What Sarah Susanka figure out twenty years ago is just as relevant today. The Architectural service pamphlet she created link provided an invaluable and accessible guide for her residential clients on the type of work architects does, as well as what they can expect in exchange for what they paid. Her pamphlet also reflected the overall philosophy Sarah held in regards to the practice of architecture. I first heard about Sarah from Richard Taylor link, the architect whom incredibly enough provided answers to twelve hundred questions on Allexperts.com over the past ten years. I was curious as the motivation behind his work and in our conversation he spoke about the public perception of what we do and who we are as architects, and his continued effort over the years to bridge that gap and that was when he mentioned Sarah's work.
Sarah is the architect and author behind the "not so big" movement. The basic premise behind her philosophy being relatively simple; build better, not bigger. An ideal that most architect and designer intuitively understand, but one that have yet to see wider acceptance by the general public. Part of the problem is the public's lack of understanding for exactly what constitute "better" when it comes to building practices. Without a clear indicator of quality, the public instead fixate on the simple statistic of size and as a result the average size of an American home has continued to grow over the past decades. All of these facts points to the need for a greater amount of dialog between the architects and the general public. Many architects such as Sarah has began to actively address this vacuum of information by taking advantage of the internet as well as traditional media as a tool to get the words out.
More on Sarah:
Article from Paul Anater Link
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