 to be currently operating in the residential field, the larger of which 
 have offices throughout the country. The architectural firm special- 
 izing in working for merchant- builders, in other words, has become 
 a national phenomenon. 14 
 
 The rise in specialist firms is part of the general trend toward spe- 
 cialization that is a standard feature of contemporary architectural 
 practice. More and more firms survive in the current market for ar- 
 chitectural services because of their proven competence in dealing 
 with problems of a specific building type, such as hospitals, schools, 
 or urban design. This fact is partially obscured by the belief among 
 architects that the essence of the discipline, which also distinguishes 
 
 Figure 9. Llewellyn Park is located in West Orange, New Jersey within commuting 
 distance of New York City. Its houses, some of which still remain on the site, were 
 designed by Andrew Jackson Davis starting in 1853. Davis has been called the first 
 professional architect in America, and his biographer says that the settlement itself was 
 the first attempt in the United States to create on small lots an exclusive residential area 
 combining rural solitude with surburban comforts. The house shown in the photograph, 
 called Eagle Rock, was inhabited by Llewellyn Park's developer, Llewellyn Haskell. 
 
 13 Burnham Kelly, The Design and Production of Houses (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959), 
 pp. 99-100. 
 
 14 The NAHB conference was held in 1956 and was reported in Professional Builder, vol. 
 21, no. 6, June 1956, p. 5. The survey conducted by the AIA was reported in House 
 and Home, vol. 45, no. 2, February 1974, p. 54. The estimate of 300 firms currendy 
 specializing in housing is based on my conversations with architects and officials of 
 architectural organizations in different parts of the country. 
 
18 
 
 them from other professionals involved in building, is their knowl- 
 edge about design principles, which are relevant to all types of build- 
 ings, regardless of their program or function. It is an attitude con- 
 firmed by the criteria according to which rank is allocated within the 
 profession, with the most prestigious and respected firms being those 
 whose built work covers a range of building types. However, the 
 capacity of the prestige firms to engage in a broad range of projects 
 is the result of certain special characteristics of the projects they tend 
 to get and often of their office structure as well. For example, firms 
 such as I.M. Pei and Associates and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill 
 are big enough and have enough capital resources to afford to in- 
 clude within their organizations the range of special skills necessary 
 if one office is to handle the unique program and technological re- 
 quirements of a variety of building types. Because such firms are 
 chosen for prestige jobs, they often have the opportunity to work 
 with more lavish budgets than are available for the ordinary job, 
 which in turn provides them with the opportunity to engage in the 
 research and other special investigations that complex buildings reg- 
 ularly require. But the ordinary practice does not enjoy these oppor- 
 tunities and can only survive by developing a proven record of ac- 
 complishment in designing building types that can be built 
 economicallv and efficientlv. The firms that work for merchant- build- 
 ers fall into this category. 
 
 The pressure to design economicallv and efficiently is particularlv 
 powerful in the home-building field because, unlike the original clients 
 of other building tvpes who usually remain the long-term owner and 
 often the user as well, merchant-builders look upon their buildings 
 as commodities, products they can sell for a profit. We are beginning 
 to see the development of the same orientation toward buildings in 
 office buildings and even in hospitals, but in no other field of build- 
 ing production is the emphasis on the bottom line so widespread as 
 
 it is in the U.S. housing industry. 
 Architects, of course, have a hard 
 time dealing with the idea of 
 buildings as commodities, since 
 their relation to them as works of 
 art requires that the emphasis be 
 on their permanent value, not on 
 what thev bring in the market- 
 place. Herman York, die principal 
 of one of the first design firms to 
 stake out a major place in the mer- 
 
 Figure 10. The split-level house became popular in the East during the suburban build- 
 ing boom of the 1950s. It is reputed to be an adaptation to the sandy rladand of the 
 Adantic Coast of a house form developed originally on hilly sites in California. This 
 version was designed bv Herman York for a large development on Long Island con- 
 structed in 1955. 
 
19 chant-building field after World War II, has summarized the situa- 
 
 tion: "Many architects don't like the idea of designing a house as a 
 product for sale. Thev consider themselves to be primarily artists, 
 secondly engineers. Thev are willing to design buildings which will 
 in themselves stimulate commercial enterprises, but not to design a 
 house with the prime object in sales appeal to buyers." 15 The conflict 
 between the values of the architectural tradition and the require- 
 ments of merchant- builders has led critics such as Pawley to tide his 
 studv of the housing industry Architecture versus Housing. 16 One of 
 the interesting points Pawley makes in his book is that architects' 
 opposition to housing production systems arises regardless of whether 
 the housing is low rise, high rise, low density, or high density, and 
 crops up in the British and European state housing systems as fre- 
 quently as it has in the United States. 
 
 For independent firms to succeed in dealing with home builders, 
 thev must develop particular skills and procedures. The architectural 
 firm must be highly flexible about providing the specific type or range 
 of services the builder wants. There are still many building firms who 
 will hire architects mainly for their drafting ability. They look upon 
 the architect as a kind of graphic stenographer whose job it is to 
 translate the builder's ideas into plans or renderings and have no 
 interest at all in the architect's possible capacity to deal with a broader 
 range of feasibility and programming issues. Although housing con- 
 tractors and builders have used architects this way ever since mass 
 housing production began in industrial cities almost two centuries 
 ago, clearly there has been a trend in favor of employing architects 
 to provide a comprehensive range of services, a trend inspired by the 
 growing dominance of the large merchant-builders. The type of serv- 
 ice called for depends in part on the type of housing being built as 
 well as on the size of the home-building company. For single-family 
 houses 90 percent of the independent architectural firms take the 
 project through the stage of working drawings and specs, but only 
 4 percent carry it through to construction administration. In the case 
 of apartments, however, 23 percent of the architectural firms are in- 
 volved with the project up to and including construction administra- 
 tion. 1 " The use of the full range of services apparently increases with 
 the merchant-builder's scale of operations, although the very largest 
 builders do more of the work in-house. 
 
 Although architecture as a profession commonly justifies its claim 
 for attention from the public and the building industry on the grounds 
 of its special skill in design, this, as I mentioned earlier, is the pre- 
 rogative the profession must regularly sacrifice in working for mer- 
 chant-builders. Design in this context is defined to include the layout 
 of the housing on the site, the mix of dwelling units in terms of size 
 
 15 Mr. York is quoted in House and Home, vol. 24. no. 2, August 1963, p. 108. 
 
 16 Martin Pawley, Architecture versus Housing (New York: Praeger, 1971). 
 
 17 Architectural Record Survey, Architectural Activity. 
 
20 
 
 and shape, the choice of materials and structural system, and the 
 decor or style of the unit. Architects who fail to acknowledge this 
 constraint in dealing with developers or builders fast find themselves 
 without that client. As one book advising builders how to handle 
 architects puts it, 
 
 An architect should be hired for his architectural style as that is what the 
 result will be, regardless of what other reason he may have been engaged 
 [for]. Because an architect will resist flexibility, the developer may desire to 
 hire a design coordinator who in turn will hire an architect that willingly 
 designs to current market consumer concepts. The developer will lose control 
 over the architect [to the design coordinator] but gain control over the design 
 . . . The architect who is in focus with consumer demands and is flexible in 
 his design should be the target of the developer. 18 
 
 Given the developers' attitudes, it is not difficult to see why so 
 many architectural firms avoid dealing with them, although certainly 
 at the present time an architect who wants to design housing has few 
 alternatives, with so many of the government programs eliminated 
 or drastically cut back. This may be a major reason why, despite the 
 standard adversarial attitude of the profession, more and more firms 
 are interested in learning how to work for developers. (The other 
 side of the coin is that the disappearance of the kind of client who 
 allows the professional more authority in the housing design process 
 has undoubtedly contributed to the widespread despair, especially 
 among architects in the schools, about the fu- 
 ture prospects of the profession and the 
 spreading belief that it is becoming increas- 
 ingly difficult to achieve architectural values for 
 any building type.) Some architects who can- 
 not stand this kind of work hope that their 
 clients can be educated to appreciate more re- 
 fined housing designs. If this were to happen, 
 goes the secret scenario, architects would enjoy 
 greater leeway in enforcing their own views 
 about quality and could try out advanced or 
 unconventional design ideas. 
 
 Merchant-builders have on occasion over the 
 last twenty years given architects their head: an 
 outstanding case that worked was the experi- 
 ment by Eichler Homes Inc. in die San Fran- 
 cisco Bay Area with atrium houses designed by 
 
 Figure 11. The San Francisco architectural firm of Anshen and Allen designed this in- 
 terior courtyard or atrium house for the merchant-builder Joseph Eichler. Eichler pro) 
 ects were noted for houses that appealed to the progressive tastes of young professional 
 and executive families in the Bay Area during the 1950s and 1960s. 
 
 18 Gene Phillippo, The Professional Guide to Real Estate Development (Homewood, III 
 Dow Jones-Irwin, 1976), p. 87. 
 
21 
 
 V«'oc» ptoud to pi»$eni.. 
 
 Anshen and Allen. The atrium design became the model for most 
 Eichler developments in that region during the 1960s, until the com- 
 pany expanded into markets in other parts of the state, lost internal 
 management control, and filed for bankruptcy. 19 More typically, 
 however, builders have tried out new concepts by constructing mag- 
 azine or promotion houses, which proved to be great crowd pullers 
 when first presented, but which did not sell. Apparently these cases 
 were legion, and the widespread knowledge of them has made de- 
 velopers reluctant to give architects much room for innovation. 20 
 
 Another characteristic of architectural firms that succeed in the 
 merchant- built housing field is that they are willing to remain anon- 
 ymous when the builder demands it, in other words to forgo being 
 identified as the designer or architect for the units or project. This 
 pattern is especially prevalent on the East Coast and in the Midwest, 
 less so in California, Texas, and Arizona. In the latter three states, 
 closer working relationships have developed between builders and 
 architects, and in some cases architects have acquired financial stakes 
 in the ventures. (The case of developers in California naming their 
 architects in their advertisements has already been mentioned.) 
 
 The reluctance of many merchant- builders to publicize the archi- 
 tects for their projects is consistent with the control the builder ex- 
 ercises over the product, but it 
 compounds the resistance of ma- 
 jor architectural offices to working 
 on development housing. The ex- 
 istence in built form of a project 
 an office is proud of constitutes the 
 profession's least expensive and, 
 until recently, most popular form 
 of advertising. 
 
 The anonymity under which the 
 profession is expected to practice 
 is also consistent with the tend- 
 ency of housing consumers to make 
 their purchase decisions according 
 to the builder's reputation, an ap- 
 proach consumers follow for most 
 other commodities. Consumers 
 rarely know who designed their 
 
 COLFAX 
 
 T BEDENS BROO 
 
 W»W*"S«S*B 
 
 ONE OF A KIND ... ROBERT A.M. STERN 
 COMES TO "COLFAX"! 
 
 Figure 12. Developers of housing addressed to the requirements of the top-income classes 
 have discovered that it pays to hire the services of well-known architects in marketing 
 their projects. This advertisement for a new development near Princeton, New Jersey 
 features the name of the New York architect Robert A. M. Stern. Stern provides custom 
 house designs for the project and also formulated the style guidelines that all architects 
 and builders working on the project are obliged to follow. 
 
 19 Eichler, The Merchant Builders, pp. 86-87. 
 
 20 House and Home, vol. 24, no. 2, August 1963, p. 109. 
 
22 automobiles or their washing machines, but brand identification, that 
 
 is the manufacturer's name, is very important. At the high-cost end 
 of the market, however, the name of the designer is beginning to 
 appear in advertisements, even for these commodities, perhaps as a 
 way of personalizing the product more; this seems analogous to what 
 I have said about the use of the architect's name in housing projects 
 in California. 
 
 Although builders expect architects to accept the client's control 
 over the traditional domain of the profession, they also demand that 
 architects come equipped with a range of skills that goes far beyond 
 the profession's usual competence. The possession of these tech- 
 niques is also characteristic of firms that succeed in the housing field. 
 To the extent they have mastered these skills, such firms represent 
 excellent examples of the comprehensive practice that today governs 
 the orientation of the profession generally. 
 
