We architects harbor a dirty secret: Many of our most famous and lauded buildings are brutal to live in.
I’m not speaking here about leaky roofs or inadequate insulation – Lord knows we’ve been guilty enough of those. No, what I mean is something more subtle: the ravishing prize-winning house that is a museum or shrine to its creator’s ego rather than a home for real human beings.
The sort of place where you’re scared to rest any mug that doesn’t have a coaster beneath it, where sticking your kid’s fingerpainting masterpieces on the wall would amount to vandalism and flinging open an awning is going off-piste, because the architect here has Everything right down to almost the last ashtray; Heaven help you if want something lamp-wise they didn’t design for It.
What if we simply killed the myth of the “genius” architect who needs to be charge of every little corner of a building’s being? This totalitarian impulse in design – passed down from the modernist masters and reified by our most bloviated egos in the profession – has produced generations of houses that photograph beautifully but live miserably. Worse, it fails to understand what architecture ought to be: not a finished artwork, but a framework that is generous enough to both respond to changing needs and give other designers the space in which to create.
The Cult of Total Design
Part of the problem is because we have mythologised certain architects. We revere designers who ruled over “everything down to the last detail” — the door handles, the cutlery, the ashtrays and even their clients’ attire. I think this is held up as the pinnacle of architectural achievement: total environmental control, a Gesamtkunstwerk, a complete work of art.
And, yes, there is a certain seduction to this concept. The purity of vision. The aesthetic coherence. Enter one of these spaces when it’s just completed, styled and photographed, and it can take your breath away. Every element sings in harmony. Nothing jars. It’s perfection.
It’s also suffocating.
And this is something that follows: There are people who actually live there. They haul their grandmother’s sideboard that doesn’t go. They collect books, kids’ toys, the detritus of real life. They share a bedroom they want to paint a color they adore, or hang curtains that will actually provide some privacy, or — dare it be proposed — display their own art on the walls. And just like that, they are vandals in their own home, debasing the architect’s creation.
I have seen it happen dozens and dozens of times. The client who apologises for the “mess” of family photographs on a mantelpiece. The homeowner who inquires, with real fear: “Am I allowed to change the sofa? The family in tiptoe fear of their own home, curating their lives to the tune of an aesthetic that was never really theirs at all.
This isn’t architecture. It’s tyranny with good taste.
Why the Model Does not Work: Three Case Studies
Allow me to point out a few places this method fails (not because the architecture sucks, but because the philosophy is wrong).
The Farnsworth House: A Glass Prison
The historian and journalist Kate T. Parker presents the troubling, thrilling story of a house you may have heard of in your high school English class – Edith Wharton ’s great enemy Mies van der Rohe’s tony glass house on the Illinois prairie belt.
Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House is well-deservedly renowned as a masterwork of modernist architecture. A floating glass box over the Illinois landscape, it’s stunning. It is also, by most accounts, a nightmare to live inside: Dr. Edith Farnsworth, the physician for whom it was designed, eventually sued Mies and later said she began to feel “like a prowling animal always on the alert.” The house afforded no privacy, no hiding from the eyes of passing boaters on the Fox River. Mies had created a perfect object, only he’d forgotten to design an actual house.
The issue wasn’t the glass — glass has potential to be so delightful. The issue was an all-or-nothing vision that made no provision for the needs of the inhabitant to develop or make their presence felt. Farnsworth wanted curtains for privacy. Mies was appalled. Curtains, to him, would sully the purity of the design. But whose house was it, really?
The Schröder House: Beautiful Rigidity
Another icon is Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht – a three-dimensional Mondrian, all primary colours and Euclidean geometry. It’s also a room in which the proportions were so fastidiously calibrated that any reconfiguration seems like sacrilege. The furniture is all built-in, the color scheme is set, spatial arrangements determined. It is a beautiful work of design thinking, but it’s also an occupied full-scale architectural model.
The client, Truus Schröder, wound up being heavily involved in the design, and lived there for 60 years – so maybe she learned to love it. But what if you inherit or buy such a space — or simply want to make some changes after 10 years? There is no dialogue, there is no evolutionary process here, there are no layers of new life on top of old.
The Modernist Estate: When Vision Meets Reality
Even closer to home, let’s take a few of our postwar housing estates – not the brutalist towers that everyone loves or hates, but the modernist houses planned by architects with unimpeachable pedigrees and utopian dreams. Some were even fitted out with built-in furniture, colour schemes to be followed and even restrictions on renovations. Because, you see, the architects knew best. They’d solved housing.
Except they hadn’t. Within years, the people who moved in were painting over those carefully chosen colours with garish ones, tearing out the built-in furniture to make more room for their stuff, adding dormers and porches and satellite dishes. The architects cried vandalism. The locals referred to it as making a house liveable. Who was right?
Both, actually. The buildings tended to be good – properly proportioned, well-lit, intelligently planned. But the trio’s demand for total control, of freezing the design in amber, was a basic misunderstanding of how people actually live.
