My father-in-law grew up with his mother, father, and thirteen brothers and sisters in a small two-storey house — a shack, really — sitting alone in a field just outside Beausejour, Manitoba.
It hasn’t been lived in for over seventy years, yet it still stands on the prairie: decayed, battered, and resolute. If I were to describe it, I’d say it resembles an old wooden shed — perhaps three hundred square feet, with a sagging roof, blank openings where windows used to be, and a crumbling interior filled only with dust, debris, and the remains of furniture long ago discarded.
There is something romantic about it now, though my father-in-law surely never saw it that way. He would have been too busy elbowing and shouldering his way up and down the narrow stairs, fighting for space in a tiny bedroom, and spending most of his time outdoors.
What’s most striking, of course, is that sixteen people lived in a space not much larger than a single-car garage. Even for its time, this was remarkable. Yet most homes built in the 1930s and ’40s were modest, tightly planned, and stripped of the amenities we now take for granted. A family of six or seven might occupy 900 square feet over two floors. Bedrooms were small, stairways tight, ceilings eight feet high. The focus was on efficiency, economy, and maintainability.
Times have changed. Families are smaller now — two or three people instead of six or seven — yet our houses have swollen to grotesque proportions. A family of two can “manage” in just under 3,000 square feet (not including the garage), while a family of four might squeeze by with a three-car garage, resisting only the excess of a fourth bay and gatehouse.
These are marvelous times.
We have turned away from the easy innovation of efficiency to tackle the difficult challenge of fitting as much square footage on a lot as possible. Not only must we design spaces that are impossible to heat and cool, but we must also find ways to showcase our garages — those proud repositories of wealth and detritus: lawn mowers, auto parts, weed whackers, chainsaws, bicycles, boxes of Led Zeppelin records, extension cords, and occasionally, cars.
We clad these monuments in cost-effective materials like stucco and vinyl siding, their vast façades softened by colour palettes of grey, beige, and off-beige — the visual equivalent of elevator music.
Who is responsible for this blanding of society? There’s plenty of blame to go around. Builders have mistaken energy conservation for planning efficiency and “blending in” for design. Architects have largely abandoned affordable housing to serve the wealthy. And the general public, less visually literate than ever, insists that “a house should look like a house” — which is to say, like every other house.
Yet, there is hope.
New technologies promise to make inventive buildings affordable again. Municipalities are beginning to provide land for creative development. And an increasingly global perspective reminds us that it is possible to have both history and modernity — authenticity and innovation — in the same place.
If we are lucky, creative thinkers everywhere will join forces to escape the banal and lead us into the next millennium — one line, one wall, one house at a time.