 The skills necessary to work with home builders were described in 
 1957 by L. Morgan Yost, one of the first postwar architects to learn 
 how to handle the needs of the industry. 21 Yost played a key role in 
 the early postwar period in persuading the ALA leadership to relax 
 its squeamishness about dealing with home builders and in getting 
 the profession to adopt a more positive attitude toward the com- 
 modity orientation of the housing industry. Perhaps without know- 
 ing it, Yost was advocating a point of view much like that of Walter 
 Gropius and many other intellectual leaders of the profession, cen- 
 tered around Harvard and MIT, who were appalled at the growing 
 separation between the profession and the building industry, men 
 for whom the more conservative code of ethics adopted by the AIA 
 in 1951 was the symbol of much that was wrong about the relations 
 between architects and the housing builders. 22 Practitioners like Gro- 
 pius, his partners in The Architects Collaborative, and Carl Koch 
 went beyond what Yost and his colleagues within the AIA were ad- 
 vocating and actually became builders as well as designers of housing. 
 
 According to Yost, the ways in which architects could help build- 
 ers included analyzing the builders' market and competition, deter- 
 mining what community sendees would be available to the builder, 
 assisting in property selection, planning the project area as a whole, 
 arranging and participating in conferences with different members of 
 the building team, analyzing local building ordinances, guiding the 
 project through the funding and lending agencies, both private and 
 public, and helping to smooth the governmental review process. After 
 the working drawings were completed, architects could help in for- 
 mulating the public relations and merchandising campaign and per- 
 haps assist the builder in developing new projects. 
 
 21 L. Morgan Yost, "The Architect and the Operative Home Builder," /1L4 Journal, vol. 
 28, no. 8, December 1957, pp. 739-771. 
 
 22 "Gropius Appraises Today's Architect," Architectural Forum, vol. 96, no. 5, May 1952, 
 pp. 11 Iff. 
 
23 Yost's conception of the architectural firm's role in home building 
 
 was, as we can see from its connection to the position taken by Gro- 
 pius and his colleagues, part of the developing redefinition of the 
 profession that went on during the decade immediately following 
 World War II. Many of his recommendations arose out of discus- 
 sions that took place within the various AIA committees that were 
 set up to formulate a strategy to enable the profession to become 
 involved in the burgeoning housing market. These conceptions be- 
 came recurrent themes in the AIA presidents' addresses to the annual 
 congresses and in speeches by other AIA leaders, by representatives 
 of the home-building industry, including William Levitt, and by 
 presidents of the NAHB. They were eventually incorporated in books, 
 manuals, and other how-to- practice publications of the institute and 
 soon became a standard insert in the loose-leaf version of the Hand- 
 book of Professional Practice. Official recognition of the importance 
 of the merchant- builder as a client was a major factor leading to the 
 emergence of more firms able to respond to the builders' demands. 
 But it should also be recognized that many architects and some lay- 
 men were offended by the hustling tone of these different statements 
 and worried that if the profession continued too far in this direction 
 in its pursuit of business opportunities, architects would lose the aura 
 historically associated with the name and instead become indistin- 
 guishable from businessmen. This reaction was especially noticeable 
 among architectural teachers and students, who see themselves as 
 guardians of the tradition, but it was sufficiently widespread in the 
 1960s to generate a call for the AIA to become more involved with 
 questions of design quality and social betterment. There is no intrin- 
 sic reason, of course, why firms that provide comprehensive services 
 of the sort that appeal to merchant-builders cannot also maintain an 
 interest in the art of architecture and social housing; still the percep- 
 tion persists that the firms who provide these expanded services to 
 merchant- builders are somehow forsaking the ideals of the profes- 
 sion. 
 
 To be really effective in working with builders, architects must do 
 more than sacrifice the design prerogative: they must begin to ap- 
 preciate those features of housing aesthetics that appeal to the aver- 
 age consumer and incorporate these features in their designs. This 
 implies that the architect for the merchant-builder must to some ex- 
 tent internalize the values and perceptions of the marketplace and 
 cater to them. Herman York, who was mentioned earlier, has stated 
 what this means for the practitioner: 
 
 We must provide houses which are not only sensibly planned but which give 
 buyers the desire to acquire them the moment they get their first look. The 
 luxury . . . which apparently is necessary to insure sales is seen in such ex- 
 amples as wide roof overhangs, double front doors, heavy brass door hard- 
 ware, and expensive- looking front entrance lighting fixtures. Once inside we 
 see bluestone, marble or expensive vinyl flooring in the entrance foyer, wood 
 
24 
 
 panelled walls, wallpaper murals. If there is an upstairs, a stair hall which 
 resembles something built for the plantation owner of the Colonial era. 23 
 
 The importance to builders of being alert to popular taste is the 
 reason given by some national building firms, such as US Homes, 
 for their policy of using independent architects based in the regions 
 of the country in which US Homes has its subsidiaries. We have been 
 told by executives of these firms that this arrangement enables them 
 to tap local style preferences and in this way marry their efficient 
 production to whatever competitive advantages a locally based builder 
 might enjoy. It is also the reason some builders prefer that interior 
 designers rather than architects handle their design work. They re- 
 port that designers are more sensitive to matters of decor and style, 
 less concerned about responding to professional traditions, and bet- 
 ter able to handle the aesthetic problems that focus on the inside of 
 dwellings. 
 
 Development firms also put considerable store in the architect's 
 flexibility in matters other than design. For example, they rate archi- 
 tectural firms in terms of their ability to work with other groups on 
 the building team and dislike intensely architects who regard them- 
 selves as the top professionals and therefore above the battles in- 
 volved in achieving a marketable product. A capacity to engage in 
 the rough and tumble of debate, to be able to slug it out among 
 competing points of view, is important to the merchant-builder. 
 
 Architects who work for build- 
 ers also cannot expect to get an ex- 
 clusive arrangement. Even within 
 the same area, indeed for the same 
 project, developers will sometimes 
 hire two architectural firms simul- 
 taneously, playing the suggestions 
 of one off* against those of an- 
 other. Builders also expect their 
 architects to visit the salesroom to 
 find out what appeals to con- 
 sumers and what does not. The 
 firms are expected to modify the 
 design to accommodate the con- 
 sumers' criticisms, and to do so 
 quickly. One of the most common 
 complaints builders make about 
 
 "...now this model is basically Tudor... but with a happy 
 blending of French Provincial, Cape Cod and Colonial... 
 The farm-house motif and contemporary touches 
 plus the thatch roof result in 
 that 'Jenesaisquoi' 
 were famous for..." 
 k. 
 
 Figure 13. A 1963 cartoon from a leading magazine of the housing industry, which 
 represents the criticism about merchant- builders common in the period. Their projects 
 were being attacked by design professionals and the public for lacking g(x>d proportion, 
 balance, and order and for being excessively complicated. 
 
 23 Herman R. York, "Tract Homebuilding Design," AM Journal, vol. 36, no. 3, Septem- 
 ber 1961, p. 59. 
 
25 architects they hire is that the firms don't work fast enough in pro- 
 
 ducing the information or documentation the builders need to get 
 on with the project. 
 
 The last feature of architectural practice in the home-building field 
 that must be discussed is the perennial question of fees. The tradition 
 in the profession has been to base fees on the total cost of the project, 
 using a scale of percentages to calculate the actual amount. Clients 
 have resisted this method of arriving at a fee on the grounds that it 
 gives the practitioner an interest in increasing the total cost of the 
 project and thus works in opposition to the client's concern for econ- 
 omy. This point of view has carried great weight in the home-build- 
 ing field, where the merchant- builder competes in terms of unit price. 
 Furthermore, in the case of single-family housing production, which 
 is still the dominant type among merchant-builders, the design prob- 
 lems have become so standardized and repetitive that there is less 
 justification for tying the architect's fees to the total project cost. 
 
 In 1950 the ALA acknowledged this fact and initiated discussions 
 with the home- building industry aimed at arriving at a fee schedule 
 that would simultaneously encourage the industry to hire architects 
 and still make it possible for the houses to reflect professional con- 
 cerns about appearance and environmental quality. 24 Most builders 
 of single-family houses who use independent firms now pay them a 
 negotiated lump-sum fee to cover site development and the design 
 of the basic units, with additional fees for later variations in design 
 and a royalty on each unit built. This seems to work for both parties. 
 To the degree that cluster housing and other forms of low- rise high- 
 density development take over in merchant- building, design costs go 
 up. Montgomery has estimated that design fees paid by mass- market 
 housing developers increased from 50 to 100 million dollars in 1963 
 to half a billion dollars in 1972. 25 
 
 The features of architectural practice that are important when the 
 profession works for merchant- builders represent significant devia- 
 tions from the traditional idealized conception of professional prac- 
 tice. The negative aspect is that many practitioners, as stated earlier, 
 are forced to relinquish some of the autonomy that has been associ- 
 ated with the idea of an independent free profession and to sacrifice 
 the controls that professionals expect to enjoy over the domain in 
 which they function. From a positive perspective, however, we can 
 say that if a firm succeeds in the housing field, it is partly because it 
 has expanded its range of skills and services, which is important in 
 the building process generally. Success in the housing field can thus 
 become a precedent for expanding the profession's influence over 
 other building types. 
 
 I mentioned earlier that architects became involved in mass hous- 
 
 24 Professional Builder, vol. 15, no. 6, June 1950, p. 7. 
 
 25 Montgomery, "High Density, Low Rise Housing," p. 103. Montgomery's estimates 
 are adjusted to compensate for inflation. 
 
26 ing only recently. Although I have in passing alluded to some of the 
 
 factors responsible for this change, it is worth considering them in 
 greater depth. At a very fundamental level, probably the most im- 
 portant reason is the absence of many alternatives for a profession 
 that has long suffered from a shortage of opportunities to regulate 
 the domain in which it is trained to practice. Unlike physicians, who 
 with few restrictions continue to dominate the system of health care, 
 and lawyers, who enjoy comparable authority over the institutions 
 for controlling social behavior, architects are repeatedly in the situa- 
 tion of suppliants trying to persuade the people and organizations 
 who rule the building process to hire them. If professional offices are 
 to survive, therefore, they must continually develop ways of adapting 
 to requirements of builders and other types of clients. In the housing 
 field one form of accommodation is to become adept in the skills and 
 areas of knowledge that are crucial to the large-scale production of 
 houses. 
 
 Not only is the profession constantly challenged by the client, but 
 in the United States in particular a variety of related professions and 
 emerging occupational groups is always ready to provide answers to 
 the questions that face new forms of commercial enterprises, such as 
 merchant- builders. These competing occupations include engineers, 
 land surveyors, urban planners, building designers, interior design- 
 ers, market analysts, economic consultants, management experts, and 
 landscape architects. Since the title "architect," but not the right to 
 do designs, is protected by law, the only way architects can maintain 
 control over the potential market for sendees is to outwit their com- 
 petitors, to command greater knowledge and skill, and to demon- 
 strate greater effectiveness than these other occupations. Thus the 
 architectural firm is forced to adopt an entrepreneurial stance, some- 
 thing many professionals find difficult. Even so, they are probably in 
 for a long struggle, because engineers exhibited this capacity earlier 
 in dealing with merchant-builders, and architects are only now be- 
 ginning to catch up. Here is a description of what the founder of 
 Eichler Homes expected from professionals when the company be- 
 gan its initial ventures around the time of World War II: 
 
 Development had taken place before the war, albeit on a limited basis, and 
 there were a few professionals who had valuable experience. These were law- 
 yers and civil engineers, the first members of the nascent team, usually but 
 not always hired as consultants rather than full-time employees. Many of these 
 professionals later built large practices and attributed much of their success 
 to a merchant builder. ... In a field characterized by close relationships, few 
 were stronger or more lasting than those between a merchant builder and his 
 lawyer and civil engineer. 
 
