Toward a New Building Culture
I have a diverse background, none of which includes design, building, or architecture until my late 20s. In a quest for more meaning, I risked my stable and predictable life as a CPA with a large accounting firm in Houston and applied to the Peace Corps. While wading through the year-long application process, I found a short-term opportunity in Panama with a sustainable development project where I was first introduced to traditional urbanism. During the following two years in Uganda as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I used my copious spare time to read books about human-centric urban planning. Considering I’d grown up in the sprawling suburbs of Houston, I found the concepts particularly compelling.
Although I had found my meaning—an architecture that facilitated human thriving—I had no idea how or where to start. I debated going to school for construction management, architecture or urban planning, finance, or real estate development programs. My conclusion was that learning hands-on construction would enable me to actually implement the concepts that were becoming deep convictions. Having met in my travels a Master Builder who was experimenting with mass-wall, load-bearing masonry, I sought out an apprenticeship with him. He agreed to take me on, so I started building things.
I could talk at length about those two years of hard labor in rural Oklahoma, making $12 bucks an hour, newly married, and coming up on 30, all the time wondering how the hell I was going take care of my family and build a career. I’ll just say that those years were hard, formative, and changed my life. Halfway through the apprenticeship I thought I was still a decade away from being capable of building a house on my own. And I certainly didn’t think I could be a designer—after all, that was for the professionals, right? People spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to learn how to do that. Besides, I couldn’t draw, never went to architecture school, and didn’t consider myself artistic. And yet, one year later I was building four houses in a pocket neighborhood I had designed and developed with a fellow builder.
In many ways, I think my lack of prior experience was a gift. I had inadvertently skipped the indoctrination of academia and the norms surrounding architecture, design, and construction, and came to the profession without presupposition or prejudice. It was in that naivety I was introduced to traditional building methods and materials, namely mass-wall brick masonry and timber framing. Aside from an incredibly talented mentor, I taught myself design by looking at buildings I found beautiful, and spending thousands of hours drawing houses in SketchUp.
I only designed what I knew how to physically build. My lack of formal training made it difficult to imagine, let alone to draw, something beyond the modest structures I’d been building for the past year. Furthermore, my apprenticeship was rapidly coming to an end, and I needed to design something I knew how to construct myself. Then I hoped to convince someone to hire me to build it. My situation was urgent. I had zero money and zero backup plans. Terror was a fine motivator. As a result of all these factors, my designs were extremely simple. Thoughtful, but simple. They respected the limitations of the mediums I knew how to work with and of my very limited construction experience.
About the same time, my new landlord took an interest in my work and became my investor. I proposed a six-home pocket neighborhood development, which was ambitious to the point of insanity, given my lack of experience. Thankfully, he proposed a partnership with another young but more experienced builder, to which I quickly agreed. I’d build four of the houses; he’d build two. The other builder’s guidance proved invaluable, particularly through my first house.
Simple design led to simple construction. We had a concept based on practical designs, using traditional methods and materials, and then we started building. Each decision influenced the next; we worked out details within our overall plan on the jobsite in real time. Discovering and attending to the spaces between became as important as the buildings themselves. It was an unfolding and organic process, a deeply personal and invigorating experience for me.
The outcome was beautiful, human, and good. It wasn’t until several years later I connected all the dots: I had inadvertently stumbled across vernacular.
Practical
Mass-wall masonry was the cornerstone of traditional building for millennia up until the advent of lumbermills and mass-produced nails in the 19th century. This industrialization upended the continuation of traditional building and replaced it with a whole new system, particularly in the United States. Mass-wall masonry, the basis of architecture, was replaced nearly overnight with two-by-fours and curtainwalls.
This new paradigm resulted in fast and affordable housing that fueled the American Dream of home ownership. Machines replaced humans as the primary workforce. As America grew wealthier and could afford the beauty and durability of those traditional methods and materials, rather than building better houses, we built bigger houses. With this erosion of the human touch, traditional building knowledge and skills, such as mass-wall masonry, all but disappeared. The craftsman officially became an endangered species.
Architecture is not static; it is ever-changing in both style and method, reflecting human creativity, ingenuity, and values. We should not try to “build as the Romans built,” or scorn modernity and its technological prowess, or all go out and become craftsmen. It’s a different age. Many new building materials and practices are good, and after all, most traditions were once considered modern. But we also do not want to throw out thousands of years of architectural innovation and progress. We want to build upon that foundation.
We need to go back to the point where we were still building architecture that inspired, lifted the human spirit, and lasted millennia, and build upon those practices. Let’s apply building science with the same vigor, but to the time-tested building methods born from thousands of years of innovation, and then continue that tradition. We need to go back and explore mass-wall.
Toward a New Building Culture
If you ask a child to draw a picture of a house, nine times out of ten they’ll draw a rectangle with a triangle on top. Why? Because it’s the most distilled representation of what we mean by a house. It’s symbolic, not just of a building, but of a concept—home.
That certainly varies by place and culture; not all houses should have gabled roofs. But good buildings, buildings that create harmony, comfort, and facilitate human thriving, do not have to be complicated. Some of the greatest cities, towns and neighborhoods are made up of 99% good buildings—simple, authentic structures arranged in a way that create spaces and provide a meaningful context for the 1% great buildings. A mosaic of largely mundane pieces with a few jewels that all together create a masterpiece.
