A few weeks ago, ArchitectureAU.com published its Top 5 Houses of 2014 featuring the “most popular residential architecture reviews from the year”. See the post here.
Tell me if you think I’m crazy, but I thought the top 5 designs were a total yawn-fest. Boxes, more boxes, and oh, wait, here’s something different – another box! I’m a little biased toward an old fashioned gable roof, but for the most part, I thought the designs in the top 5 were bland and cold. Mmmm. 2014: Year of the Shipping Container wannabe!
Here are some of the houses that made the cut:
Above: Invisible House by Peter Stutchbury Architects/Image by Michael Nicholson/via ArchitectureAU
Above: Karri Loop House by MORQ/Image by Peter Bennetts/via ArchitectureAU
Above: Main Ridge Residence by McAllister Alcock Architects/Image by Shannon McGrath/via ArchitectureAU
The places in the ArchitectureAU list remind me of this home by Glenn Murcutt featured on our blog last year.
All the designs in the top 5 have a certain wow factor of course, but I doubt they’d appeal to the average home buyer. In many ways they seem destined to remain an elite architectural product desperate to symbolize heterogeneity and innovation.
It’s not cool or cutting edge, but I long for the day when a sweet little environmentally friendly gable roof cottage makes the cut in a Top 5 houses list. Looking to the past to capture the essence of homeliness is not always a backwards step, and amazing design doesn’t always have to mean “avant-garde”.
The houses in the ArchitectureAU top 5 might be called brave and beautiful, but rather ironically, we’ve ended up with a bunch of designs that look almost completely homogenous – just like they’re all part of a certain club. I hope 2015 brings top rating designs that bust out of the box (pardon the pun) – and gasp! – maybe we’ll even see a gable roof or two!
ArchitectureAU is the companion site for a range of paper magazines including Architecture Australia – the official magazine of the Australian Institute of Architects. It can be found at http://architectureau.com/.