 When a merchant builder learned of a site potentially for sale, he would 
 immediately call his engineer to ask what data were already at hand. Then he 
 would go immediately to the engineer's office to review [the data]. From 
 
27 there they would go to the site, with the broker if there was one, for a direct 
 
 look. For hours they would walk the ground discussing the problems and 
 their potential solutions. Then they would meet with the lawyer ... by the 
 end of that day, a decision was reached. 26 
 
 The problem of competition among the design professions is an 
 old one, especially in the United States. Not only have state legisla- 
 tures been reluctant to grant exclusive rights to professions, but the 
 tradition of the single-family house has made it easy for owner-build- 
 ers and merchant- builders, especially when the tatter's operations were 
 small scale and building codes did not exist outside cities, to operate 
 without much help from professionals of any kind. The campaign to 
 license architects, which at the turn of the century occupied an im- 
 portant place in the architect's strategy for achieving respectability, 
 was never completely successful. Although individual states did adopt 
 legislation that protected the title, so that only those approved by 
 the state registration boards could list themselves as architects, the 
 design of many buildings has remained the province of engineers, 
 and for houses, of the individual owner or owner-builder as well. 
 Once the registration movement failed, architects had to seek other 
 ways to impress on clients and builders that they were indispensable. 
 They have not succeeded, and the growing domination of home 
 building by the giant building firms has made the problem more 
 difficult. These companies were able to exclude from the mass-hous- 
 ing market architects who failed to provide them with the particular 
 skills they needed in a way that was convenient for them. The archi- 
 tectural practices I have described were the inevitable consequence. 
 It is testimony to the political shrewdness of the AIA in this instance 
 that the encouragement of this type of practice became official AIA 
 policy in the 1950s, as the following comments from a speech by the 
 AIA president, Leon Chatelain, Jr., in 1957 indicate very clearly: 
 
 We must design on a mass basis, working together with the builders and lend 
 guidance in land planning, plan houses to fit the potential occupants and site 
 terrain, produce accurate production drawings which will enable contractors 
 to make savings that can be passed along to the consumer and devise a system 
 for effective superintending of the work to insure that the plans are followed 
 and that any difficulties which arise can be effectively solved. . . . 
 
 We must strengthen our ties with the home builders, the material produc- 
 ers, suppliers of other items that go into house construction, and with officials 
 of the appropriate agencies of the government. We must also undertake an 
 information program designed to tell architects how they can and should fit 
 into the residential housing field, and to tell builders of the methods and 
 benefits of such a relationship. 27 
 
 26 Eichler, The Merchant Builders, pp. 26-27. 
 
 27 Leon Chatelain, Jr., "Housing Our New Society," AIA Journal, vol. 28, no. 2, June 
 1957, p. 85. 
 
28 The large number of architectural offices that work today with mer- 
 
 chant-builders and the very high percentage of builders who now use 
 the services of independent architects are witness to the seriousness 
 with which this advice was taken. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Architects and Nonmarket 
 
 Housing I said earlier that the significance of housing to architecture could 
 
 not be judged only in terms of the amount of professional activity 
 that was involved with this building type, that often during this cen- 
 tury both the individual house and mass housing provided oppor- 
 tunities for architects to investigate issues that were important for 
 the development of their discipline. The reverse is also true: the 
 profession's impact on housing design and production cannot be 
 measured only by the amount of built work that involved the partic- 
 ipation of professionals. Much of the theoretical and empirical work 
 architects have done on problems of prefabrication, urban design, 
 new materials, minimum housing standards, and the effect of hous- 
 ing on social problems, has trickled down to influence the housing 
 built in the United States. 
 
 This point is particularly important with reference to the argument 
 that the achievement of architectural values and the act of building 
 are incompatible goals. Although the argument may overstate the 
 obstacles placed in the way of serious architecture by the building 
 industry, it identifies a very important fact about housing production 
 in the United States today: very little housing is being built for those 
 who do not have the money to pay market rents or sale prices. Thus 
 architects who represent the tradition of social housing have almost 
 no work and are a dying (or at best dormant) breed. 
 
 This is unfortunate for two reasons. In the first place, it was the 
 profession's interest in the problems of nonmarket housing, not just 
 in the United States but in Europe and the United Kingdom as well, 
 that first got architects involved in the subject of housing as a build- 
 ing type. 28 Second, the development of ideas and prototypes for this 
 category of housing was largely the work of architects, and in the 
 absence of any demand for such investigations, the housing problems 
 of those unable to compete in the private market are not getting 
 much attention. Practices concerned with social housing are not 
 flourishing now because the philanthropic and government housing 
 programs that sponsored the production of nonmarket housing have 
 been cut back drastically over the last decade. One reason for the 
 
 28 This subject is discussed in two general books on the nineteendv and twentieth-cen- 
 tury history of housing, one dealing with England and the other with the United States. 
 See John Burnett, Social History of Housing (London: David and Charles, 1978); Gwen- 
 dolyn Wright, Building the Dream (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981). 
 
29 cutback is that the housing programs failed to achieve the goals of 
 
 social betterment used to justify them in previous decades. Many 
 economists and policy makers have also come to believe that the 
 United States has overinvested in housing to the detriment of in- 
 vestment in new industrial plant and equipment. In an effort to stim- 
 ulate the private home-building industry, current government pro- 
 grams provide lower-income populations with allowances and vouchers 
 as a means of subsidizing their participation in the private market. 
 
 The once viable tradition of using professionals in the design of 
 nonmarket housing has its roots in the system used to construct 
 bridges, roads, aqueducts, and other public works. In the United 
 States, these projects always began with the appointment of an ar- 
 chitect or engineer who would formulate the design before a con- 
 tractor or builder was appointed. In European nations the contractor 
 (and sometimes the architect too) was an employee of the state itself, 
 although in the United States construction work has almost always 
 been let by appointment and later through bidding. When, toward 
 the close of World War I, the United States government for the first 
 time became involved in housing construction in a major way, at the 
 urging of the profession the public works tradition was taken over 
 as the natural model to follow. Indeed, professionals were in charge 
 of the central administration: the Emergency Fleet Corporation was 
 headed by Robert Kohn, later president of the AIA, and the US 
 Housing Corporation was under the general management of Burt 
 Fenner, a principal in the architectural office of McKim, Mead and 
 White. 29 Several of the same architects were appointed to head the 
 New Deal programs, including the Emergency Housing Division of 
 the PWA, while other architects became chief administrators of the 
 Public Housing Administration and the Federal Housing Adminis- 
 tration. After World War II, the top jobs in the government agencies 
 went to representatives of the private home builders, such as Philip 
 Klutznick. Architects did, however, continue to be appointed by lo- 
 cal authorities as the first step in undertaking any specific housing 
 project. The public works model was also maintained for the private 
 nonmarket projects built by limited dividend corporations and phil- 
 anthropic foundations, and it was adopted as well by the nonprofit 
 church and community groups that built low- income housing for the 
 aged with the help of government subsidies. 
 
 Architects, of course, welcomed the work they got in the nonmar- 
 ket housing field, especially because there had previously been so 
 little demand for their services from the builders of private market 
 housing. On these nonmarket projects architects were able to exercise 
 the design prerogative to a greater extent than under other produc- 
 
 29 Anthony Jackson, A Place Called Home (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1976), pp. 
 170-171. 
 
30 
 
 tion arrangements. This probably explains why so many prominent 
 professionals were active in the housing field in the 1960s and 1970s 
 when the nonmarket programs were still active. Included in this cat- 
 egory were Louis Kahn, Jose Luis Sert, Charles Moore, Paul Ru- 
 dolph, and Robert Venturi. Most of these architects have also de- 
 signed housing for developers, but almost none of their designs has 
 been built, because, it was claimed, the projects would be too expen- 
 sive or the style was too far in advance of established taste. Although 
 this list of illustrious American architects who were hired to design 
 market housing might suggest otherwise, the fact is that when non- 
 market housing flourished, it was regarded by the profession and by 
 clients and sponsors as a specialty, just like the design of other build- 
 ing types. Unlike the situation in merchant-built housing, however, 
 in nonmarket housing there were few firms that worked exclusively 
 in the field. Three factors have contributed to this difference. First, 
 even during the heyday of nonmarket production under the public 
 housing programs of the 1930s, not enough units were constructed 
 to generate a demand for many specialist practitioners. It was diffi- 
 cult enough to establish a regional, let alone a national, practice of 
 this type because local authorities were expected to award profes- 
 sional contracts to people living and working within their jurisdic- 
 tions. Second, public authorities often protected themselves against 
 the criticism that nonmarket housing almost always generated from 
 neighbors and from spokesmen for the home builders by choosing 
 
 Figure 14. The Church Street housing project for larger low-income families in New 
 Haven, Connecticut, designed by the firm of Moore, Lyndon, Turnbull and Whitakcr. 
 It was built in 1969, during a period when many advanced architects were doing work 
 on nonmarket housing projects sponsored by churches and community groups eligible 
 to receive federal subsidies. 
 
31 eminent professionals whose advice would be regarded by the com- 
 
 plaining public as objective. Leaders in architecture, however, as I 
 mentioned earlier, do not usually specialize in any one building type. 
 Third, and probably most important, is that the conditions under 
 which architects were employed and their relationship to the build- 
 ing process conformed very closely to the professional ideal and 
 therefore required no big shift in the organization of their practices. 
 The owner-sponsor chose the architect before choosing the contrac- 
 tor; a criterion of merit was at least ostensibly used in making the 
 selection; the architect was often in charge of the program; after the 
 design was completed, the project went out for bids; and following 
 the selection of a contractor, the architect was responsible for super- 
 vising construction. The architects' training and experience suppos- 
 edly fitted them to play all these roles, and they did not therefore see 
 any need to specialize. The architectural firm that works for the mer- 
 chant-builder, on the other hand, has had to give up many of these 
 traditional functions and adopt more of an entrepreneurial or man- 
 agerial relationship to the project. 
 
 Several characteristics of practice obtained in this field, whether 
 the firm involved regarded itself as a specialist in nonmarket housing 
 or took on the work when the opportunity offered. First was the 
 necessity to spend a great deal of time winning the support and ap- 
 proval of the elaborate bureaucracy of housing officials that was es- 
 tablished to supervise the funding and construction of nonmarket 
 housing. The magnitude of the effort involved is well illustrated by 
 the following description of the approvals required to build a middle- 
 income subsidized project in New York City in 1965: 
 
 An architect who has obtained a commission to design a middle-income 
 housing project in an urban renewal area immediately faces a welter of mu- 
 nicipal, state, and Federal agencies, each of which will influence his design. 
 In New York City, which represents only the average in bureaucratic prolif- 
 erations, an architect must consult the following codes and regulations when 
 designing a building: (1) The New York City Administrative Code (Building 
 Code); (2) New York State Multiple Dwelling Law; (3) New York City 
 Multiple Dwelling Code; (4) New York City Zoning Resolution; (5a) FHA 
 Minimum Property Standards (if financed by the FHA); (5b) New York State 
 Division of Housing Regulations (if financed under New York State Mitchell- 
 Lama Law); (5c) Housing Redevelopment Board of Regulations (if financed 
 under New York City Mitchell-Lama Law); (5d) Public Housing Adminis- 
 tration Regulations (if public housing, administered either by the City or the 
 State); (5e) Community Facilities Administration Regulations (for section 
 202 Federal financing — Direct Loan); (6a) Plumbing Code; (6b) Elevator 
 Code; (6c) Electrical Code (for specifications); (7) FHA Rehabilitation 
 • Standards (if rehabilitation). 
 
 He must also refer to the room-count regulations issued bv some mortga- 
 gees to make certain that the building will conform to the bank's room-count 
 requirements. The bank room-count, the FHA room-count, the New York 
 
32 
 
 State Division of Housing room-count, and the room-count in the New York 
 City Zoning Resolution are not necessarily in agreement with each other. 
 
