A few days ago I got a serendipitous lesson in the extremes of American housing. Just for fun, I'd been leafing through the plans for a new mansion–there's no other word to describe it–being built in one of San Francisco's toniest suburbs. The work of a very fine neotraditional architect, the design included every lavish detail and contrivance known to man. Moreover, it managed to do so within the confines of an impeccably traditional idiom. I counted 153 sheets of drawings in the building plans, each of them brimming with extravagance worthy of the Vanderbilts.  more...

Thanks to the soaring price of real estate, growing numbers of modest postwar homes are being gutted and rebuilt, not just to make them larger, but to bring them into current vogue as well.

When done with care, such drastic makeovers occasionally succeed. More often, though, they just obliterate the very traits that give a home character, replacing them with a confused muddle of real estate sales clichés.  more...

Not long ago, I visited William Randolph Hearst's renowned estate near San Simeon, Calif., now a state park better known as Hearst Castle. With its serene mountaintop setting, verdant gardens and spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean, the palatial retreat designed by Julia Morgan between 1917 and 1941 was soon nicknamed The Enchanted Hill. And indeed, soaking up its breathtaking gardens on a crystalline morning is about as close to paradise as most of us will ever get.  more...

Root around in the clutter of bottles and boxes under your kitchen sink and you'll realize that, in most houses, storage for household items gets much less attention than storage for clothes. You wouldn't be willing to crawl around on all fours to get to your favorite sweater, yet most of us do this all the time to get to Mr. Clean. It's a rare architect that provides handy space for such items.  more...

In this amazing age, when everything from cars to coffeemakers has brains that make them smart, why are traffic signals still so damn stupid? Every day, we resignedly herky-jerk our way through a gauntlet of ill-timed or just plain unnecessary traffic lights. They're so ubiquitous in the built world that you may not even think about them anymore–yet they're an integral part of your daily urban and suburban experience. You probably spend more time idling at traffic lights than you do eating your breakfast.  more...

Last summer, I handed a young architectural intern a sketch to be drafted up on the computer. It was a site plan for an agricultural research facility comprising 130 acres, about 80 acres of which were necessarily to remain open farmland.  more...

In China's mad scramble to develop, its cities are rising at an astonishing rate. That's the good news. The bad news is that they're already falling apart.

China's rush toward Western-style development has not brought with it a commensurate culture of quality. Too often, the new structures that look so impressive from a moving car are breathtakingly slapdash up close. Beneath their glitzy veneers of granite, marble and tile, China's buildings are literally rotten at the core.  more...

We all know that nothing looks more dated than last year's red-hot style.

What's not so obvious is why consumer styles–whether clothes, curtains or cars–come and go with such cyclical certainty. More often than not, the seeds of new design trends are carefully nurtured by their respective industries to spur sales, and then disseminated via design magazines, television shows and the like. Clever marketing encourages consumers to believe that they're the ones driving these trends, when in fact it's more often the other way around.  more...

Once again, it's time for an Architext tradition reaching back nearly a fifth of a decade: the Horrible Architectural Materials Better Off Not Existing Awards, or HAMBONEs. These, you may recall, go to the least durable, most overhyped, or most just-plain-pointless products on the home improvement market.  more...

As the 19th century drew to a close, women were making it clear that they were fed up with the overblown proportions, labyrinthine floor plans and acres of dust-catching ornament in their Victorian houses. Magazines such as Good Housekeeping began advocating simplicity, efficiency and modesty as the new watchwords for residential design.

In keeping with this drastic reversal in domestic ideals, the humble little bungalow became the new century's antidote to Victorian pomposity.  more...