Architecture magazines written for architects, like Architectural Record and Architecture, rarely ever broach the subject of clients' difficulties explaining, or even honestly recognizing, their needs, let alone the emotions they encounter during the design and construction process. And newsstand shelter magazines, like Better Homes and Gardens, Southern Living, and Architectural Digest, tend to focus on the end result, rather than the sometimes frustrating process. Some recently published books are aimed to help people recognize, and verbalize, their housing needs and aspirations. The most popular of these books is The Not So Big House, by Minnesota architect Sarah Susanka, in which the author asserts that, "In one of the wealthiest societies ever, many people are deeply dissatisfied with their most expensive purchase."3 (Meaning, of course, their houses.)

Susanka's solution to this problem, and the thesis of her book, is what she calls "The Not So Big House," which "exchanges space for soul, so that the quality of the space is more important than the sheer square footage." Susanka believes that, "we are all searching for home, but we are trying to find it by building more rooms and more space.... But a house is so much more than its size and volume, neither of which has anything to do with comfort." "What makes the Not So Big concept work is that superfluous square footage is traded for less tangible but more meaningful aspects of design that are about beauty, self- expression, and the enhancement of life."4

The type of house Susanka praises in her book, however modest in size, is not necessarily less expensive, a fact that Susanka readily acknowledges. As she plainly puts it, "Building a house, more than any other undertaking, pits our dreams against our realities. When we think about dollars we tend to be very practical. Dreams, by their very nature, are often impractical. The reconciliation of the two is never an easy thing-and yet, in building a house, it's essential that the two come together. People's dreams are frequently two to three times more expensive than the realities of their pocketbook. The challenge is to find a way to bring dreams and realities in line with one another, without making people feel as though they've given up on their dreams."5

This issue of dreams versus reality is a big one. As if the renovation, addition, and construction process wasn't complicated enough, throw money into the equation, and things can sometimes get agitated and irrational. Money is the eight- hundred- pound gorilla sitting in on those initial building programming meetings. As Mr. and Mrs. Blandings learned the hard way, it's just human nature to want more house than you want to spend, and to have "sticker shock," or sometimes adamant denial, when you're told what your dream is really going to cost.

While Susanka's solution to dreams- versus- reality is to favor quality over size, I think that most of middle- class America favors size over quality. Americans like things big, and they're proud "Do-It-Yourselfers." Enter the big housing developers, like Ryland Homes, so prolific across the country. They build a product that appeals to many consumers, because it is accessible. From a bank's perspective, these houses appraise much better than Susanka's Not-So-Big House, so it's easier for the purchasers to get loans equal to the houses' sales prices. The purchasers of these houses are trying to get as much as they can to start out with, and know that, once they get into the house, they can work on it over time. They can finish off the walk- out basement for the kids, the "bonus room" over the garage for the mother-in-law. They can upgrade the kitchen cabinets, replace the flooring. They spend a lot of weekends at places like Lowe's, which, if you haven't noticed, is no longer called a hardware store, but, instead, a "Home Improvement Warehouse."

Why have the marketing people at Lowe's branded their stores "Home Improvement Warehouses," as opposed to "House Improvement Warehouses?" Why is it "Home Depot," not "House Depot"? Why do architects refer to houses as 'houses', while realtors, and pretty much the rest of society, call them 'homes'? And why, at one point in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, when the Blandings have decided to nix building their "dream" house because it's way over budget, do they gaze dreamily over at their architectural rendering, and melodramatically rationalize to one another, "But we're not just building a house, we're building a home, and not just for ourselves and our children, but for their children!"6

Washington, D.C. architect Hugh Newell Jacobsen offers this explanation for the 'house' versus 'home' nomenclature: "There's a difference between 'housing' and 'houses'. Housing to me is masses of tract housing, repetitive, built to the market-housing. That's opposed to houses, which are one of a kind. Architects design houses. Mom makes 'home.'"7 Maybe the nomenclature issue is essentially a class issue, as Paul Fussell argues in his book Class: A Painfully Accurate Guide Through The American Status System. Fussell asserts that we can trace "the stages by which house disappeared as a word favored by the middle class," and was replaced by the term 'home.' Fussell claims that the term 'home' was "offered by the real- estate business as a way of warming the product, that is, making the prospect imagine that in laying out money for a house he was purchasing not a passel of bricks, Formica, and wallboard but snuggly warmth, comfort, and love." Furthermore, "the middle class... also enjoys the comforting fantasy that you can purchase love, comfort, warmth, etc., with cold cash."8