Developers in Northern Virginia built out large suburbs of mixed high, medium and low density housing: suburbs with broad streets and trendy, new shopping centres and malls. However they found young educated professionals were choosing the old city downtowns like Alexandria and Arlington over their new developments. This was a wealthy market that the developers did not like missing out on. A new development in Northern Virginia is Lansdowne. It contains the normal spiralling suburb but with sections that have artificially constructed town centres.

Parking is off the side of the town centre so the restaurants and shops are pedestrian friendly. There is a tall clock tower, a small atrium for music, and central park area. Surrounding the town square is high density housing and light commercial buildings. This is being designed for the single young professionals. I like it.

The goal is to give it a European feel, but like Las Vegas, the buildings are new, clean and air conditioned. Plus there are touches of modern American landscaping.

One of the most successful upscale big stores is Wegmans. This is a Dutch company but is run out of Rochestor, NY. The stores are slowly making their way south from the US NE and one recently opened in Ashburn, VA near the AOL Headquarters. These are heavily trafficked by the working professionals of North Virginia.

Where Wegmans differs from other big box stores is that they design them inside like a town square. It looks like a cross between the Montreal fishmarkets and a European town centre. Both Lansdowne and Wegmans are probably aimed directly at people like me. I like them. They are well designed and executed.

Water occupies a central role in the desert city of Phoenix. The city is criss-crossed with canals and public spaces are dominated by either water fountains or water misters off the commercial buildings.

The fountain above is from a tiny little strip mall in downtown Tempe, AZ. Phoenix is an architecturally adventurous city however the commonality of the water fountain is almost an under-lying celebration and fear of the role water has in the sustainability and viability of the city. Everyone is fully aware that if the water dries up then Phoenix will effectively cease to exist. The fountains in the public spaces are an uncomfortable expression of both the plentiful and scarce nature of fresh water.

We went to a speech by an ASU architecture lecturer from England last saturday night. It was hosted by a local artistic group. I think, but I am not certain, it was the Spirit of the Senses. The speech was on Architecture and Art and it was very interesting. The speaker was an English architect who had traveled across the US with his wife performing displays on architecture to keep himself afloat and through that journey he came to understand the European romanticism of the landscape and architecture as well as the American delight and demand in the mundane and suburban - the American romance of its own.

Probably his strongest point was on architectural indifference. He would travel to the far flung suburbs of the edges of the cities and photograph architecturally ugly phenomena that were a result of indifference. For instance a push out on the outside of the house to accomodate a fireplace inside. Another good example was the house design the removed the corridor, at the expense of the toilet being a walk through.

I used to live in North Virginia. It is entirely suburbia and newly suburban at that. The absurdities in Ashburn and Leesburg were well known. For instance two curls of houses in Ashburn ended up with these large houses - 4,000 sq ft - being within eight feet of each others back wall. Another was that sliding doors on the second floor where there was supposed to be a deck would have a small fence over it, to stop people walking, and falling out. It was indifferent aesthetics, but who knows, those people probably could not afford a deck.

Apparently only one percent of houses in the US are architecturally designed to custom build. But seriously, who can afford it? Holland has forty percent of houses designed by an architect, but that is government mandated. Developers have made house ownership relatively affordable.

There is also the issue of the HOA [Home Owners Association] which helps make houses uniform in upkeep. Because a house is such a large investment people do not want it depreciating and use the HOA to keep their major asset at least level and not have the crazy guy next door who thinks a broken down car in long grass is beautiful.

So there are a lot of elements that contribute to modern American suburbia and some of its absurdities. However, I don't think an elitist attitude, denying the realities of economics, or mandating architecturally designed houses is a solution. Houses remain expensive. In the speakers defense, he went out of his way in this area not be condascending.

The speech covered the speakers art and architectural projects as well, including some bus stops he designed in Sioux City. Each artist has their tech gimmick and his was CNC cutting where it was all one contiguous line. As a consequence he 'drew' the environment on the building as a transparent design or scribble. Which was quite cool. I did not understand the purpose or reason behind his art project in the Californian desert, but other than that it was an interesting speech, with the architectural indifference being the strongest part.

A house from Los Angeles. I like how the inside and outside blend in together. Suburban houses are designed for mass production, so they tend to have lowest denominator room and bathroom structure, being design for a mass market. For empty nesters such as ourselves it means we have three rooms that are basically dust collectors.

Housing is still very expensive in Phoenix, despite it dropping significantly, however, we are noticing that people are dropping the price to what they owe on the place and then staying there. We have seen properties stick on that price and then go into short sale or foreclosure mode.

We have been looking for about six months now and patience is paying off. We are looking at land that recently dropped 33%, and another that dropped 15%. Despite the 'green shoots' theories, there isn't that much money around at the moment to buy. I agree with this article as well:

One of the the largest mortgage insurers in the US, PMI is forecasting that home prices will be lower in 2011 than they are today, including 30 of the 50 largest metro areas. The decline is likely to spread to "all regions of the nation" from California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona, the states most affected by the housing slump.

I think the Phoenix market is starting to go below what people owe on properties now.

We met today with two architects from 180 Degrees. Since we have never built a custom home before we don't know what the normal process is. John and James met us first at the block of land. We have done a floor plan of what we are thinking and laid out a lot of our choices in doing so. It is obvious we don't have architectural flair as our floor plan was a big two story square. But it did enable us to describe our current lifestyle and how we would want that translated into a custom home.

At lunch we pulled out the laptop and showed multiple pictures of the minimalist and modernist style that we like. We then went through the sketches of our floor plans again before seeing magazine examples of their work. The style of 180 Degrees designs and builds is very close to what we like.

Next we will be looking first hand at some of the places they have designed and built and see where we go from there. We are excited.

Japanese architecture can be quite challenging, especially the modernist buildings that seem to spring out of the small spaces in the Japanese cities. For instance this house has the bottom story open via a glass wall into the street. The street becomes and extension of the down stairs living space. It is hard to imagine an Australian or American house giving up that aspect of privacy to open the house to the outside urban world.

The back of the house is beautifully designed; opening out into three stories of airy outdoor areas.

The patios probably come close to doubling the space.

Wallace Cunningham is an architect in San Diego who studied at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesen school in Arizona. He was asked in Riviera what his design philosophy is in a nutshell;

Houses should be portraits of the owners. People should come to a house and know something about who lives there, what kind of people they are, what they're like.

A lot of the custom homes in Phoenix are just the Santa Fe McMansion style spec home. Lots of fussy, complicated and tacked on spaces; covered in earth hued stucco and with the overt river rocks covering half the wall. It is a popular look. All of North Scottsdale looks like that, but for a spec home, it is just a one off suburban home in the cookie cutter style.

For the land we have bought we want a contemporary home where the inner and external spaces match our lifestyle exactly. We don't care about resale, as we will live in it for a long time. But for us the most important thing is placing the structure around our lifestyle.

That means a large open space both upstairs and downstairs - with most likely not rooms. The house itself will be small as Arizona allows the living space to expand into outdoors and when the weather is too hot or too cold, that can be managed by shade sails, pool and gas fires or heaters.

I don't know if it will be a portrait of us. However, it will mean that every space is one that will be used. We have several rooms in our current suburban home that are unused. Our cats live in them. We don't ever use them. We don't want our custom home to suffer from that.