Traditional materials, with their inherent limitations, generally express themselves in very simple forms. It’s impossible to build the complex forms of a McMansion with traditional methods at a reasonable price. These constraints generally lead to better buildings. And with an average house size in the US of 2,500 square feet, we have some cushion for increased quality and smaller footprints.
While the masonry I do is beautiful for this century, I’m merely creating thoughtful, proportional buildings from authentic, durable materials. I am no master mason or craftsman, and certainly no brilliant designer. I am simply a builder: someone who facilitates the building of beautiful things, and wears whatever hats I need to wear to get it done.
In a hyper-specialized, increasingly complex world, professionals are often stuck in the silo of their specialty. Developers are stuck with spreadsheets and bank loans, architects with blueprints and building codes, general contractors with crews and construction. All of this generally pressures people to pursue giant projects, and giant projects rarely lead to good architecture. It’s too bureaucratic, like trying to paint a portrait by committee.
There will always be a place for big projects, but the fabric of good neighborhoods, towns, and cities is woven by small people doing small things. Small projects allow for a more flexible, organic development that keeps you engaged with the building as it unfolds over time. It’s like an author writing a novel. You set the characters in motion, but then they take on a life of their own. The characters begin to shape the story with you. You are not just imposing the story, but responding to it. Smaller building projects have fewer constituents and allow you to express your creativity and vision. To paint your portrait. To write your book. It’s the product of a human, not of an institution. Vernacular isn’t a style, it’s a process.
In my experience, one person is entirely capable of developing, designing, and building at the scale of a six-home pocket neighborhood. I know an architect who just developed and built eight townhouses, and a builder who is in the process of designing and building 10 houses, plus a small duplex development. Everyone has their strengths, the things they love and are best at. And that’s good. But you can be good at design and still learn how to build a construction budget, run a pro forma, and learn how to talk to banks. On a small scale, none of this stuff is nearly as complicated as it seems.
The barrier to entry is extremely low. You don’t have to have a lot of money or experience to get your feet wet. You could buy a house as your “primary residence” with a conventional mortgage at 5% down and remodel the kitchen or bathroom. This would give you a chance to learn the permitting process, meet some subs, practice budgeting, and get some hands-on experience. If remodeling with cash isn’t an option, you could buy a house, or refinance one you own, with an FHA 203(k) loan that lets you wrap up the renovation costs into the mortgage. You can put as little as 3.5% of the total down to limit your out-of-pocket costs. For example, a $250k house + remodel at 3.5% down is $8,750 cash out of pocket.
The FHA route is the most cumbersome, but also lets you get started with very, very little cash. If you buy a reasonably priced house in an even mildly appreciating area, it’s extremely low risk. If you get into a bind you can either sell the house, rent or Airbnb it, and then move into a cheaper rental. You could also work through the FHA to buy and remodel up to a fourplex, or even to construct one from scratch. The only requirement is that you have to live in it for one year for it to qualify as your “primary residence.” If you rent the other units, you could then live for free, build equity, capture tax advantages, and benefit from appreciation.
After a year you could move out, rent that remaining unit, and qualify for another primary residence with a conventional mortgage. You would now have a cash-flowing fourplex in your portfolio that could be used as leverage to secure loans for larger projects. With the resultant access to capital, you’re on the road to becoming a developer, to controlling your own destiny, doing projects that you want to do in the way that you want to do them.
You don’t have to quit your good-paying job to make $12 bucks an hour, as I did a little over 5 years ago. You can start with a small project on the side. You can work within your own limitations and set things in motion. In the process you’ll meet suppliers and contractors, build relationships with banks, learn more about financing, and get to know city officials, inspectors, realtors, and other people in the business.
Creating a new building culture doesn’t mean storming the barricades of the current institutions and power structures. It means taking action in our own spheres of influence to create compelling alternatives. To become builders. To remind people that humans don’t have to be destructive forces, they can cultivate and enrich. As we change the culture, policies and institutions will follow.
It’s not about a particular style or replicating some classical Order precisely, but about the continuation of the classical tradition, which ultimately is a value system. A system that values beauty, harmony, stewardship, and celebrates the infinitely creative human spirit. Those values bridge across all places, cultures, and economic statuses, yet express themselves uniquely in each, because humans are wonderfully diverse and enormously inventive. And when we take those values and express them in a durable architecture, we not only enrich the world we live in, but we also preserve and perpetuate those values, allowing posterity to build upon our accomplishments, rather than having to overcome them.
No one else is going to do it. It will take you and me: small people doing small things.
All images provided by the author.
Austin Tunnell is Founder & Principal at Building Culture, a design and build firm in Oklahoma City that specializes in mass-wall masonry construction. Inspired by beautiful architecture throughout the world that has lasted millennia, he is developing an alternative building methodology to displace our current, disposable practices in the United States, by blending the best of tradition and innovation, fusing classical practices with modern tech. While it is common to think of development and building as a resource-consuming, destructive force, Austin believes that at its best, architecture enriches, and is an essential ingredient to human flourishing. You can connect with Austin on Instagram at @buildingculture.
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