The cost of building

spreadsheet

Housing construction has been in the dumps in the last few years.  This means that not only the large, market developer home builders are out of work, but so are the small general contractors and all the associated trades - plumbers, carpenters, electricians, etc.  Things are pretty dire but they do seem to be picking up a bit as of late.

Not that you would know that here in Boulder.  Our fair city is such an insulated bubble of wealth that regardless of the current economic situation, the dominant paradigm is still to place as many roadblocks to development as possible.  There seems to be an attitude here that any development at all, even small, carefully sensitive growth, will destroy the high quality of life that is so prized.  You may not have much sympathy for wealthy Boulderites looking to build multi-million dollar homes, but remember that most of the money that is expended on that kind of a project stays here in the region in the pockets of tradespeople.

The dominant anti-growth agenda is of course reflected in the permitting and review process.  The folks in the various City departments are all doing their jobs administering the code to the best of their ability but the extraordinarily high cost of a permit is the most transparent indication of this anti-growth agenda.  If you aren't particularly welcoming to new construction what better way to demonstrate that than to set the fees for building permit at an astronomical cost.

To demonstrate:  building permits and fees for a single-family, 3800 square foot, new construction house on an empty lot in Boulder as evidenced by one of my current projects:

• Building Permit fee: $3,439.oo

• Growth Management Allocation fee: $26,000.00

• Plan Check fee: $860.00

• City Sales Use Tax: $8,525.00

• Electrical Permit fee: $232.00

• Mechanical Permit fee: $1,115.00

• Plumbing Permit fee: $119.00

• Residential Energy fee: $84.00

• Capital Facility Impact fee: $6,028.00

• Utility-Water, Irrigation & Fire: $300.00

• Water Meter: $544.oo

• Water Tap fee: $222.00

• Wastewater Permit/Inspection: $296.00

• Wastewater Tap fee: $201.00

• Plant Investment fee, Water: $10,602.00

• Plant Investment fee, Wastewater: $4,136.00

• Plant Investment fee, Stormwater: $5,603.00

• Grand Total: $70,306.00

I don't know what permitting costs are in other places.  I do know that it varies widely from small rural towns to larger cities.  I even know that many cities and towns, in the light of the recession and as impetus to create jobs, have temporarily suspended permitting fees.

This permitting cost total is approximately 6% of the hard construction cost and you will notice that the single largest item, the Growth Management Allocation, is alone $26K.  Pretty effective growth management I would say, not dissimilar to a country club where the buy-in cost is enough to keep out the riff-raff.

Fortunately there is still work being built in Boulder and of course I am part of that process in a very small way.  In general I rarely work for large developers and for my projects, for individual families, this cost is staggering.  The high cost of entry into the Boulder market has lead most development in the direction of large, expensive speculative projects that can effectively recoup some of those fees in a way that smaller, more moderately priced projects can not.  Most Boulderites lament the few large houses that do get built but they have created a system that nothing small and modest can be built as an alternative.

Midwestern churches

midwest church 02

As I have talked about in a couple of recent posts on the flatness of the Midwest, a simple building standing in that relentlessly horizontal landscape is a powerful, singular moment.  This is even more apparent when it is a church, rising upward to heaven, a determinedly vertical building contrasting the vast horizon.

midwest church 03

Unlike other parts of the US and Europe, in the Midwest, the steeples of the surrounding churches are not the dominant markers of the landscape.  The grain elevators and silos far surpass the height of even the most ambitious chapel.  But what these local churches lack in the hierarchy of height, they make up for with a kind of bold simplicity and frank determination.  Wind-swept and storm-battered, the verticality of the church buildings is defiant, taking on the rain and wind and marking a place of gathering.  Though the Midwestern houses may seem to hunker down below spreading roofs, the churches make a claim for community, tethering a point on the ground to changeable cloudy skies above.

midwest church 01

The church is a fixed point in an otherwise often endless landscape, without definition.  These churches have no desire to "work with the topography" or "meld with the surrounding landscape" or any of the other tropes of place-making architecture. The grain elevators and silos may be taller and more audacious, but the steepled church has a dogged, determined optimism to make a place, to gather a space around it, and hold it for a community to gather around.  They don't so much work with the landscape as define it.

