Eye Candy

When I was studying architecture in Los Angeles I learned the term "Eye Candy."  Stuff that looked really cool, caught your eyes, made you take a second look.  These seemed to be the projects that got the most attention.  For me what was important was substance.  I was so busy trying to get my projects to have some sort of substance, I often ran out of time to make the look fancy or eye-catching. I was a minimalist in a world of maximalists.

Out of school, trying to deal with the real world, I'm faced with this same idea again.  Just trying to get my kids to wear appropriate clothing is a struggle. Everyone, at every age (yes, I mean you, my beloved 4 year old) has their won sense of style, of comfort, of what they think is important to them to showcase themselves to the rest of the world.

It's the same with housing.  Everyone has different ideas of what to them is a beautiful house.  I remember driving through Beverly Hills with a friend of my brothers who just loved every huge mansion he saw, regardless of what it looked like. He just liked it because it was big.  I have a friend who lived in a developed community in Florida where every house looked exactly the same.  Although hers was painted a slightly different shade of green.  My parents had a house where the living room ceiling opened up to a gallery of the upstairs and an entry that was a double story space.  It was the only house on the street that did that.  It got really hot in the summer time, my room was tiny because they were trying to squeeze 4 bedrooms into a space big enough for three.  But it was an awesome space, not just for throwing laundry and toys down at my brother standing below, but for lying on the couch and staring up at the sloped ceiling and watching the shadows of the walls and railing pass as the sunlight moved across the room.

But when we talk about the affordability of building houses, where do we start skimping?  What makes something more of a necessity than something else? When you build in a resource poor community, what is your choice of building material?  The push from the west is to go green. Use local materials.  Use local resources.  But the east wants trendy cool eye catching stuff just like the west does too.  Why should they be left behind?  

Is there a way to use local materials and make it look cool and trendy?  Is that an expense they can afford?  Can they afford not to?  If we used traditional ways of building using local materials, but jazzed it up or cladded it differently, would it make it more desirable?  So much of why traditional building techniques aren't used by the wealthier people in resource poor areas, is because of cultural biases and stereotypes.  How do we make them cool again?  Its a common phenomena in the US that poor communities get infiltrated by poor artists who then make the area look cool to wealthy people and suddenly the property prices soar out of control. Is there a way to make traditional building techniques, which tend to be environmentally friendly and most suitable to the climate, cool again?  Without it becoming so cool (and therefore expensive) that it remains accessible to everyone?

Compressed soil block construction can look like, umm well, compressed soil blocks.

Compressed soil blocks can look cool too!  Here is an example of a structural vault built out of compressed soil blocks built from local soil for a new museum at the World Heritage Site of Mapungubwe in South Africa designed by Peter Rich Architects.  Michael Ramage (Cambridge), John Ochsendorf, and Philippe Block designed the unreinforced structural masonry vaults in collaboration with Henry Fagan in South Africa. Matthew Hodge developed the cement-stabilized tiles in collaboration with Anne Fitchett (Univ. of Witwatersrand). Based on his experience building the domes of the Pines Calyx in the UK, James Bellamy supervised the vault construction on site.