 When plans and specifications are completed, he must consult the following 
 agencies for preliminary approval, each with its own forms, etc.: (1) Depart- 
 ment of Sewers (for sewage and storm drainage approval); (2) Department 
 of House Numbers (for substantiation of house number); (3) Department of 
 Highways (for approval of grades at street); (4) Tax Department (for ap- 
 proval of the lot on the block); (5) Department of Air Pollution (for approval 
 of the incinerator). 
 
 He then applies to the Building Department for a permit. If the proposed 
 project is along the waterfront, he needs the approval of the Department of 
 Marine and Aviation; if adjoining a public park, the approval of the Parks 
 Department; if along a subway route, the approval of the Transit Authority, 
 and so on, ad infinitum. 30 
 
 It is important to realize that it was necessary to run this gauntlet 
 of regulations whether the owner-sponsor was a government author- 
 ity or a private nonprofit group, since for both the funding came 
 from official agencies at the state or federal level. Incidentally, the 
 existence of this bureaucracy is another reason why nonmarket hous- 
 ing sponsors were drawn to prominent members of the profession, 
 since it was believed that their prestige and contacts would help smooth 
 the approval process. The strategy sometimes 
 worked, but it is also true that the bureaucratic 
 maze discouraged some architectural firms from 
 doing housing work, particularly as regulation 
 came to be thought of as inimical to good de- 
 sign. The problem was regarded as particularly 
 serious right after the Second World War. A 
 major effort was made by the Kennedy admin- 
 istration in 1961 and 1962 to stimulate the 
 profession's interest in social housing design bv 
 introducing more flexibility into the proce- 
 dures, setting up design competitions, and 
 starting a design awards program with die ALA, 
 changes that made it easier to recruit the illus- 
 trious architects listed earlier. 31 
 
 In addition to possessing a technical knowl- 
 
 Figure 15. The "Frankfurt Kitchen," so named because it was a standard feature of the 
 public housing constructed in Frankfurt, Germany when the building committee was 
 directed by Ernest May. The kitchen, noted for its compact organization of space, used 
 built-in cabinets and equipment designed bv the woman architect Crete Schutte-Loh- 
 otzen. The kitchens are an excellent example of the application of exist enz minimum 
 principles to housing design. 
 
 30 Abraham Levitt, "Bureaucracy, the Regulatory Agencies and the Architect," Progressive 
 Architecture, vol. 46, no. 2, Februarv 1965, p. 199. 
 
 31 "Federal Housing Agencies Encouraging Good Design," Architectural Record, vol. 136, 
 no. 2, August 1964, pp. 103-109. 
 
33 edge of the codes and regulations, firms that worked on nonmarket 
 
 housing had to evince some interest in the social effects of the built 
 environment. This was a necessary response to the demands of their 
 clients, comparable in its way to the need for merchant- builder ar- 
 chitects to design units that will satisfy consumer preferences and 
 therefore be sold easily. 
 
 The criteria by which nonmarket sponsors evaluated projects changed 
 with the decades. In the 1920s the big issue was how to preserve a 
 sense of community in the expanding metropolis coming to be dom- 
 inated by the automobile; in the 1930s the emphasis was on existenz 
 minimum^ the smallest, least expensive dwelling unit that would pre- 
 serve the integrity of the working-class family; in the 1940s the con- 
 cern was to construct defense housing in a hurry; in the 1950s in- 
 terest shifted to humanizing the urban environment and integrating 
 the races; and in the 1960s the problem was how to reduce vandal- 
 ism and crime. The architects implied that the housing bureaucracies 
 prevented them from coming up with solutions to these problems; 
 at the same time their critics and the bureaucrats argued that the 
 difficulty lay with the architects' lack of skill and dedication. Albert 
 Mayer, himself a member of an earlier generation of nonmarket housing 
 architects, believed that more rigorous procedures for choosing ar- 
 chitects to work on these issues should have been established. Here 
 are remarks he made in 1962, when nonmarket housing was still a 
 live issue: "As a device for choosing an architect, perhaps local au- 
 thorities should specifically pre-qualify them: how many housing de- 
 velopments have they ever visited, how often have they discussed 
 problems with tenants or managers; have they ever — and for how 
 long — walked and sat in the grounds of a housing development to 
 observe their actual use and to ask questions of the users?" 32 
 
 The idea that techniques should be developed to enable the archi- 
 tectural firm to come into direct contact with the users became in- 
 creasingly important in the 1960s and 1970s and led to the emer- 
 gence of a totally new definition of the architect's role which then 
 came to dominate practice in the design of nonmarket housing. Ac- 
 cording to this definition, architects were no longer to be seen, or to 
 see themselves, as the grand designer laying down the form, style, 
 and arrangement of the housing according to principles derived from 
 the venerable traditions of the profession. Instead, architects were 
 expected to look upon themselves and their offices as facilitators who 
 would translate into built form the aspirations and desires of the 
 future inhabitants of the project. As part of this redefinition, several 
 innovations were introduced into the firms' organization of work. 
 For example, some firms set up headquarters in a neighborhood store 
 front, hoping to encourage local residents to drop in, discuss their 
 
 32 Albert Mayer, "Public Housing Architecture . . . "Journal of Housing, vol. 19, no. 8, 
 October 15, 1962, p. 453. 
 
34 
 
 housing needs, and review the designs before they were presented to 
 official bodies. Other offices achieved a similar objective by establish- 
 ing cooperative arrangements with a so-called community design 
 workshop sponsored by an architecture school. Architectural firms 
 began to recruit recent design graduates who had studied environ- 
 mental psychology or to employ social scientists as consultants or 
 staff members. 
 
 This emphasis on the importance of direct contact between archi- 
 tect and user was in some respects analogous to the role played by 
 consumer choice in the private market system. Prospective purchasers 
 whose requirements are not satisfied by the merchant- builders' prod- 
 uct express that dissatisfaction by rejecting the product, and the builders 
 quickly learn to adapt their product to consumers' preferences. The 
 architect working in nonmarket housing has traditionally been insu- 
 lated from the need to sacrifice the design prerogative to what the 
 market wants. This may be an additional reason why famous archi- 
 tects are more often associated with nonmarket than market housing. 
 Because the prospective tenants have little if any alternative housing 
 available, the architect can dictate the design and the occupants must 
 accommodate themselves as best they can. This freedom was increas- 
 ingly threatened during the 1960s and 1970s when it became evident 
 that the social housing schemes proposed by the profession were not 
 achieving their goals of social betterment. The dynamiting of Pruitt- 
 Igoe was a symbol of the reversal of the architect's role: although the 
 part played by Yamasaki's design in the decay of this St. Louis project 
 has been exaggerated, the failure of the project occasioned the wide- 
 spread realization that the profession's conventional design assump- 
 tions were not adequate for addressing the problems of social hous- 
 ing. 
 
 Figure 16. Carver Court housing was built in 1942- 1943 according to designs developed 
 by the Philadelphia firm of Howe, Stonorov and Kahn. It is located in Coatesville, 
 Pennsylvania, and was built by the local housing authority using hinds from the federal 
 government. 
 
35 Nonmarket housing as a form of professional activity is, as I have 
 
 said, effectively dead at the moment. It will be difficult to resurrect 
 quickly even if government funding to subsidize the construction of 
 nonmarket projects were to resume on a larger scale. The procedures 
 followed by this specialty underwent so many changes when it was 
 still viable that it will prove difficult to define which salient features 
 of such a practice will be applicable to the demands of the future. 
 Furthermore, the state of the profession today, buffeted as it is by 
 changing market demands and the shifting structure of the building 
 industry, is so confused that the profession itself would have diffi- 
 culty identifying a tradition of practice, knowledge, and skill relevant 
 to the production of nonmarket housing. It is probable that when 
 the national call for nonmarket housing reemerges, sponsors will pre- 
 fer the model of production developed by the private home-building 
 industry to the model represented by the public programs of the past. 
 In the latter, architects were major, often principal, actors, but in the 
 model that prevails in merchant- building, they are, as we have seen, 
 one among many decision makers on an integrated building team. 
 This model will probably be preferred because of its proven success 
 in producing a high volume of cost- efficient housing and because 
 housing production is now universally acknowledged to be a field 
 requiring the coordinated input of many specialists in addition to 
 architects. Architects do not have, and never have had, a monopoly 
 of know-how on this subject. Indeed, before the sponsored nonmar- 
 ket housing programs began to collapse in the 1970s, production 
 was already moving in this direction in the form of turnkey housing 
 and Operation Breakthrough. These forms of production are likely 
 to be copied again in future years. 
 
 IV 
 
 Stock Plan Services and 
 
 Plan Shops The development of designs for stock plan services was until recently 
 
 the principal method through which the architectural profession par- 
 ticipated in the American home-building industry. The plan services 
 conduct their business in much the same way as the pattern compa- 
 nies that sell designs to people who sew their own clothing. Home 
 builders or prospective homeowners look through a catalogue that 
 contains floor plans and renderings of the completed house. They 
 select the design that is most appealing, send a check or money order 
 for the plans and related documentation to the service, and get back 
 in the mail a set of drawings needed to construct the house. The 
 price in 1980 for a single set of drawings was between $50 and $80, 
 up from $10 twenty years previously. 33 The typical purchaser orders 
 
 33 Kelly, Design and Production, p. 98. 
 
36 
 
 al- Traditional 
 Modem • Spanish* Contemporary 
 Split-Levels •Ranches and more! 
 
 Complete Blueprint* And Specification 
 Available On Every Design 
 
 II 
 
 four to five sets, for which the total price is between $80 and $135 
 (each successive set costs less). One set is for the homeowner, an- 
 other is for the builder, and the remainder are used by subcontractors 
 and the local building inspector. 
 
 There are about 100 stock plan services operating in the United 
 States at the present time. They range in size from services that may 
 sell 100-200 plans a year to the very largest organizations that mail 
 out 1,000-2,000 each month. Most of the services have been in busi- 
 ness only since the 1950s, starting up in response to the boom in 
 single-family housing construction that followed World War II. The 
 companies still operating are the survivors of a much larger number 
 of services that were organized by individual architects or by small 
 architecture firms, but that could not find a market and went out of 
 business or merged with other services. Only one of the existing 
 services, Garlinghouse, in Topeka, Kansas, has an extended record of 
 activity. It was set up in 1907 by a Topeka builder who recognized 
 the potential market after the display of his houses in the window of 
 a local bank brought many requests for his plans. 
 The contemporary plan services are today's equivalent of the pat- 
 tern books that carpenters and 
 builders in Europe used in erect- 
 ing houses for the bourgeoisie to- 
 ward the end of the eighteenth 
 century. Manv English examples of 
 these books were imported into the 
 United States and were the source 
 for the Georgian style of domestic 
 architecture that was the model for 
 elegant single-family housing in the 
 colonies and during the pre-Fed- 
 eralist period. Cheap land, low- 
 density urban settlements, a large 
 middle-class population, and a cli- 
 mate and natural landscape differ- 
 ent from Europe's soon generated 
 an indigenous literature on house 
 design, much of which included 
 plans that were copied widely. This 
 literature helped establish the ver- 
 nacular forms of the Cape Cod and 
 American farmhouse styles. By the 
 1840s Downing had become 
 
 100 
 
 Exciting 
 New Ways 
 To Build Your 
 Dream House ! 
 
 $$$-SAVIJVG Mortgage Financing 
 TIPS ON: Materials Lists ^f 
 Construction Costs 
 
 Figure 17. America's Best Home Plans is published by Harris Publications in New York. 
 City and is sold by newsdealers throughout the United States. The plans and renderings 
 are developed by the National Home Planning Sen ice and produced by the offices of 
 the New Jersey architect William Chirgotis. 
 
