4 Present chaotic picture of home building materials, methods, planning, and finance.

4   Present chaotic picture of home building materials, methods, planning, and finance.

2The great new tool of this age is metal from which has been born mechanics or directed mechanical motion, which is governed fourth dimensional design. It is metal that has made possible centralized production, transportation, and distribution through multitudinous channels. Metal has made possible the automobile, the railroad, the airplane, telephone, telegraph, wireless, the clothes on our back and all our food, and our city skyscraper. Generally and structurally speaking, we use it in our houses in the form of nails only. Structurally the characteristic of the new tool, metal, different from any of the tools of other ages, is its fibre or tensile strength, tremendously in excess of any other tensile unit ever created. For example a small wire rope may be seen lifting a great locomotive. In compression metal does not exceed stone to any marked degree. That is why heavy metal leg tables are inharmonious to our censors. The best architecture, so called, in small home construction today is but a continuance of the Stone age, where materials were piled on materials and stuck together with muds, clays, and other cementing mediums, structures depending on their width, height, and weight for stability.

3 In the design of any of our modern productions such as the airplane, the automobile, or radio the functions of every unit have been segregated, and the proper method or material applied, irrespective of custom. Indeed there was no custom to hamper, outside of the persistence for some time, in the design of the automobile, of old carriage and coach methods. Until discarded, these resulted in inefficient, cumbersome, expensive machines. Such were the great hulking limousines of a few years ago, capable of no great speed, weighing twice as much as many of our finest cars today, and consuming much fuel. The placing of an accessory of modern design, such as the electric refrigerator, in one of our houses today, it will later be seen, is as ludicrous as would be the placing of a Rolls Royce engine in a hayrick.

4 Due to the great overhead cost of supervision throughout the usual six months building period of our houses of today, and the inaccessibility of the residence to the centralized office, the modern architect cannot afford to give his time, thought, and design to any, but the most costly of residences. Only five percent of the individual residences of the United States are designed by architects. Those that are, have not the economic pressure on design that would apply to the home building limitations of the other 95%. The design of this other 95% of houses is derived from periodical, building material manufacturer, or local builder, all of whom are governed by the unprogressive formulae of habit and style. They have no cause nor training latitude provocative of new and harmonious design. In fact it is vastly to the interest of all these sources to allow as little progress and disruption of their habits as possible. There being no centralized distribution or demand channels, and no enlightenment on the subject as a whole by advertising, they can go right on taking advantage of the public in their disgracefully antiquated manner, and the public pays the price. The public gets about one tenth the value for its dollar in its housing that it gets in any other of industrialized products. That is on the basis of the automobile purchasing dollar they would get a house for $5000, actually far superior to the present $50,000 house if it were manufactured and set up in twentieth century fashion, instead of being built. The days of ‘‘building’’ anything but a single function specialty, with material eccentricities, such as a canal, power house, or oddly shaped shoes for a deformed person, are past. If anyone was forced to wear a different kind of shoe altogether from other people it would be almost surely a sign of some deformity, not a sign of mental or spiritual individuality. The same will soon be true of a house. We are of course not referring to difference in color, etc.

5 All the materials used in house ‘‘building’’ with the exception in a few instances of sand and gravel, are brought to the site of the home by modern transportation, sometimes from vast distances. Brick from Holland is brought to many parts of the United States.

6 If today a man, let us say a resident of Chicago, wishing to acquire an automobile, were to visit one of two thousand automobile designers in the city, equivalent to Chicago’s two thousand architects, and were to commence his retention of the designer by the limitation that he wanted the automobile to resemble in its outward appearance the Venetian gondola, a gin rickshaw of the Tang Dynasty, a French Fiacre, or Coronation Coach of Great Britain, pictures of which he had obligingly brought with him, all final embellishment of course to be left to his wife; and they were together to pick and choose from the automobile accessory catalogues, advertisements, and auto accessory shows, motors, fly wheels, fenders, frame parts offered in concrete, brass, sugar cane fibre, walnut etc., and succeeded in designing an automobile somewhat after the style of some other fellow; and they were then to have the design bid upon by five local garages in Evanston, picking one of the bidders for his ability, or price; and the successful bidder were to insist on the use of some other wheels than those specified; and the local bank, in loaning the money to the prospective owner to help him finance, had some practical man to look over the plans and absolutely guess at the cost and base a loan thereon, incidentally insisting on the replacement of several parts and methods in which they were interested; and then the insurance company were to condemn a number of units used, because they had not paid for their ‘‘official approval’’ and other units were therefore substituted; and fifty material, or accessory manufacturer’s salesmen were informed by a reporting agency whose business it was to ferret out this poor man’s private plans, that he was going to build and hounded him with promises; and finally the local town council had to approve of the design, and individual materials and give permit to build, sending around assertive inspectors, while it was being built; it is certain that few of those desiring automobiles would have the temerity to go through with it. Should he have the hardihood, the automobile would finally cost in the neighborhood of $50,000 and be highly unsatisfactory and completely without service when finished. This is exactly the condition in the home building field. Is it any wonder, people crowd the city apartment. It should have been mentioned that in the building of the automobile, not one but many mechanics from different trades would have to be employed, though many times there would be but room for one man to work. The contractor who would also be building other cars in Lake Forest, Elgin, etc., would stop in for an hour a day to look over the work, outside of which it would receive no organization of method. There would likely be strikes by the plumbers or electricians who would insist on most of the improvements in design being left out as they had no rule permitting them. To cap all the car would take from six months to a year to build.

7 The home building field though as we have pointed out, the most important of the ‘‘necessities’’, is the only unorganized industrial field today, of any real consequence. At present it is dominated by the activities of the interests in natural materials, who seek either stupidly or helplessly to force a preponderance of their material upon the market. The cement people seek to impose the all cement house, the lumber people the all wood house, and likewise with steel or gypsum, or asphalt or asbestos. There is no organized, centralized, industry with testing, designing, sorting, assembling, distribution and advertising authority. It has no definite responsibility to the public, by its declared ideals of service, guarantee, and resale value born of its necessary advertising. It would be the same as if in the automobile industry, the rubber people were to band together to try to impose the all rubber automobile upon the people, subsidizing every channel of publicity through their advertising power. They obviously cannot do this, for the automobile industry is organized in truthful, research, analysis, and design. What does not seem to be obvious is that if they did succeed in getting a few of these rubber cars built, that they would have but a negligible amount of business in proportion to that enjoyed in quantity participation in the proper segregation of functions.

8 There exist today a number of companies purporting to market to the public completed houses, advertising pictures of finished homes. What they do in reality, is sell the knocked down shell, or surface of the house, which is the inconsequential portion, being but 15% of the total cost of the house. They do not include the all important labor. True they handle many other accessories that go to make up the completed home, but these are extra. What should really be marketed is the important 85% of chassis, utility units, and arterial systems.