Roger Fry, in his essay “A Possible Domestic Architecture”—Vogue 51 (March 1918)—some 80 years ago, or some 7 years before our birth, said that when someone looks for an architect to build a house, it is because the owner, “a gentleman,” “wishes his house to have some distinctive character” “to stand out from the common herd of houses” by splendor or discretion. Today the age of splendor has passed, the present and the prospective tomorrow demand today the world of discretion as a distinctive character. The other things by the “builders” end up “imitated badly,” and with no defense at all, “no one defends it, no one enjoys it, no one admires it.” Roger Fry also observed that architects achieve that “distinctive character” by diving into the past of every era, for epigonic “features,” and that “modern machinery” has copied or glued them onto the houses and is still in search of some “new old style” “to try.”
Then, having already confirmed the lack of coherence, Roger Fry asks himself: “What if people were just to let their houses be the outcome of their actual needs, and of their actual way of life, and allow other people to think what they like?” After other variations he concludes that “they would then be something.” They would have the true, fitting character, and that is what we already know how to do today.
Roger Fry already reasoned it out when he learned it from a friend who built cheap country houses: “the secret was concentration of plan,” “rooms rather smaller than I should have liked,” “proportions within certain fixed limits defined by needs, and neither time, money, nor thought were expended on giving the house the appearance of any particular style” “a genuine architecture” “and in the end, no doubt, an architectural style.” A solution for which we have a search process based on the very complete catalog of spaces- requirements for the site, something that may not amount to much but that has been damaging all the money invested in construction, which is not little, or indeed is a lot when it is said that some 500,000 homes remain to be built in the country, a something that deserves attention as to how it should be allowed to be done, since it affects all of us to a more damaging degree than the daily cost of living or the increase and lack of control in the use of the fuel we must import to get by. This is the reason why we must take an interest in steering correct decisions in terms of investment.
Architecture has been calling for know-how, this specific process we have mastered and we have a duty to offer it to those who so need it or sense it to be fitting for a particular state of conceptual or analogical mastery. We would thus have a chain of successful solutions in terms of every case solved by virtue of our process. The users will be the beneficiaries, the owners would have their investments guaranteed. Developers would increase the efficiency of the products they sell, buyers would have more efficient options among the offerings. Everyone would be lending support to the rise in collective well-being that would thus be generated and established as urban-regional and then universal development. This would find support in clear provisions for integration in every urban project and materialization.
- A study and outreach group will run a television program on the subject of the work process and its rise.
- A design workshop will generate solutions to exhibit, structure, budget, and promote.
- A hardware group or raw-material producer would support the materialization from its very beginnings in each city of the region.
Cost estimate for points 1 and 2.
Physical materialization of point 3 in cities of the region.
- A service group would give a critical opinion on every project in the making that is submitted to it. It would review it by applying the search method to verify that it fulfills its purposes, or must adopt another zoning for its integration- structuring.