News

Though their late 20th-century heyday is past, museums are still in vogue with the public at large. And new skyscrapers continue to make headlines. But if there is one thing that distinguishes popular architectural culture in these early years of the new century, it's got to be the craze for houses.

Visit any big-town, big-box bookstore, and you will find shelves sagging with books and magazines showcasing fabulous mansions, chic bachelor pads, prefab cabins, new homes in laneways, in the desert, in the woods — houses of every size and type. Some are actually built and others are pulled directly from the architect's computer screen to the glossy printed page.

Nor is this a fascination merely of the masses. Whenever I drop by Ballenford Books, Toronto's only shop wholly devoted to architecture and a haunt of architects and students, I usually find another armload of hot-off-the-press volumes and journals about houses.

In this ever-growing heap of full-colour publications, Jonathan Bell's 21st Century House (Abbeville Press, $34.95) stands out sharply.

Mr. Bell's album presents 55 contemporary residences with empathy and architectural good sense — the author is a well-known British critic and editor — but without the puffery and lyrical vapouring that too often afflict such productions. In fact, the introduction to the book is largely about getting off significant shots at contemporary residential architecture, which Mr. Bell considers obsessed with aesthetics, and at both the current appetite for photo spreads of houses and the image industry that feeds it. (The irony of using a glossy architectural picture book to score points against architectural picture books has not escaped the author, by the way — though he doesn't appear to see the quite human humour in what he's doing.)

"The vast majority of new houses that receive public attention," Mr. Bell writes, "are 'event architecture,' carefully groomed like a thoroughbred from commissioning, design and construction, right up to what has become a crucial stage: publication."

This single-minded hankering by architects for photo-ops "[pares] innovation back to a simple question of aesthetics, skimming over technical aspects and, to an ever greater extent, over the cultural and societal context of new building."

The neo-modernism that now characterizes a great deal of stylish, high-end design — what Mr. Bell calls "new contemporary style" — is a disaster born of image-idolatry and disregard for the practicalities of living well and comfortably.

"It is almost as if new contemporary has evolved into the manufactured boy-band of the architecture world, an immaculately conceived glossy image that no one, at heart, takes terribly seriously. These houses are not the real world."

The residences illustrated and described in 21st Century House, on the other hand, are the real world as Mr. Bell sees it, or would like to see it: a place of important stand-alone villas, intelligent infill dwellings in the nooks and crannies of cities, homes where good bones count for more than a pretty face. While there are no blobs in this book, or exploding deconstructions, or much else that serves up a visual knock-out punch, Mr. Bell's picks add up to a useful portfolio of modest possibilities in contemporary house design.

Infill has special interest to the author, and he has included some especially memorable examples of it. An architect's house in Bethnal Green, London — a blockish fabrication of concrete, metal and glass — has been scooted smoothly into a vacant slot in the neighbourhood's dense architecture, creating a good new chunk of urban fabric. But concrete, that much-maligned substance, need not only be used for modest effects. It has been deployed to create what Mr. Bell calls "a grand urban gesture" in Granada, in a double house project by Spanish architect Fernández-Alonso Borrajo. The startlingly white concrete building, with its punched-out windows and balconies casting dramatic shadows, stands out crisply from its context of traditional brown plaster and brick, while also accenting and enhancing it.

The section of this book that most forcefully portrays the author's concerns about architecture, however, is entitled "The Practical House." This is housing without big attitude and big aesthetics, without in-your-face gestures, and with plenty of respect for "site conditions, environmental concerns, client budgets and materials constraints."

Of Mr. Bell's selection in this category, a single-storey house in New Haven, Conn., is probably closest to his heart. Designed by students in Yale University's graduate school of architecture, this simple structure is intended to be a prototype for affordable, inner-city housing. The dwelling draws on stylistic sources as various as democratic suburban tract houses and honest farm buildings in the New England countryside — making the enterprise, all in all, very American in the best sense of the word. Mr. Bell's note about this house sums up well what he believes architecture should be: "not . . . abstract, intellectual . . . but rather a low-cost project for the common good."