37 
 
 America's first authentic philosopher of the single-family house tra- 
 dition. Downing's book Cottage Residences, first published in 1842, 
 went through four editions and contained 321 illustrations that served 
 as models. 34 Copious collections of floor plans were also a common 
 feature of the many books that began to be published around the 
 same time and which became more numerous later in the nineteenth 
 century, that dealt with child rearing, family life, and household 
 management. There was even a stock plan service functioning during 
 this period, run by the publishers of Godey's Lady's Book, the leading 
 magazine addressed specifically to a feminine audience. Between 1846 
 and 1898 Godey's printed 450 model home designs, the drawings for 
 which could be obtained free of charge by writing to the offices of 
 the journal. Wright reports that these designs were the model for 
 over 4,000 homes built in the 1850s alone. 35 Around the time Go- 
 dey's magazine ceased publication, house plans began to become avail- 
 able without charge from lumber 
 companies, from building supply 
 dealers, and in the early decades of 
 this century, from the large mail- 
 order catalogue stores, such as 
 Sears. During the 1920s, eighty- 
 five small architectural offices in the 
 eastern seaboard states and the 
 Midwest organized a unique lim- 
 ited dividend corporation under 
 professional sponsorship to pub- 
 lish a plan magazine, Small Home, 
 and to sell stock plans. 36 Except for 
 Garlinghouse, all these sources had 
 more or less disappeared by the 
 time of the great suburban expan- 
 sion after World War II. 
 
 The stock plan services that 
 flourish now are more specialized 
 than were most of the extinct ven- 
 tures. This is the only work they 
 do in the design and home- build- 
 ing fields, though they may have 
 
 Figure 18. Garlinghouse, Inc., in Topeka, Kansas, was established in 1907. It is the 
 oldest continuously operating stock plan service in the United States. This photograph 
 of an Art Deco (Moderne) house of the 1930s illustrates the attempt of the stock plan 
 services to reflect changes in consumer taste. 
 
 34 J. S. Johnson, ed.. Architecture of Country Houses, p. be. 
 
 35 Gwendolyn Wright, Moralism and the Modern Home (Chicago: University of Chicago 
 Press, 1980), p. 11. 
 
 36 Arthur Holden, "Outside Business Factors As Competitors of the Architect," ALA 
 Journal, 1925, pp. 308-310. 
 
38 
 
 financial links to other enterprises, including other kinds of architec- 
 tural firms. Their plan documents offer much more detailed infor- 
 mation about construction than even those sold through Small Home 
 in the 1920s. Plans available today indicate the preferred building 
 techniques, show the location of utilities and plumbing, provide in- 
 formation useful in constructing foundations or slabs, and can be 
 easily used as working drawings. With only minor adjustments, they 
 usually qualify for building permits. For a small additional fee, many 
 of the services also provide cost estimates. The plans sold by Better 
 Homes and Gardens, a leading popular magazine addressed to home- 
 owners, project labor and material costs in the specific region in which 
 the purchaser intends to build. 
 
 Architects get involved in stock plan work in three ways. Some, 
 perhaps 10 percent of those engaged in this kind of work, own their 
 own stock plan services, although probably no more than half the 
 total number of services are owned by members of the profession. 
 Although architect-owned services are smaller on the average, that 
 is, they have fewer plans to sell, two architect-owned services are 
 among the biggest in the nation. John Bloodgood, an architect in 
 Des Moines, Iowa, runs a service that specializes in modern and con- 
 temporary house designs. Many of his plans are published in Profes- 
 sional Builder, a magazine with offices in Chicago that is addressed 
 to medium-sized and large home-building firms. Bloodgood was for 
 many years building editor of Better Homes and Gardens and also 
 served as chairman of the AIA's Committee on Housing in 1979. 
 Herman York, whose firm is located on Long Island, has run a serv- 
 ice for over thirty years and is reputed to be the originator of die 
 split-level home design which was a common type in the New York 
 region during the 1950s. 
 
 The architects who own stock plan sendees design many of the 
 
 plans they sell, aldiough they also 
 employ other architects and unli- 
 censed designers for design work 
 and to draw details, do rendering, 
 and prepare die working drawings 
 and specifications. The owners fre- 
 quently conduct a standard profes- 
 sional practice on a limited scale, 
 often under a consulting arrange- 
 ment to large home builders and 
 land developers. York, for exam- 
 ple, was one of the Levitt Corpo- 
 
 Contemporary House Plans 
 Inciud.ng PROFESSIONAL 8UILDER 
 Houses Of The Month 301-312 
 
 BLOODGOOD ARCHITECTS 
 
 Figure 19. John D. Bloodgood, with offices in Don Moines, Iowa, offers a variety ot 
 architectural services to mei chant-builders, including a plan service. This is the cover ot 
 one of his popular plan books which reprint house designs that are also published m 
 Professional Ruilda-. 
 
39 ration's principal design consultants in the construction of Levitt 
 
 communities in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, and Bloodgood is ac- 
 tive as a consultant to developers at the present time. 
 
 The largest number of licensed architects who engage in stock plan 
 design occupy salaried positions in the services or work for them 
 part-time to obtain extra income. Some of the part-timers work on 
 a retainer, others as independent consultants who are paid only for 
 the specific jobs they do. The services that employ architects under 
 these various arrangements include some of the largest in the busi- 
 ness, such as Home Planners in Farmington, Michigan; Master Plan 
 Service in Mineola, New York; and National Plan Service in Elm- 
 hurst, Illinois. These services are independent commercial organiza- 
 tions, but there are similar services that are subsidiaries of companies 
 that publish and distribute books and magazines dealing with other 
 aspects of home building or homeownership, such as the plan service 
 that belongs to Davis Publications, with offices in New York City. 
 Davis publishes magazines and books on consumer electronics and 
 home repair. The major magazines in the home-decorating and gar- 
 dening field, the so-called shelter magazines, also run stock plan serv- 
 ices, as do some of the magazines that builders subscribe to. Among 
 the magazines that run plan services are Better Homes and Gardens, 
 House Beautiful, House and Garden, and Family Circle. The leading 
 magazine for builders is Professional Builder. In addition to architects, 
 these services employ industrial designers, interior designers, "build- 
 ing designers," and "delineators" to produce the plans they sell. 
 
 The stock plan services run by architects and the firms that employ 
 architects dominate the stock plan field. But individual architects can 
 also participate in the selling of stock plans if their designs are chosen 
 for publication by the few home plan guides and magazines that 
 accept submissions on a competitive basis. The best known among 
 the guides are those issued by Hudson Publications, Inc., in Menlo 
 Park, California. They appear monthly in magazine form or are is- 
 sued quarterly as pocket-sized paperback books. Hudson receives 
 hundreds of designs annually from architects all over the country and 
 selects the plans the editors believe are most likely to appeal to a 
 national audience. Some are submitted by well-known designers in 
 the stock plan field, including Bloodgood and William Thompson, 
 an architect in Princeton, New Jersey, known for his authentic re- 
 productions of colonial houses. Many are sent in by young architects 
 fresh out of graduate school who hope to achieve visibility quickly 
 and also earn some additional income. Interested readers order their 
 plans from the company that publishes the guide, and the company 
 sends the order to the architect- author, who forwards the documents 
 directly to the purchaser. The fee for the plan is divided between the 
 guide publisher and the architect. 
 
 Potential customers can find plan guides at bookstores and the 
 
40 
 
 House Plan 
 
 u on M main flow wtoto 
 mJinfvd »r»*i room M«M 
 kltckce lor ji oeM living 
 
 • •>rk kickligkli Ull «tR( 
 
 
 aw 
 
 - i-r 
 
 irnrrw 
 
 regular outlets of newsdealers, such as grocery stores and newsstands 
 in airports, bus stations, and railroad terminals. The newsdealers also 
 distribute the plan books and magazines issued by some of the large 
 stock plan services. These guides, plan books, and magazines sell for 
 between $1 and $3 and contain from 50 to 200 designs each, in- 
 cluding a rendering and basic floor layout for each house. Individuals 
 or families who contemplate buying a house can thus easily get a 
 good deal of the information they want without great effort. 
 
 A second major source of information about the services is the 
 advertisements they place in the monthly issues of shelter magazines. 
 Almost all stock plan services use this channel to communicate with 
 potential customers. The ads generally contain a coupon to be filled 
 out and returned directly to the office of the service, along with a 
 check or money order for the plan book. The books distributed by 
 this method are more expensive than those sold through newsdealers, 
 but the advantage to the consumer is that the books are aimed at 
 specific requirements and tastes: log houses, vacation homes, houses 
 in contemporary or traditional style, houses 
 under 1,500 square feet, or large houses. The 
 Scholz Company, one of the big prefab home 
 builders, offers a similar volume and charges 
 $20 for it. Unlike the other plan services, Scholz 
 and other prefab companies provide the full set 
 of plans and documents only through their 
 franchised builders. 
 
 Still another source of information about 
 stock plans is the local newspaper. Two na- 
 tional press services, die Associated Press and 
 Kings Features, distribute a weekly column on 
 house plans to their subscribers. The columns 
 appear regularly in about 500 newspapers across 
 the United States, and produce an excellent re- 
 I m J "^ '1 sponse for the services or architects who are 
 
 lucky enough to have their plan chosen as "the 
 house of the week." Interested individuals can 
 obtain their plan documents by addressing an 
 inquiry to the architect or service shown in the 
 article sent care of the newspaper. Again the 
 plan service or the designer splits the purchase 
 price of the documents with the publisher. 
 Newspapers in the United States have been 
 printing similar articles at least since the end of 
 
 UUIC* I 
 
 I — J., 
 
 r-TH3 — .J | { 1 1 
 1 TP 
 
 ZJ 1 
 
 sr 
 
 as 
 
 7 
 
 Figure 20. House plans of this type are published every week in hundreds of small- and 
 medium-circulation newspapers. Thcv arc distributed by major newspaper syndicates, 
 including Kings Features and the Associated Press, and are based on drawings prepared 
 by professional architects. 
 
41 World War I. They were, for example, a major outlet for the plans 
 
 of the Architects' Small Home Service Bureau, the limited dividend 
 corporation of professionals that operated during the 1920s. During 
 this very prosperous decade for the American housing market, the 
 bureau each week distributed information about its designs and serv- 
 ices to 75 newspapers with a total circulation of five million read- 
 ers. 37 
 
 Small local building firms of the sort that produce five houses in 
 an ordinary year and as many as twenty-five in a good one get much 
 of their information about stock plans from the same sources as pro- 
 spective homeowners. However, the larger builders who order stock 
 plans through the mail are most likely to get their plans through the 
 services they hear about at meetings of the local chapters of the NAHB 
 or from publications that report on trends in the housing market, 
 such as Professional Builder and Housing (formerly House and Home). 
 The latter, a McGraw-Hill publication, has the largest circulation of 
 any journal in the housing field. 
 
 In many states and local jurisdictions, the documents purchased 
 from the plan services meet the standards of the building code, but 
 this is not the case for all. In New Jersey, for example, a state known 
 for its rigorous control over housing developments, the documents 
 cannot be used for building purposes unless they are stamped by an 
 architect registered in the state. Some of the architects whose plans 
 are distributed by the services are registered in New Jersey even if 
 they do not live there, in which case their stamp qualifies the docu- 
 ment. If the designer is not registered, the builder or developer must 
 have the plans redrawn and stamped by an architect who is. In those 
 states in which such a rule is in force, people building their own 
 houses are not subject to the requirement, which is a major reason 
 stock plans are so attractive to owner- builders. 
 
 Stock plan services rarely provide additional services to the client. 
 Even if consumers approach the designer directly with a request to 
 site the house or modify the plan documents, designers usually turn 
 them down. During the 1950s it was more common for the services 
 to provide, in writing, advice about siting and construction, but the 
 increasing fear of malpractice suits ended this service. The only ex- 
 ception I have found is an architect in the Midwest who runs his 
 own plan service and sells plans to developers. If he is passing through 
 the region in which the developer operates, he will sometimes make 
 a side trip to consult at no extra fee. 
 