What Architecture Must Be: The Argument for Generous Frameworks
Here’s what I’ve learned, in over 25 years of practice: the best architecture makes for a strong, beautiful, thoughtful framework and then steps aside.
Just writing the first chapter of a story instead of the whole book. Or building a song structure that others will improvise over. The architecture supplies the bones – the proportions, the light, the flow, how it relates to landscape and context — but leaves space for residents to bring the flesh: their own personalities and lives.
This is not about architects relinquishing responsibility or creating banal, generic boxes. Quite the opposite. Intelligent architecture is anything but easy; it’s very hard to do, and do well per definition: difficult becomes effective shaping around the difficulty in a tough process. The easiest thing is to throw all kind of rubbish at everyone just because you can – this what most dumb people like Piet Mondrian used to think they did best.
The trick is distinguishing between what’s permanent and what’s temporary, between what should be fixed and what can safely be more fluid.
Permanent and Temporal: A Necessary Conversation
Good architecture understands that buildings are layered, each with its own life and logic.
The 5 permanent layer design sens is actual architecture : what stands, the skin, its baselines of space making and place taking / situation regarding context and light. This is what we architects should be obsessing about. Get the proportions right. Size and shape the rooms appropriately. Bring light in beautifully. Create flow and connection. Create a conversation with the scenery or streetscape. Opt for things that will age well, or that can be maintained.
This is supposed to be a strong layer, an opinionated one even. A home should have character, a sense of place – a quality of light that’s unique to it. But this character should be an outgrowth of fundamental architectural decisions – proportion, volume, materiality, orientation — rather than from dictating where the sofa is placed.
The temporal layer is all this – the ornament, the furniture, the colors, the objects, personal effects. This is where life resides, where personality reveals itself, where transformation and evolution takes place. This layer should speak to the architecture – responding to it, playing off it — but not be controlled by it.
And here’s the key: there’s a middle layer, a transitional zone, in which architecture passes on to interior design. It’s an area in which an interior designer – a real one, and not a decorator playing at being an architect – can perform their magic. They understand colour, texture, light in a way architects often don’t. They consider comfort, how fabrics perform and the psychology of domestic space. They can read the architecture and help a client make it their own without becoming intransigent.
I’ve collaborated with genius interior designers who have taken my buildings, like shells, and made them sing in ways I’d never imagined. They’ve seen potential I didn’t, smoothed edges that needed rounding, introduced warmth where I’d effused cool. And perhaps most significantly, they’ve helped clients feel ownership of their spaces in a way my architectural drawings never could.
The Heritage Lesson: Did we learn from the Past?
Unknowingly, heritage architects already know this. When you’re working with a Georgian townhouse or a Victorian villa, you don’t try to manage everything. The architecture is already in place – the proportions, mouldings and the relationship of rooms. Your work is to honor and repair that framework — maybe you’ll need to update it respectfully for modern living, if needed – and then let the people who live there put up their own furniture and pictures.
No one would be looking at a Georgian house to have furniture included or a prescribed colour scheme. The construction is suitable to support any number of changes in interior treatment infinite. A minimalist can live there. A maximalist can live there. The house doesn’t care, since the architecture and its decor are taken to be (if related) different propositions.
Why not new architecture? Why has it become acceptable to assume that contemporary design can only be produced by totalitarian fiat, when we wouldn’t ever say this about historical architecture?
The most successful heritage architects I know are masters of restraint. They’ll know when to step in and when to step back. Angles know that their role is to protect and heighten the architectural shell, not freeze it or dictate how the building should be used. There’s a humility in that approach that today’s architecture could stand to learn from.
The practical implications for clients
If you are commissioning a house, this division of labor is not only philosophically sound, in practical terms it’s helpful.
Flexibility: Your needs will change. Kids grow older, parents age, work patterns change. Architecture will be too prescriptive to adapt. A sturdy exterior but flexible insides that can grow with you.
Ownership: You should feel that the house is yours, not just that you’re a steward of another person’s dream. The architecture ought to be a stage for your life, not a script for it.
Cost control: When the architect isn’t designing every door handle and light fitting, and leaving the door open to spending more in some areas and less in others. You can put the money into the architecture — the stuff that’s expensive to change – and then be more flexible with the interiors.”
Collaboration: You can hire an interior designer who speaks your language, who comprehends your taste and lifestyle in a manner that architect-dictated “open plan” or “clean lines” may not. This is not a failure of architecture; it is an acknowledgment that different skills are used for different tasks.
Evolution: A house must be broad enough to accommodate your life as it grows, the art you gather, the furniture you inherit, and the colors to which you become attached. Architecture that is too bossy would not allow this.
What That Means in Practice: A Guide for Clients
So how to commission architecture that’s assertive without being claustrophobic? Here’s what to watch for — and what to ask for:
In the description of the brief: Make sure that you are asking for architecture that generates a structure, not for an interior. You are hiring an architect to work on the building, not decorate it. That is not to say you don’t give a damn about aesthetics — not at all. It is about knowing that architectural aesthetics (proportion, light, materiality, spatial quality) are not the same as decorative aesthetics (colour, furniture, styling).
