Why Doesn’t Modern Housing Do it?

Who could deny that the human body is a mind-boggling miracle? Imagine: each of us is safely housed within a bundle of blood, bone, and guts nurturing a little glow of life while suspended in a sea of constant change and danger. The miracle becomes even more astounding when you consider the long, slow, evolutionary process of give and take that produced the human body. Our bodies don’t struggle with the sea of nature around us because we developed with it, within it, as part of it, over time.

Housing, likewise, originally developed slowly within particular human cultures and in response to specific climates and environments. Using materials from the site and techniques developed out of long experience with a specific, exact location and climate, each culture around the world crafted a unique style of housing from the fabric of their surroundings. In other words, traditional housing approaches were specific to the culture, climate, and environment from which they sprung. The results were astounding. Consider the igloo, a building using the thermal mass of ice to enclose heat and repel snow, or the ancient Egyptians’ intricate system of screens, wind scoops, and ventilation domes that produced interior cooling amid burning desert heat. These solutions are masterpieces in their context, but would fail miserably if they switched places.

We live in a different world today. People are moving around; cultures are intermingling. An urban lifestyle predominates that doesn’t change with the seasons and isn’t connected to a specific climate or locale. The glue that holds us together is a world economy of frantic buying and selling to each other. The housing of this world is general. It isn’t connected to a climate, set of available local resources, or specific group of people. Instead, it’s designed to be flexible, to be used in any of a variety of environments and climates and by any of a variety of people. The modern concept of housing is to build a strong box and hook it to adjustable life-support systems that provide temperature, light, and air circulation as well as bring water in and flush waste out. Such a box can be mass-produced as a unit, as with a mobile home, or assembled from standardized, mass-manufactured, easily transportable parts. This house can be plopped down almost anywhere in the world and be ready to go. Differences in climate are accommodated by a simple twist of the control knobs.

The strength of this approach, its apparent flexibility, is also its fatal flaw. Housing solutions that don’t arise out of a slow, intricate interaction between a place and a people cannot possibly hope to nurture the delicate interaction between that place and those people that’s required for the survival of both. The result: modern housing is often simply dangerous. Off-gassing from synthetic materials, the poison chlorine in “sanitized” drinking water, even the effects of living under a fake sun (artificial light), are only a few of the dangers facing the people. Erosion and loss of wildlife habitat from forest clear-cutting, pollution from burning coal to produce electricity, and wasteful resource depletion represented by the mountains of cut-off pieces of modular units constantly headed for the dump, are just a few of the perils for the place. But we don’t even need this analysis to know that modern housing isn’t working. As you learn in a trip to any mobile home sales lot, modern housing somehow falls flat. It just doesn’t feel right.

Housing is supposed to be a sublime temple of union between two ancient partners, the human and nature. That’s just not something you can hook up to a truck and pull off a parking lot. It’s also not something you can write a check for and plant haphazardly based on the locations of roads and shopping malls.

© Clarke Snell, 2005