 Plans issued by the services vary in design quality and in the com- 
 pleteness of their documentation. Architects themselves admit that 
 the plans turned out by some of the national services often result in 
 products superior to the custom work of small local firms. Many of 
 
 37 Ibid., p. 309. 
 
42 the owners and employees of the services are well trained, have worked 
 
 for prestigious firms during some portion of their career, and are 
 more familiar with the problems of mass housing than the average 
 practitioner whose experience has been confined to small projects and 
 building additions. We should recall in this context that according to 
 an estimate based on 1972 data, one-half the architectural firms in 
 the United States were solo practices with total annual receipts of 
 less than $1 0,000. 38 Although annual receipts have surely increased 
 over the past decade, the majority of firms are still one-person or 
 small practices. This situation does not provide most architects with 
 much opportunity to become experts in housing production. The 
 dearth of local talent in many parts of the country and the sophisti- 
 cation of the product available from the services combine to form a 
 major reason why many professional builders continue to relv on 
 stock plans. 
 
 The sales of the stock plan services have not kept pace over the 
 last decade with the growth in the volume of housing production. 
 The decline in their market results from several factors, including the 
 relative decline in owner- built homes, the increase in mobile home 
 production, the passage of legislation requiring builders to use plans 
 stamped by a local architect, and the gradual shift in product mix 
 away from single-familv housing to town-house projects and garden 
 apartments. Some of the stock plan services do indeed return large 
 profits to their owners, but they are mainly the architect-run sendees 
 whose plans are used by professional builders and developers. 
 
 A further condition that has contributed to the services' declining 
 market is the emergence throughout the United States, but especially 
 in large metropolitan regions, of small one- or two-person architec- 
 ture offices that serve local builders, and sometimes prospective 
 homeowners, by selling stock plans over the counter. These offices, 
 or "plan shops, 11 are run by several types of architects. Some have 
 regular jobs in large design firms or government agencies and earn 
 extra income by preparing or selling plans. Other plan shops are run 
 as an adjunct to practices that engage in the standard range of small 
 building jobs. A third type consists of small practices that deal with 
 a broader range of demands in die building process, including land 
 speculation and feasibility studies, and include stock plans as part o{ 
 their offerings. 
 
 In all three types of plan shops, the stock plans are laid out in 
 drawers that are accessible to the customer. Individuals or builders 
 come in, go dirough the drawers, identify the plans they want, and 
 come back a few days later to collect the documents, often without 
 ever having met the architect in charge. (It is not unusual for the 
 
 • ,8 Robert Gutman, "Architecture: The Entrepreneurial Profession," Progressive Architec- 
 ture, vol. 58, no. 5, May 1977, p. 57. 
 
43 
 
 architect to obtain the original documents from one of the stock plan 
 services.) In such cases, the plan shop usually redraws the documents 
 and then adds its stamp so that the plans meet the local requirements. 
 Architects who practice according to this formula charge at a rate 
 two to three times the stock plan services, usually $300-$400 for the 
 first set of plans. If further copies are needed so that the same house 
 can be erected on another lot, an additional royalty is charged, at 
 one-quarter to one-third the fee for the original. 39 
 
 Plan shops developed during the 1930s in many northeastern states 
 in an attempt to help keep small firms solvent during the Depression, 
 and they became more common during the suburban expansion after 
 World War II. From the builders' point of view, the plan shops have 
 a decided advantage over the stock plan services. Even when the 
 builders have no personal contact with the architect who runs the 
 shop, they know something of his reputation because of his work for 
 other builders in the region. Furthermore, because the architect is 
 known to the local building inspectors and to planning and zoning 
 boards, builders can expect fewer delays in receiving their building 
 approvals. Perhaps most important, if the builder requires additional 
 advice or documentation, the plan shops can provide it. Indeed, as I 
 have mentioned, many of the architects who run plan shops do per- 
 form other work for builders. They know where suitable land is lo- 
 cated and what the going price is. They know what the popular 
 house types and styles are. Many of them have good contacts with 
 
 Figure 21. A typical office of one of the successful national stock plan services, showing 
 the equipment used for reproducing and distributing plans and related materials de- 
 signed by professionals employed by the company. 
 
 39 "When Does a Builder Have to Use an Architect?" House and Home, vol. 32, no. 2, 
 August 1967, pp. 58-65. 
 
44 
 
 local banks and mortgage companies and can help the builder obtain 
 cheaper terms on construction loans. The architects' expertise in this 
 field stems from their experience in contracting, and manv of them 
 help to make up the 3 percent of the NAHB who are registered 
 architects. In our interviews we encountered one former architect 
 who became so renowned for the design quality of the houses he 
 built that he eventually gave up his building business to concentrate 
 on providing architectural services. 
 
 The attitude of most members of the profession toward their col- 
 leagues' participation in preparing and selling stock plans is a mixture 
 of contempt for the way in which it violates the ideal definition of 
 the architect's role, embarrassment that registered architects should 
 be forced to operate in this fashion to earn income, and secret ad- 
 miration for the profits this tvpe of business generates. Stock plan 
 work can be very remunerative for those architects whose plans are 
 purchased in large quantities, or whose services or shops are patron- 
 ized by developers. Architects who own their own services or who 
 run plan shops collect the full amount of the rovaltv that is paid for 
 plan documents. Those whose plans are sold through the plan guides, 
 magazines, and newspapers receive, as I have noted, half the sum 
 paid bv purchasers, but are relieved of the expense of advertising 
 their work. The most successful designers are the owners of services 
 and shops. Stock plan work carries a verv low overhead, so that when 
 the home-building industrv is flourishing, an owner of a larger sen- 
 ice can easily net in the neighborhood of SI 00,000 annuallv. 
 
 Architects who argue that stock plan production compromises the 
 norms of professional conduct are not supported in their conviction 
 by the ALA code of ethics, or by the licensing regulations of die state 
 boards that examine and register architects. The code nowhere ex- 
 plicitly forbids any of the activities engaged in by architects who own 
 
 Figure 22. A market-oriented rental garden-apartment project in New Jcrsc\ in which 
 the architect has borrowed from his knowledge of architectural history and decorated 
 each block of units in a different period style. This kind of eclecticism has a long history 
 in American domestic architecture. 
 
45 services, sell designs through them, or work for them. The disdain 
 
 and embarrassment reflect informal norms that have developed in the 
 profession during the last 100 years. These norms express the ambi- 
 tion of professionals to differentiate themselves from the acknowl- 
 edged mercenaries in the building industry, such as contractors and 
 jerry-builders, and thus justify the claims for monopoly privilege that 
 architects have never fully achieved. Indeed, one could argue that the 
 abashed feeling some architects display toward their stock plan col- 
 leagues is magnified by the lack of a clear mandate from the public 
 and clients in support of their desire to be recognized as professionals 
 rather than businessmen. In our interviews it became apparent that 
 stock plan architects are fully aware of their reputation and have 
 internalized the profession's ambivalent view of their activities. Many 
 respondents were anxious to convince us that their designs did not 
 necessarily reflect personal standards, but were a necessary accom- 
 modation to the preferences of developers, builders, and housing 
 consumers. Several sought to divert the conversation from their stock 
 plans to other work they did, citing examples of projects over which 
 they had been able to exert the greater degree of control associated 
 with professional autonomy. Some architects made comments that 
 they felt sure would impress a researcher from an architecture school: 
 one plan-shop owner mentioned that he always referred to Bannister 
 Fletcher's classic history book on architecture, and sent us to pho- 
 tograph a development that by its use of an unusually wide range of 
 historic styles confirmed his design method. Another stock plan serv- 
 ice owner resisted our efforts to get him to talk about his business, 
 and instead spend most of the interview recounting his days in grad- 
 uate school when he was a student in Louis Kahn's master class. 
 
 Captive Architects "Captive architects" is a term used within the architectural 
 profession to describe architects who work as salaried employees for 
 firms that are not independent design firms. The term is pejorative, 
 reflecting the assumption that the architect should always be an in- 
 dependent professional standing between the client and the contrac- 
 tor. It thus also implies a change from the older conception of the 
 architect, common before the commitment to professionalization be- 
 came so widespread during the nineteenth century, that the architect 
 should be closely integrated either with the building process — some- 
 one who constructs as well as designs — or with the client, say in the 
 way of so many illustrious English architects who were surveyors to 
 the king or held other roles in charge of building works. However, 
 with the increase in the complexity of building types during the last 
 quarter of the nineteenth century and with the growing size and 
 
46 activity of home- building firms over the last thirty years, the captive 
 
 architect has become increasingly prominent. 
 
 The organized profession, represented by the schools, the AIA, 
 and the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards 
 (NCARB), has traditionally been opposed to the idea of architects 
 accepting employment from builders and clients. Captive architects 
 are regarded as being less able to implement their own standards of 
 good design and quality building. The professional organizations also 
 believe captive architects take work away from the private firms. They 
 worry that by making the architect seem to be a lackey of the client, 
 the captive architect will damage the profession's prestige. NCARB 
 has tried to reinforce this attitude by not counting work done for a 
 nonarchitectural firm in the experience qualification for registration. 
 In recent years this attitude of the professional organizations has 
 been changing. The AIA, which has been oriented toward the private 
 firm, has begun to recognize the existence of captive architects and 
 to extend to them some of the support and sendees that have tradi- 
 tionally been reserved for private practitioners. It now, for example, 
 provides staff and support services for committees of architects in 
 government and industry and indeed has encouraged studies of the 
 special demands of this role. 
 
 Several factors have contributed to the change of heart. In the first 
 place the profession has had to acknowledge that it has no power to 
 prevent clients from employing designers in-house. The profession 
 was able to use its lobbying power to wrest public housing and other 
 building projects from in-house architects, but it cannot do this in 
 the private sector. If clients are going to hire in-house designers, the 
 AIA would prefer that these be registered architects and AIA mem- 
 bers. 
 
 The private firms have also dis- 
 covered that they often get a more 
 sympathetic ear in dealing with 
 large clients when there are archi- 
 tects in-house who can understand 
 the professionals 1 concerns and also 
 fight the battle for good architec- 
 ture within the company. 
 
 The supply of architects usu- 
 ally exceeds the demand, and ar- 
 chitects have traditionally suffered 
 from underemployment. The or- 
 
 Figurc 23. This mobile home was built bv Fleetwood Enterprises, one of the three 
 
 largest producers of industrialized housing units in the United States It is intended tot 
 permanent erection on a building site. 
 
47 ganized profession has come to realize that it is short-sighted to pass 
 
 up these job opportunities even if they do not conform to the profes- 
 sional ideal. 
 
 Finally, there has been a general recognition within the profession 
 that the commitment to an idealized version of the profession is un- 
 dermining the architect's influence, and there is consequendy a greater 
 willingness to try new versions of the older relationships of the ar- 
 chitect to the building process. 
 
 In identifying the role of the captive architect in the home-build- 
 ing industry it is necessary to distinguish among the materials 
 manufacturers, the manufacturers of dwelling units and housing 
 components, the small home-building firms, and the larger or giant 
 home- building firms. Most materials manufacturers and some sup- 
 pliers have people with architectural training and backgrounds on 
 their staffs, though there are not many registered architects among 
 them. These architects keep in touch with the changing requirements 
 of the building industry and help their corporations develop the new 
 technologies and products that will expand their markets. They form 
 an indispensable liaison between the private practitioner and the ma- 
 terials industry. 
 
 Captive architects occupy a numerically small but not insignificant 
 place in the home-manufacturing industry. Some manufacturing firms 
 are owned by architects, and some of the larger firms employ them. 
 They do everything from designing units to managing production. 
 
 Among the merchant- building firms that are members of the NAHB, 
 there is a big difference between the practices of the smaller and the 
 larger firms. Those that produce twenty-five or fewer houses per year 
 rely almost exclusively on outside design services: stock plans, plan 
 shops, and independent local firms. The big users of the in-house 
 architectural staff are the giant building firms, and it is from their 
 reports and experiences that we get the most complete sense of the 
 considerations, problems, and forces that encourage the development 
 of the in-house role for architects in the housing industry. 
 
