Smart consumers support good design wherever they find it; the key is knowing where to look. Until recently, people without sufficient budget or experience had few places to search for a new-home design. The local bookstore or Home Depot usually stocks an assortment of bland or over-scaled themes based on traditional motifs that offer little relevance to modern lifestyle. To address this deficiency, an international group of progressive-minded architects offers a collection of conceptual houses in a small, self-published volume entitled Seattle Case Study Homes: Modern House Plans by Local and International Architects and Designers. Appropriately, its first installment is printed on newsprint and can be bought (at Peter Miller Books) for two dollars.

Many would-be home builders make certain assumptions about architectural services: an architect's skill and attention are financially out of reach and no one with real design talent is interested in squandering their time on the more modest houses for first-timers. These assumptions, states architect and Case Study organizer Blake Williams AIA, are patently wrong. To demonstrate his point, he banded together with several colleagues to self-publish Seattle Case Study Homes, a grouping of 67 models for housing (from a number of like-minded architects and designers) that makes good design – in modest dimensions – their central focus. Williams and colleagues plan to continue their Case Study project with more volumes.

Soliciting conceptual designs of modern single-family homes from both local and international designers via the Case Study Web site (www.seattlecasestudyhomes.com), the call for entries entertained submittals that focused on three lot types and a limit of 1600 square feet of livable space. Seattle Case Study Homes offers a serious and high-quality alternative to the banal resources consumed by a large percentage of the home-building public. This volume is more than a product placement story; it has historical antecedents, most notable among them the Case Study program (1945-1966) started by John Entenza of Arts and Architecture, and Houses for the Pacific Northwest, published by The Seattle Home News and edited by Margery Phillips in 1947. In the same spirit and lineage, as a Seattle Times reporter a few years later (1954) Margery Phillips worked with AIA Seattle architects in creating the still-surviving Home of the Month/Open House feature publication.

Seattle Case Study Homes is the rebirth of a good idea.
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Thursday 2/27/03, 6:30pm
UW College of Architecture & Urban Planning Praxis presents
lecture: Seattle Case Study Homes
Architecture Hall 147
exhibit: 2/20-28 Architecture Hall 137

BY & ABOUT: Click to view other recent publications reflecting the Northwest design scene.