HOUSE PLANS

Jenny Quillien

There have been many requests to post and sell plans of houses designed over the years by Chris Alexander and his colleagues. In response to these requests we invite you to visit available house plans where we will be posting photos and drawings. The houses are beautiful and carefully made for the parcel of land and, of course, for the owners.

Plans are always a part of design and construction but they are strange critters and are worth a comment or two. Actually I'll make three.

For the great majority of us, who haven't been trained in architecture or construction, plans are hard to read. I mean by that that you can't easily look at a plan and really imagine what it would be like to be inside a building built according to that plan. There are a lot of fancy gizmos and CAD programs for making plans, but none of them are really capable of telling you what it is going to feel like inside those spaces or really guide you in the decisions you need to make.

For the great majority of us, we forget that plans can be dangerous because they are descriptive and prescriptive. They describe what the finished place is supposed to be like. For example, the plan will indicate to the builder where to put the window. Indeed, the builder can get in a lot of legal trouble by not respecting the prescriptive plan. A lot of times this is a dumb way to do it. For example, it's only when you've got a room almost built that you can really figure out the 'just right' placement for the window and double check it from the both inside the room and outside the house. So beware of plans. When we work with clients we like to consider plans as work-in-progress, revisited as we go. When you look at the plans we've posted, keep in mind that the houses are beautiful partly because the plan was used as it was meant - as a guide, not a straightjacket.

For the great majority of us, there might be a real temptation to go with a cheap off-the shelf plan. Actually, when plans are so cheap it is usually because they're bad and ugly and made for "nowhere in particular". It's fun to start to train your eye. Let's just try a couple of examples - one of bad and one of blah versus beautiful.

Look at this simple plan for a small cottage. Most lay people will not realize that the lighting will be poor, the circulation difficult, the transition from inside to outside far from good, and that one of the best spots has been given to a secondary bedroom and closet. Smaller problems such as working space in the kitchen and whether doors swing to the inside or outside will become obvious but expensive to change.

Look at this plan - which has nothing to recommend it. It's blah.

Compare it now with this one (by F. L.Wright) where the geometry (even just on paper) is more pleasing because of the greater differentiation (spaces are more different and are focal areas for attention), the greater variety of scale between large and small, and the local symmetries.

Now enjoy the plans that we've posted. Each one has its own special geometry that has come into existence through the activities that needed to be housed and through the interplay of spaces and site. Should you decide to purchase and use or adapt one of them, please give real consideration to the interplay between the context and the plan.

Jenny Quillien