 These large firms generally use a combination of in-house and out- 
 side architects. The mix varies with the size of the firm's operations, 
 the degree to which it is concentrated in a particular area, and the 
 extent to which it is content with its existing market or is seeking a 
 new market or a new image. In the early days of the Levitt Corpo- 
 ration, in the 1950s, the firm relied almost exclusively on in-house 
 architects, building on the tradition that had been started when Alfred 
 Levitt was with the firm and did its design work. The firm began to 
 experiment with outside consultants when the image of its product 
 . came under attack, and again later in New Jersey when its houses 
 were not selling well and it was looking for new types of housing. 
 The company became dissatisfied with working with outsiders, how- 
 
48 
 
 ever, feeling they could not appreciate the special requirements of 
 the operations, and went back to relying almost exclusively on in- 
 house architects. 40 
 
 Kaufman and Broad and other firms that operated in national mar- 
 kets in the 1970s had their own corporate architectural staff at head- 
 quarters. The national staff provided the basic house plans for the 
 regional divisions, but schematics and finished plans were produced 
 locally. This arrangement provided control over costs, but at the same 
 time allowed local divisions to respond flexibly to regional tastes and 
 shifts in local economic conditions. A survey conducted in 1979 re- 
 ported that 25 percent of all builders and 50 percent of the giant 
 builders had an architect or designer on their staffs, but many of 
 these designers may have been engineers, landscape architects, or simply 
 self-taught. 41 
 
 Architects are encouraged by their education and by the ideals 
 celebrated by their profession to believe that their principal function 
 in life is to "design," but studies of the profession reveal that most 
 architects who have reached the level of senior partner spend less 
 than 10 percent of their time on design. 42 Most of it goes into other 
 activities, such as getting work, attending meetings, and solving 
 problems on the site. There is thus nothing unusual, outside of the 
 
 Figure 24. In his rush to find new gimmicks to make his New Jersey Levittown houses 
 appealing to consumers William Levitt encouraged his staff architects to explore unusual 
 combinations of ornament. Houses were built that combined features of single-family 
 ranch and two-story colonial houses, Gothic garage doors and Palladia!] style shutters, 
 Victorian street lamps and Hudson River batten board siding, and many other bizarre 
 combinations. The style became the vernacular domestic architecture of suburbia, re- 
 placing the more literal reference to historical vocabularies that defined .m earlier tradi- 
 tion of American eclecticism. 
 
 40 Herbert Cans, The Lnnttowners (New York: Random House, 1967), p. 10. 
 
 41 Architectural Record, When Builders Employ Architects, 1979. 
 
 42 Royal Institute of British Architects, The Architect ami His Office (London: Royal 
 Institute of British Architects, 1962), p. 47. 
 
49 work situation itself, about captive architects being involved in a va- 
 
 riety of activities other than design work. Those who work for home- 
 building firms help in site selection, conduct feasibility studies, pro- 
 gram, design, and supervise construction, all activities that are famil- 
 iar to independent architects. 
 
 Captive architects do, however, have other functions that set them 
 apart from their independent colleagues. One of the most important 
 of these is to supervise outside designers. Captive architects in the 
 home-building industry report that this is one of their most satisfying 
 activities, particularly when they deal with prestigious firms. As one 
 architect I interviewed told me, this work gave him a chance to par- 
 ticipate in the practice of architecture on a level that would not 
 otherwise have been accessible to him. 
 
 Captive architects also become involved in real estate management 
 and the marketing of housing units. Although the architects I talked 
 to did not find these particular experiences of great interest, they did 
 appreciate the fact that success in these areas enabled them to move 
 on to satisfying executive and supervisory positions within their firms. 
 
 Home builders give several reasons for hiring their own designers. 
 One is that outside architects don't work fast enough. One builder 
 complained that it took him thirty days after his revisions or approv- 
 als to get drawings back, by which time the house could already have 
 been built. Staff designers are more familiar with the company's 
 methods of specification and construction. They are also constantly 
 available to the management, the sales staff, and even buyers of par- 
 ticular units, which means a design can be altered quickly to satisfy 
 a customer's wish. 
 
 Home-building firms also state that unless they hire their own 
 designers, they cannot attract high quality professionals. They com- 
 plain that the prominent firms are wrapped up in large-scale custom 
 housing or other building work and are not interested in working 
 with merchant- builders. Surely the resistance of top offices to giving 
 the design prerogative over to the builder or developer is related to 
 this complaint. 
 
 Despite the home-building industry's reliance on in-house archi- 
 tects, one finds in the housing literature an increasing number of 
 complaints about this practice. If one reads between the lines, how- 
 ever, one sees not a desire to give up in-house architects entirely but 
 an attempt to redefine the designer's role. Apparently the industry 
 would like to see these designers involve themselves in planning, 
 liaison, and management, and not serve simply as the only or even 
 the principal source of design ideas. Some of the reasons for this 
 shift have already been mentioned, including the search for innova- 
 tive ideas resulting from the greater competitiveness of the industry, 
 but there are other practical reasons as well. Among these are the 
 difficulties of recruiting good talent: NCARB rules and the stigma 
 attached to working as a captive architect — you must be mediocre 
 
50 because if you were good you'd be working for an independent de- 
 
 sign firm — limit the industry's ability to attract talented designers. 
 
 It is also extremely expensive to maintain a full staff. The Ross- 
 Cortese Corp., a major national builder of retirement communities, 
 for example, used to list a design staff of thirty a decade ago, but not 
 now. As I have mentioned, the home- building industry is extremely 
 sensitive to general economic conditions, and the cyclical nature of 
 the demand for its products means that most firms do not have enough 
 projects going to need full-time design work all the time. But if those 
 who design are to engage in other functions, an advanced degree in 
 business administration or management may be more useful than an 
 architecture degree. Even if the architects can perform these other 
 roles satisfactorily, they may lose touch with what is going on in the 
 world of home design. The vice president for design of a major in- 
 ner-city development firm, an architect himself, has complained that 
 an in-house staff tends to stagnate, and for this reason he has switched 
 to using outside architects for almost all his firm's work. As I men- 
 tioned in Chapter 2, there are now over 300 firms that specialize in 
 working with developers. 
 
 Architects employed by home builders have mixed feelings about 
 their experience, depending in part on their expectations and their 
 ability to find jobs that will enable them to satisfy alternative ambi- 
 tions. Some report that they like the challenge of the work. Having 
 to sell their idea to the builder forces them to articulate precisely the 
 reasons for particular design decisions. Some architects like the op- 
 portunity to be involved in management decisions. They report being 
 linked by direct internal communications to both production and 
 marketing, though some feel cut off from the work of the independ- 
 ent designers. Many appreciate the fact that the fruits of their labor 
 are realized in a short time; this is not visionary architecture. Some 
 simply like the chance to move up into a management role and the 
 power that comes with an executive position. Others brought up 
 their pleasure at being able to bring design thinking to bear at the 
 very inception of the project, when it is being financed. Finally, some 
 mentioned the chance to exercise design skills while overseeing out- 
 side architects. 
 
 Despite all these salutary aspects captive architects see in their work, 
 most of them moonlight. Yet so do most salaried architects working 
 for independent firms, which suggests that the dissatisfactions in- 
 volved in being a captive architect do not spring from the fact of 
 captivity itself. 
 
VI 
 
 Design-Build Another mode of practice that has become more popular within the 
 profession recently is the design-build practice. The important char- 
 acteristic of design- build is that the architectural office assumes re- 
 sponsibility not only for the design of the housing units or project, 
 but for their construction as well. The office, in other words, acts as 
 both designer and contractor. 
 
 Beyond this essential definition, design-build can and does take 
 different forms. In some cases the architectural office also acts as 
 housing developer. The design- builder purchases the land, raises the 
 capital, and markets and sells the units in addition to designing and 
 constructing them. A more accurate label for such a practice might 
 be design-develop. 
 
 Another form of practice is known as design-build-bid. Here the 
 architectural office offers the equivalent of a package deal, providing 
 the client with a price that includes not only the design for the proj- 
 ect but also a firm bid indicating the completed construction cost to 
 the owner. 
 
 Design-build is a well-established mode of operation in the home- 
 building industry. In the nineteenth century most speculative hous- 
 ing was constructed under a design- build system in the sense that 
 the builders did their own design work and provided the prospective 
 purchaser with a firm contract price. In some cases they also owned 
 the land, as merchant- builders do now. Today's merchant-builders 
 can also be said to practice design-build, especially when they acquire 
 their designs from their in-house staffs. In this chapter, however, I 
 am talking about design- build practices of a different sort: firms made 
 up of professional architects who carry out the operations of con- 
 struction or construction and development. 
 
 Such firms constitute both a new form of practice and a reversion 
 to a more traditional type of operation. It is traditional in the sense 
 that before the twentieth century most practitioners in the housing 
 field who were known as architects doubled as contractors and build- 
 ers. This was true both for single-family houses and for larger proj- 
 ects. It was only when architects became more self-conscious about 
 the status of their craft and moved to acquire professional status 
 through registration and licensing that more and more architects 
 thought it advisable to sever their ties with the commercial activities 
 of land development and construction. 
 
 When, however, the states finally began to establish a registration 
 system for architects, the legislatures refused to incorporate restric- 
 tions on the profession's involvement in construction and develop- 
 ment. Too many practicing architects were opposed to the proposal, 
 and builders and contractors feared that it would threaten their right 
 to do their own housing design. The crusade to separate the design 
 function from the building function was taken up by the ALA. It 
 established a code of professional ethics that forbade members in 
 
 51 
 
52 good standing from having an interest in construction firms, and as 
 
 recently as the 1950s it was still trying to make this restriction more 
 stringent. The architectural firms that were prestigious enough to get 
 work without having to provide construction services went along 
 with the restriction, but throughout the whole period of the AIA's 
 firmest opposition, from 1900 to 1950, hundreds of offices contin- 
 ued to practice design-build. 
 
 A change in official sentiment seems to have taken place around 
 1960, and for a decade thereafter there were numerous debates within 
 the AIA about the advisability of relaxing the rules. In 1978 the 
 annual convention voted in favor of a temporary suspension of the 
 restriction, to be reviewed in 1981 on the basis of the results of a 
 study of the profession's experience with design-build practice. In 
 1979, the Department of Justice announced its intention to bring 
 suit against the AIA and societies of professional engineers on the 
 grounds that some of the provisions of their ethics codes constituted 
 a restraint on professional trade. In response the AIA, along with 
 the engineering societies, agreed to sign consent decrees, the result 
 of which was that all provisions of the ethics code, including those 
 preventing design-build practice, were made voluntary. The organi- 
 zation decided to reverse its stand on the matter fully and now lends 
 advice and assistance to architects who are interested in pursuing this 
 kind of practice. By 1981, 14 percent of AIA member firms engaged 
 in this mode of practice, and the percentage has probably continued 
 to increase since that time, especially for practitioners operating in 
 the field of housing design. 43 In trying to explain why design-build 
 has become more acceptable as a form of practice, one must distin- 
 guish between the more direct pressures on the AIA to change its 
 code of ethics and the forces that led to those pressures. Like many 
 other professional organizations, the AIA has felt the need to be 
 more responsive to its potential constituency, even though the lead- 
 ership may have had ambivalent feelings about the wishes of that 
 potential constituency. 
 
 In the case of the AIA several factors were operating. The organ- 
 ization was losing members: during the 1970s a smaller portion of 
 registered architects belonged to it than in the period just after World 
 War II, and one reason was that the code of ethics did not reflect the 
 conditions practitioners encountered in dieir efforts to survive in the 
 field. So many architects were violating the professional code in their 
 scramble to survive that it would have been impossible to enforce 
 the code and still maintain membership. 
 
 In addition the leadership of the AIA was changing. No longer 
 was it headed by distinguished practitioners who represented die ideals 
 
 41 American Institute of Architects, Dcsign-BuildlContmcting Momtonnt] Task bone Re- 
 port (Washington, D.C.: American Institute of Architects, Mav 1981). 
 
53 of the profession, as had been the case in the nineteenth century and 
 
 the early decades of the twentieth, men of the caliber of Richard 
 Morris Hunt, Daniel Burnham, Charles McKim, Cass Gilbert, and 
 Robert Kohn. The leadership was passing to people from more run 
 of the mill firms. Most of the AIA presidents in the period after 
 World War II, for example, were partners in the successful commer- 
 cial offices in medium-size to large cities. Their firms were not known 
 to stand for any specific design or social principles, but were moti- 
 vated by the need to make a living and to provide reasonably com- 
 petent service. Such firms were more sensitive to the competitive 
 conditions under which most of the profession labored. 
 
