[person8645]

Architect here. This gets much more difficult if you dive into the deeper problems that architecture attempts to address. Victorian/Queen Anne homes are based around smaller, more numerous, and more specific rooms. The exterior appearance flows from the way that people lived in that time, with the HVAC and construction materials and methods available to them. Ornate hand detailing on the high-quality surviving examples looks right because of the scale and use of the spaces within, as well as the market of hand carpenters. Applying a kit of modern materials to diverse spatial problems won't really yield good designs.

There's a reason that modern architecture developed around the international style when concrete, steel, glass, and mechanical HVAC all developed and became cost effective at the same time as open-floor plan living and the decreasing number of household staff. All of these factors go hand in hand and a robust solution would have to touch on these deeper considerations. Not to say it's impossible, but trying to put out there that architectural design is more than skin deep.

To use your analogy, you can use React to build what used to be a mid-90s static styled HTML site, but you probably wouldn't.

[solarmist]

This was very informative thank you.

What trends do you see in architecture/modern (as in tools, best practices and techniques) design and home building?

Also could you recommend any good primers on these ideas/problems for the layperson?

[person8645]

Sorry the late/long answer. Took a couple of stabs to get this brain download for you.

I've been wrapped in that very question. I'm trying my first spec home right now and residential construction is a total mess, as the article makes clear. Small, informally organized contractors are a real problem at this scale, and the labor + material cost is already so high that it's a real struggle to compete with existing buildings in my market. I'm expecting to break even or perhaps net $50k for about 1.5 years of work, but part of that is tuition for the learning process.

At the high end - commercial buildings, complicated skyscrapers and so on - construction work is becoming vastly more streamlined, controlled, and predictable. It's now possible to have daily laser scans of your construction progress, automated inventory management of pieces scanned on site, detailed digital models that everyone can access and comment on, and all of that is becoming the norm. Check out Leica laser scanning, ProCore, and Trimble Connect for examples. From the design side, the push is heavily into generative design with some progress being made with machine learning informed generative design. These processes are mostly about enabling new, more complex designs or more fully optimizing specific parameters, not about automating what is already tedious like updating drawing sets and checking that code compliance (especially ADA clearances) is kept after changes (a big opportunity for disruptive software to take on incumbents, I think). At residential scale and cost, generative design is generally a very high-end luxury. I worked at a high end firm in New York City that had some details that were done in Grasshopper, but we're talking about $5,000 interior doors fabricated from aluminum - well beyond what a typical residential customer would want.

The best tool for small scale and cutting edge design is Rhino with their included Grasshopper plugin. There's no building intelligence in that tool so all the work is very manual, modeling each component in 3D from scratch. But that's the gold standard. The generative tools are visual programming interfaces, but there are many ways to delve into Python and C# if you're more comfortable there. You can write Python in Grasshopper and you can write C# and Python (with some limitations) plugins in Rhino. Revit is the standard tool for design (at every scale other than residential) in the US and they include a generative tool call Dynamo, which also supports Python and C#. Revit is a BIM tool so it includes components that can adapt to geometries, contain wall assemblies, nest objects like windows and doors on walls, and ties in to energy simulation more fluidly. For pure geometry development and home design, SketchUp is still widely used. I don't have a concise thing in mind about those but at least that is a starting point for you.

Something that will continue to become more important is environmental impact. Net-Zero and Passivhaus certifications will become more mainstream eventually. We're getting to a place where LEED is important but pretty watered down compared to more effective programs. Energy modeling (another software opportunity - better integrated and always-active energy modeling) will become the best way to control comfort and energy use.

In terms of best practice, the lesson I keep learning is that it's about interfacing with the industry. Contractors expect certain inputs like 2x6 stud walls made with Doug Fir No. 2 @16" on center. If you try to get them to use screw-together metal framing, true steel framing or concrete to get those expansive enormous windows, or even heavy timber, they will take longer and the product may be worse unless you find the right person. If you want to go down the cutting edge route, working closely with your fabricators is very important. What metals can they source, what tolerances can they run their particular laser cutter / CNC / water jet systems at, what software stack do they use etc.

For books... Form, Space, and Order by Francis Ching is a great first purchase.

For something light and very accessible, I enjoyed Bill Bryson's At Home, which investigates how the modern home came to be. Really fun. Doesn't really address what we're talking about directly but gives some insight into why you might choose different forms to express different cultural norms and ways of living.

If you're interested in emerging digital and generative design, I really like the AD Architectural Design series published by Wiley. They are hard to find and I would say they target both professional sophisticated laypeople. Their coverage of topics is great, though. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15542769 is their home page. There are some on Amazon but they're not really grouped and they're hard to search for. This is a good intro to where generative design was a few years ago: https://www.amazon.com/Scripting-Cultures-Architectural-Desi... You can pick up these journals on an iOS app here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/architectural-design-ad/id5071...

I'm not an architectural historian and I don't know a lot about the theory of detailing before modern architecture. But I do know that a lot of it boils down to thinking and especially proportional thinking from Ancient Greece and Rome. There is a strain of critical architectural history that even contemporary architects learn. Vitrivius - the Ten Books of Architecture, Alberti - On The Art of Building, Palladio - Four Books on Architecture, Semper - The Four Elements of Architecture, Le Corbusier - Towards a new Architecture. Sprinkle in some Laugier - an Essay on Architecture, Rasmussen - Experiencing Architecture, Wittkower - Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, Giedion - Space, Time, and Architecture, (along with a couple others I'm forgetting) and you have a good start on architectural theory. Those books comprised about 1/3 of my theory training. The rest was history textbooks. As a side note, architecture is interesting in that rigorous study can take place with pictures, so don't write off just getting photo books of buildings that interest you.

In terms of building technologies, Francis Ching is widely respected and very accessible. I haven't read his Introduction to Architecture but he's fantastic so give that a shot. What I have on my desk always are Building Construction Illustrated and Building Codes Illustrated. If you intend to take on a building project and be involved, I would consider those essential.

I just got The New Net Zero by Maclay and it is so far a really accessible and pretty comprehensive look at approaching zero energy buildings.

Modern Architecture Since 1900 bur William Curtis is my favorite textbook on the development of modern architecture (which is most of the important bit for contemporary work). Kenneth Frampton is an excellent architectural historian and his book Modern Architecture: A Critical History is great but more opinionated. His book Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture is not as accessible but is probably the best look at the topic we started out on - the relationship between space and technologies. Le Corbusier's Toward an Architecture is much more accessible and makes the case but just for the introduction of International Style.

In terms of getting at what architecture can be when it's truly executing as art, I can recommend three books very highly. Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, Pallasmaa's The Eyes of the Skin, and Peter Zumthor's Atmospheres. I really strongly recommend reading those as the primary way to understand what building art is or can be.

The other thing I would suggest is that if you're interested in developing your own designs, architects are incredibly cheap comparatively. If you want a recently licensed recent graduate to help you with the process, even suggesting books or just sort of meeting with you and critiquing your thinking, you could probably find that for $20-$50/hour. Even some very experienced good architects would do it for $120-150/hour. It's like the movie industry - as long as you're not booking the top A-listers you can get a lot of value.