midwest church 04

2011 Year End roundup of architecture trends: fail

I don't have the usual end-of-year wrap up.  It's been a busy, tumultuous 6 months, personally more than professionally, but I haven't really paid much attention to the architectural world outside my own studio. I was thinking of putting a list together in the last hurried days of the year, gleaning architectural blogs and websites to try to portend some trends and fads already fading.  And then, just after Christmas, splashed across the media was the news of the awful tragedy of a deadly house fire in Connecticut that claimed the lives of the owner's children and parents.  Partly because of the immensity of the tragedy but largely due to the images of the burnt house, I can not seem to get the thought of that trauma off my mind.

I think my generation of architects have largely dispelled with the notion that architecture can save the world.  That absolutist notion was demolished along with the buildings at Pruitt Igoe.  Buildings can make our lives better, but only incrementally so.  But certainly what buildings can do is kill us.

Victorian framing

Trained primarily as "designers" we often decry the density and wisdom of so many building codes and zoning regulations.  We so frequently are arrogant in the face of the messy regulations of fire separations, ignition resistant construction, fire alarms and smoke detectors mucking up our pristine designs.  I don't know a lot about how the fire in Stamford started or if smoke detectors were working, but almost assuredly if there were sprinklers installed, precious minutes would have been gained for the escape of the family.

There has been much written this past year about the decreasing number of architects gaining or attempting licensure across the United States.  It is often considered useless and a wasteful expense of time and money.  It guarantees no design competency or even fluency.  However, it is supposed to be a baseline of knowledge and familiarity with life safety systems and maybe that can not be overemphasized.  For all that a building is, for all the ambitions that I know that I fight for on every project, its function, beauty and poetry, a building is above all else to keep us safe, physically as well as psychologically.  Old Victorian houses like the one in the recent fire can be graceful and pretty, but their wood siding, wood framing, and wood floors and interior trim are tinderboxes.  Just imagine the typical balloon framing of that vintage house - tall, narrow air spaces running vertically in every stud cavity, creating a chimney effect in every wall, surrounding the inhabitants.

Why are so many old and beautiful buildings rarely wood framed and sided?  Not because of the scarcity of building materials, but because old wooden structures are all living on borrowed time, waiting for the eventuality of a fire.  Almost every house built in the US is constructed with a wood structural system of walls and floors and roof.  As wood is cheap and easy to build with, dense pages of building codes are dedicated to making this type of construction nominally safe.  Even the brick and stone houses displayed in magazines and in the popular imagine as paragons of stability and security are mostly veneer applications stretched over the usual wood framing.

So, in lieu of a trending topic or motif, or a prediction of architectural things-to-come, I would like to put forth my own resolution for our profession and the state of the built environment:  a renewed interest in and awareness of life safety issues in design, maybe even as design.   I don't think this has to make our buildings paranoid expressions of a fearful culture, but rather one that values human life and champions that in the form of the building itself.  Maybe architecture can not save the world, but a building should give us a fighting chance of doing it ourselves.

(Image from A Victorian Housebuilder's Guide, Woodward's National Architect of 1869, reprint)

(Our heart goes out to Madonna Badger, a former high-school classmate of mine, and the unspeakable loss of her children and parents from a house fire.)

mississippi river mansions

Cairo map

On a narrow spit of land, at the confluence of two mighty rivers, lies ancient Cairo.  Not the one in Africa, with pyramids and camels, rather the one along the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers, Cairo, Illinois.

Cairo has seen better days, the 1920 population of 15,000 having dropped below 3,000 souls.  Once a shipping center strategically located at the two rivers, the city later developed as a rail center, consolidating its status as a bustling nexus of commerce.  During this period of prosperity, merchants and shippers built themselves grand mansions and protected them with ever-increasing levees.  However, as commerce increasingly hitched a ride on trucks and roadways, ever more efficient and larger bridges were constructed across the Mississippi River, by-passing Cairo.  This loss of trade and a history of violent racial interactions isolated the city and like many cities in the turbulent late 1960's lead to white flight and subsequent further loss of businesses and population.  Rapid economic decline soon followed and with it came its usual fearsome playmates, crime and poverty.