 The increasing commercialization of the profession that was sym- 
 bolized in the new ethical code was itself the result of a variety of 
 conditions within the building industry. Design practice was increas- 
 ingly dominated by a small number of very large firms which had the 
 capital and resources to provide the services that clients and builders 
 needed. 44 This left relatively less work for the middle-level firms which 
 then were forced to expand into construction and development. This 
 trend was clearly apparent in the home- building field, where the spe- 
 cialist housing firms got most of the work on the large projects. 
 
 Also important was the growing tendency, which I discussed ear- 
 lier, for client organizations and construction companies to under- 
 take design work in-house, further contracting the market for mid- 
 dle-level firms and encouraging them to develop new forms of business. 
 The very big firms could survive this transformation, particularly be- 
 cause of their capacity to seek and acquire jobs throughout the na- 
 tion, and thus avoid many of the hazards involved in the dependence 
 of the average independent firm on regional economic conditions. 
 
 Architects were also spurred to adopt design- build by competition 
 from a type of company that had operated previously in factory and 
 commercial building but had never before been an important factor 
 in the home-building field. These "package dealers" offered a com- 
 plete range of design and building services, but were not run by 
 either the traditional architect or contractor. Their services were par- 
 ticularly attractive to large landowners who wanted to realize the 
 development potential in their properties but did not have the ex- 
 perience or skill to go through the standard development or mer- 
 chant-building process. They flourished in California and the south- 
 western states in the 1950s before the era of the giant merchant- 
 builders. The package dealers were so cost efficient that even the 
 largest architectural firms were excluded from the market they served. 
 The success of the dealers, however, alerted the profession to the 
 
 44 Robert Gutman, Barbara Westergaard, and David Hicks, "The Structure of Design 
 Firms in the Construction Industry," Environment and Planning 5, vol. 4, no. 1, June 
 1977, pp. 3-29. 
 
54 
 
 importance of assimilating the contracting and development function 
 into their own operations. 
 
 In considering these pressures on architects to explore new forms 
 of practice, one cannot ignore the tremendous increase in the last 
 thirty-five years in the number of architects being graduated by the 
 schools and looking for work. It has been estimated that there were 
 20,000 registered architects in the United States in 1950, a ratio of 
 2.6 per 10,000 urban population, with approximately 1,500 men 
 and women receiving professional degrees annually. 45 By 1980, the 
 number of registered architects had tripled, to 65,000, a ratio of 
 approximately four per 10,000 urban population, while professional 
 degree graduates numbered approximately 5,000. The profession, with 
 its conventional ideals, could not absorb them, and this intensified 
 the search for new roles, of which design-build was one. 
 
 A design- build practice is especially attractive to young people who 
 
 Figure 25. Sears's Magnolia model of 1918. This two-story mansion with basement, 
 solarium, nine-foot ceilings, inlaid oak floors, and servants' quarters could be obtained 
 by rail shipment. It sold for $5,140. Sears sold more than 100,000 homes from its 
 catalogue between 1908 and 1937. 
 
 45 The data are taken from Gutman, "Architecture: The Entrepreneurial Profession," p. 
 57, and Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1982-83 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Gov- 
 ernment Printing Office, 1982), p. 167. 
 
55 dislike filling standard slots in the large, bureaucratic offices charac- 
 
 teristic of the successful firms. Design-build seems to offer a method 
 for satisfying the image of the profession that initially drew them to 
 the field: a chance to be their own boss and at the same time carry 
 out cherished ideals related to housing and the environment. And it 
 is within the reach of many young people because very little capital 
 is needed to start such a practice. 
 
 Despite these advantages, many architects still avoid any form of 
 practice that gets them involved in the development work that pre- 
 cedes design, or the management of construction that inevitably fol- 
 lows if the design is to be realized, especially if they have to be in 
 charge of putting together the trades that carry out the work. But 
 even for those who enjoy this kind of work, a design- build practice 
 has hazards. 
 
 For example, some design-builders point out that even this kind 
 of practice does not provide the autonomy many professionals yearn 
 for. Architecture, they say, is still a dependent profession because the 
 banks or other lenders insist on evidence that the product is likely to 
 sell, which makes the practitioner again subject to the conventional 
 expectations of the market. Only architects who have their own cap- 
 ital, or who are able and willing to contribute sweat equity, can get 
 around these constraints, and even they cannot be satisfied fully until 
 the product is sold. 
 
 Also, some architects who have been successful in design- build for 
 housing told us that they end up as far removed from the design 
 function as many principals in private firms that do consulting for 
 developers or are developers themselves. Instead, they find them- 
 selves spending time on managerial and executive tasks concerned 
 with construction and marketing. Clearly there is no easy solution 
 for the problem of being an architect in the American home-building 
 industry. 
 
 VII 
 
 Conclusion The review of the operations of housing producers and the methods 
 
 of architectural practice identifies a wide range of problems that face 
 the profession as it tries to increase its influence on the environment 
 in which Americans live. Some of the principal problems can be sum- 
 marized as follows: (1) The commitment of the American housing 
 tradition to single-family detached dwellings gives builders broad 
 latitude to work without the assistance of architects. (2) The pressure 
 from the housing industry and its customers to reduce costs and 
 operate efficiently means that professional values favoring more ex- 
 pensive materials, finer detailing, and better aesthetics must often be 
 sacrificed. (3) Other professions, especially engineering, provide serv- 
 
56 ices that place them in competition with architects. This problem is 
 
 intensifying because nonprofessional organizations are also operating 
 in the housing field now. (4) Nonmarket housing has historically 
 been the segment of the housing field in which the profession has 
 been most effective in realizing its ambition, but very little of this 
 kind of housing is being built at the moment. (5) The current tend- 
 ency for building producers to become larger and vertically inte- 
 grated deprives architects of their authority and autonomy in the 
 design and building process. 
 
 When we consider these problems as a group, I believe they boil 
 down to the fact mat the self-conception of the architects is contrary 
 to what housing producers and consumers expect and want from the 
 profession. Similar contradictions affect the relations of many con- 
 temporary professions to the client community they are supposed to 
 serve, but the difficulties the situation presents to architects are more 
 threatening and demeaning than they are in, say, medicine or law. 
 When clients seek medical or legal help, they are usually in a situation 
 that provokes anxiety, and there are fewer alternatives available to 
 them. In addition, an aura of mystery still surrounds the work of 
 doctors and lawyers. 
 
 Despite the criticism leveled at these professions for malpractice or 
 failure to meet the health needs of the poor and disadvantaged, the 
 skills of the medical and legal professions are perceived as relevant to 
 the needs of the populations that use their sendees. Oddly enough, 
 this often does not hold for architects: their professional skills, in the 
 case of housing, for instance, are seen as having little to do with the 
 practical problems facing producers and consumers. Architects, of 
 course, recognize the challenge die profession faces in trying to 
 maintain its position in the design and building fields, and this ex- 
 plains the sense of urgency that is standard in debates about the 
 profession's future. There is probably no other long-established 
 profession whose members so often worn' about whether the profes- 
 sion itself will survive. 
 
 What can be done to make architects more confident of their ca- 
 pacity to deal with problems of housing production? What can be 
 done to give them a bigger share of responsibility in the housing 
 industry? I feel an obligation to raise these questions because this 
 study has convinced me that die profession has more to offer the 
 housing field than its present relationship to housing producers al- 
 lows it to contribute. 
 
 One step that must be taken is to revise the system for educating 
 architects so diat their knowledge of the formal aspects of design is 
 combined with skill in dealing with the pragmatic aspects of housing. 
 The appalling fact is diat most recent graduates know very little about 
 the organization of housing production, the technology of home 
 
57 
 
 building, and the kinds of housing requirements that are important 
 to consumers. Not only is their knowledge of these subjects very 
 skimpy, but what is more unfortunate, a large number of graduates 
 come out of the schools with attitudes that make it difficult for them 
 to work with the industry and its customers. Many educators defend 
 the students' ignorance on the grounds that the practical aspects of 
 accommodation are best learned in practice and that the professional 
 schools provide a unique opportunity to acquire knowledge of the 
 ideals and principles of good design. There is a certain wisdom in 
 this view of the relation of professional education to the heavily com- 
 mercialized housing production system of the United States, but the 
 argument overlooks the fact that the knowledge the schools transmit 
 is accompanied by a set of values that makes it difficult for graduates 
 to develop a constructive relationship to the pragmatics of building. 
 As a result, when later on, under the exigencies of making a living, 
 manv architects finallv do pick up a working knowledge of housing 
 questions, they are ashamed and feel they have "sold out." Other 
 graduates never make the break and are more or less permanently 
 alienated. 
 
 A second issue that has to be 
 worked on is directly connected to 
 the guilty feeling that settles over 
 architects who get personally in- 
 volved in housing production. Be- 
 cause professional education and 
 the prevailing norms lead archi- 
 tects who engage in stock plan 
 work or who specialize in consult- 
 ing for developers — and even those 
 who engage in design- build — to 
 regard themselves almost as trai- 
 tors or failures, very little thought 
 is given to how these forms of 
 practice can be used to solve the 
 problems of housing. If some 
 modification of the traditional 
 forms of practice are inevitable, 
 
 Figure 26. House VI, a weekend house designed by Peter Eisenman for an advertising 
 photographer and his art historian wife, indicates the lengths to which contemporary 
 cultural practices will go in ignoring the practical issues of housing design. The column 
 to the left of the dining table in the photograph is painted to look like two columns. It 
 is bigger than the loads require, but provides the architect with an opportunitv to in- 
 dulge his penchant for investigating notational svstems. The column's position makes it 
 hard on people around the table who want to talk to each other. Both architectural 
 gestures are introduced in deliberate defiance of the principles of economy and Inability, 
 and are intended to confirm Eisenmans argument that architecture itself has little to do 
 with the pragmatics of building. 
 
58 why do architects spend so much time bemoaning this fact instead 
 
 of analyzing the conditions that brought it into being? For example, 
 if one reason for the emergence of specialist housing firms is the need 
 of giant builders to respond to the demands of consumers, should 
 not the profession be thinking more about how consumer prefer- 
 ences can be related to professional concerns about the overall quality 
 of the environment? Perhaps architects should relax their ambition 
 to design one-off houses that seem to affect mostly the ideas of other 
 architects and instead concentrate on providing useful advice to the 
 ordinary consumer who is forced to select from the range of types 
 and styles that the market offers. There are some major opportunities 
 in this area for far-reaching investigations of the kind that architects 
 like to deal with, such as designing advanced technologies that will 
 extend the range of options available to the ordinary consumer. Per- 
 haps it will help make this subject attractive to the profession to 
 mention that Le Corbusier was exploring just this kind of approach 
 in the Algiers projects on which he worked in the last decades of his 
 career. 
 
 Although it is correct to argue, as I have said, that the home build- 
 ers are responsive to consumer preferences, the consumers whose 
 demands they take into account are individuals and families who 
 have the resources to buy the houses that the private market can 
 afford to produce. Millions of American families cannot participate 
 in this market, their number is likely to grow, and the housing needs 
 of this population are unlikely to be met without direct subsidies by 
 the federal or state governments. In the past, architects have been 
 among the leading voices in calling attention to the housing prob- 
 lems of the indigent and the disadvantaged, in part because they saw 
 it as an appropriate concern for a profession, as distinguished from 
 a business occupation. Furthermore, when the federal and state gov- 
 ernments were more active in the housing arena, the projects built 
 with their support provided excellent opportunities for architects to 
 introduce many important new ideas of housing design and con- 
 struction. In my judgment, both the self-interest of the profession 
 and its historic concern for the quality of the environment enjoyed 
 by all social classes suggest a third activity, namely that architects 
 should again assume the role of spokesmen for those less-favored 
 Americans whose housing requirements are not being addressed at 
 the present time. 
 
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