During design: Consider the high-level architectural choices. Is the room big enough and shaped correctly? Is the light beautiful? Do the spaces flow well? Are the proportions pleasing? These are things that are tough to change later. Don’t fixate on finishes and fittings at this phase — those are transient decisions that can change.
In the spec: Push back if your architect is being too prescriptive on things that do not matter from an architectural standpoint. Yes, they should tell us what the windows are, the doors are, the flooring material. No, they don’t get to dictate which sofa you purchase or what colour you paint the bedroom. Draw the line clearly.
In the handover: Prepare for a smooth shift between architect and interior designer (if you’re using one) to you. The architect should offer a clear model and guidance on what is architecturally important to keep. Then they should stand down and allow the next stage to take place.
In living there: Don’t be afraid to personalize the house. And then, if the architecture is good, it will be resistant to your interventions. You’re not trashing it by slinging up photos of your own or choosing your own curtains. You’re completing it.
The Ego of the Architect: Combating the Uncomfortable Truth
Let me be frank: a lot of the pushback on this approach is driven by architectural ego. We like being auteurs. The notion that we can be in total control of just what our imagination dictates. The pictures we like are the pristine, beautifully styled rooms that win awards and get published.
But that’s about us, not the people who have to live in buildings like this.
The biggest challenge for an architect is to create something strong and beautiful, and then let it go. To recognize that the inhabitants will rearrange things, add things, make decisions we wouldn’t make. Trust that if the architecture is strong enough, it will resist and perhaps even come out the better for such dialogue.
I had to learn this the hard way. At the beginning of my professional career, I built a house, specifying absolutely everything. I mean everything. The furniture, lighting, the artwork, the bloody tea towels. I chose it all, and the clients let me do it because they trusted me when I know now they shouldn’t have. The house was published, won an award, looked great in photographs. And then I visited two years later. Many things had changed: they’d installed a bookshelf I hadn’t specified, painted a wall a color I’d never have chosen, and they brought in their grandmother’s chair that clashed with everything. And you know what? The house was better. It was alive. It was something more than I had given it. It had become theirs. It was a humbling moment but an important one. It was only then that I realized that my job as an architect wasn’t to create a perfect, unchanging object but to create the conditions under which a good life could happen.
The Way Forward: A New Professionalism What I’m arguing for, then, is not a diminishment of the field of architecture but a clarification of the field of architecture. It’s more professionalism, not less. More focus, not more diffusion. The best architects I know are those who understand their domain deeply and resolutely uphold the boundaries of other domains. They work well with engineers because they understand what an engineer does what they cannot. Work as go od with interior decorators because they recognise that interior decoration is a different trade with a different trade domain. It is a question of humility, yes, but also of confidence – the confidence to realize that if we do our jobs right, the field we construct will be solid enough to focus on its own. To give a frame that others can work inside.
It means channeling our energies into what actually matters architecturally: proportion, light, materiality, spatial sequence, relationship to context, environmental performance and structural logic. These are the things that aren’t so easy to change, which will shape the building for decades or centuries to come. Get these right, and the building should be capable of supporting any number of interpretative approaches to its interior treatment.
Conclusion: Architecture as Gift and not Diktat
The death of the “genius” architect – the auteur who has control over everything – is not an absence. It’s a release, for architects and the people who live in our buildings.
When we cease trying to control every detail of another person’s existence, then rather than burning energy on that joyless task, we can throw our efforts into what we do very well already: designing beautiful, thoughtful, resilient frameworks within which lives may unfold. We can build buildings strong enough to have character but generous enough to accommodate change. We can make an architecture that is a gift for the people who inhabit it, not just a set of instructions.
This approach would make us better architects, not worse ones. It requires us to get the basics right – the stuff that is architecturally important—because we can’t throw styling and decoration at a bad space history design. It demands we think deeply about proportion, light, materiality and flow, for these are the enduring gifts we offer to a building.
And it demands that we trust – to trust that if we make the frame strong enough, others will do beautiful things within it even greater than anything we might have imagined. Have faith that the exchange between permanence and temporality, architecture and life will create something richer than our single vision ever would.
So if you are building a house, hire an architect who knows this. Somebody who’ll give you beautiful rooms, not a beautiful museum.” Someone who will be writing a script for the play of your life, no screenwriter behind a set for their ego. A person who knows when to be express feelings and, at times, when to hold back.
And then, once the architecture is complete, bring in a good interior designer who can help you make it yours. Or do it yourself. Make the walls whatever colours your architect never would have. Get some furniture that looks nothing like the “aesthetic.” Hang your children’s drawings. Collect the wonderful, whimsical debris of a well-lived life.
Good architecture will, if it’s good, accept it. It will be enriched by it. It will be not simply a building, but a home.
And that, in the end, is what we are all going to have to design for.
