They have trampled across the subdivisions of America, garish and poorly proportioned, possessing the charm of a Ford Navigator and the aesthetics of a Big Gulp cup.
Critics call them McMansions, Texans call them "big hair houses," and their residents will tell you that they cannot understand how the rest of the world gets by on a castle with fewer than 4,000 or 5,000 square feet.
But some new urbanists and a small coterie of architects formed a budding movement to think smaller. They are led by Sarah Susanka, a Minneapolis-based architect and the author of the surprising bestseller The Not So Big House: A Blueprint for the Way We Really Live.
Susanka holds that "Spaciousness, although it can look appealing in a photograph, just isn't conducive to comfort.... For one or two, or for a family, [spacious rooms] can be overwhelming. And when they feel overwhelming, they don't get used," she writes in her book.
The architect also preaches her gospel at notsobighouse.com. Visitors can read a chapter of the book and research information on building and designing better homes. Susanka also shares her thoughts on retrofitting existing structures and developing new building technologies.
The book, now in its second printing, has sold 180,000 hardcover copies and topped the nation's home and gardening book lists for months, even scoring the top seat in a certain online bookseller's fiction and nonfiction categories for a time. The British-born architect's message struck such a cord that talk-show host Oprah invited her in May for a discussion of home design.
"Sarah definitely hit a nerve, and now architects are listening and responding to her approach," said Phil Simon, director of communications for the American Institute of Architects. "There isn't a real movement yet, but Sarah is at the forefront in this thinking because she's articulated a vision of what can be done." Susanka suggests that our obsession with square footage has to do with people looking to shelter their fortune partly by spending it on large homes and because "we haven't defined any other characteristic of a house that's desirable."
Susanka believes that technology and the Web will soon change the way people in the market for a new home find what they seek.
"We search for a home with the only tool we defined as a society, which is square footage. A home doesn't reside in square footage, it resides in quality, personality, and special details that make a home feel like an expression of ourselves. I'm trying to give those qualities a language so people can ask for it."
Susanka's firm designed a handsome, cottage-like home of about 1,900 square feet that Life Magazine chose as its 1999 Dream Home, an honor shared by such architects as Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert A.M. Stern, and Robert Graves.
One set of blueprints costs US$534. In contrast to the open layout of many modern homes, the charming dream home features an "away room" for family members who want to escape the noise of technology (or one another). French doors allow parents to keep an eye on children, and vice versa.
Every room in a Susanka house has a jack ready for Internet access, for when Web appliances become more common. Blueprints for a home 400 square feet larger than the dream home are also available from Life.
Within a few years, thousands of floor plans will be available on the Web. The architectural renderings will have QuickTime movies or virtual-reality tours of the selected homes so prospective home builders can get a feel for the house.
The consumer can choose to personalize the home by adding various elements from a toolbox and seeing how those fit into the overall home, again viewing the results in virtual reality.
The three-dimensional presentation is the key advantage to Susanka's homes.
"Today, everything people see is in two dimensions," she said. "Floor plans are telling (clients) nothing about the personality of the house. The way I like to tell people to understand this is if you look at the map of a city, do you think you know what the city feels like from that?" After a client makes a selection, the home will be sent to them panelized -- in pieces that a builder can quickly put together. Sears sold bungalows in the early part of this century in the same manner, but home buyers eventually lost interest in the concept.
In Sweden, where prefabricated homes are common, the pieces travel to home sites with the trim and drywall already combined in units. A contractor puts them together and connects prewired electrical conduits to a power source.
The big challenge is to convince American city inspectors to sign on to a new way of thinking. Inspectors generally like to see electrical installations before clients close on the house.
"There is systems-thinking that needs to change in how we're building homes," Susanka says. "But the quality potential in a factory-built, panelized house is so much greater than what we have currently ... there are very, very few controls on how housing is built today."
The automobile industry, for example, offers high-quality controls for consumers that do not exist in the housing market. Considering the amount of money people spend on a house, Susanka asks, "Wouldn't it be nice to know it was built well?"
Susanka thinks that architects are ready to embrace a new system where, instead of creating one home for one client and then putting the blueprint away in a drawer, the design could be sold 2,000 or 3,000 times to others.
Average home buyers never consider employing architects because of the usual high expense and therefore rarely discover novel or interesting designs. And architects end up building only a handful of homes in their entire careers, mainly for the rich.
The art world, in which originals fetch high prices and where prints provide collectors affordably priced pieces in limited editions, could introduce a standard for the architectural market.
At a recent American Institute of Architects convention in Dallas, Susanka had overflowing crowds interested in her ideas. On another front, she's talking to the panelization industry about how it could work with more sophisticated designs, among them the well-known Wausau Homes.
"Architects and the panelization industry don't even know the other exists," Susanka laments. But she is confident that mass-produced designer homes soon will be popping up in neighborhoods around America.