Cairo mansion 02

Cairo mansion 03

Cairo now is a shell of its past former glory and the old mansions and former Custom House still haunt the city's architecture and memory.  Even when restored and blessed with careful stewards, the grand houses of the wealthy businessmen only accentuate the despair of the place.  Hundreds of years after the Fall of Rome, when cattle grazed in the Forum and moldering ornate capitals and pediments lay half-buried, what did the contemporary Romans imagine of their past? Were they proud of their heritage crumbling under their feet or burdened by it, unable to synthesize their current plight with the desperate melancholy of a past long since gone.  And once mighty Cairo, by-passed by technology and progress, torn apart by race intolerance and violence, has to live with the mocking edifices of past glory glaring with unapproving eyes, fully restored in body but not spirit.

Cairo building

midwestern bridges

steel bridge 03

Before interstate engineers replaced our river crossings with solid, straight, under-supported super-slabs of concrete highways, spidery steel bridges carried us across the impediments to the relentless to- and fro- of an increasingly mobile society.

steel bridge 01

When you pass through the steel rib cages of these older bridges, especially the narrow, long spans, crossing a river feels like a celebration, an exciting transformation from one place to the next.  The uniformity of road surface, side rails and driving surface of concrete pier bridges celebrate only the efficiency of travel, not the journey.

steel bridge 02

These bridges make a space amongst themselves, an interstitial place between here and over-there.  Because the structure of the bridge is above you and around you, you don't simple glide across a river or steep valley, but you feel the suspension from gravity of that leap across space.

the long house

by right envelope with demo

We have been working on a project in Boulder that holds a number of challenges, not the least of which is a long narrow lot with severe building restrictions.  My client's property is 50' wide by 188' long, but because of its corner location, both street-facing sides of the lot require a 25' wide setback from the street.  That setback along with additional side and rear yard setbacks makes the building envelope 20' wide by 128' long, a 6 1/2 : 1 length to width ratio.  A potential upper level is even more restricted by a solar shadow ordinance making the available building envelope up there an amazing 9' wide by 128' long or 14 : 1 ratio.

I have developed some long, narrow projects in the past.

The Cornhouse project was a speculative effort for a long, narrow house nestled within the parallel, seemingly endless rows of corn that one sees in the upper midwest.  Driving between where I lived, Chicago, and where I grew up, Kentucky, I would pass through hundreds of miles of Indiana corn fields, their arrow-straight rows creating a pulsing rhythm looking down their long furrows.  Fundamental to the design of this house project was its position among the corn and the changing relationship to the horizon that occurred as seasonal corn grew from the damp ground to its late summer height well over the heads of the inhabitants.  Equally present in the scheme was also the narrow layout of the house based on the typical 22" module of corn furrows.

Cornhouse 01

Cornhouse 02

That long narrow Cornhouse has its urban twin in a competition design executed a few years later.  Where the cornhouse was long and narrow in an expansive landscape, the layout of the city house was dictated by the long, narrow property lot boundaries of Chicago's Lawndale neighborhood.  Designed for a tough, urban setting and for universally accessible use, this long house was internally focused, centering around a courtyard space and incorporating two units, distributed over the building's three levels.

Chicago competition

I have written in the past about the unconventional massing of these kind of long and narrow buildings and the jokingly absurd Hyper-Attenuated Building Syndrome. A brief study of the work of Pritzker-prize winning architect Glen Murcutt reveals more than a few quite extraordinary long and narrow building designs.  These works, especially the houses, seem to slowly reel themselves out, room after room unfolding as you progress through the house.

Murcutt 01

Our current project's history is marked by our initial attempt to make a smaller more compact house that substituted height for length.  After an anguished meeting with neighbors stridently objecting to the potential loss of views because of the proposed height, we may be shifting back to the long house.  I'm not sure if this kind of elongated house will be more or less opposed by the neighbors, but given the strictures imposed by the setbacks, we have only two ways to go - tall and more compact or the stretched out massing of the long house.