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Whats a house w-out a roof

Posted by 64bowtie on December 8, 2004, at 2:26:33

Quiz: What’s a house w-out a roof… Answer: …a fence.

Once upon a time there was a successful homebuilder who asked this same question at a luncheon in his honor. The place roared with laughter. Many knew of his early days. Seems early on, his business had almost collapsed, and that very question was the crux of the failures. He wasn’t building fences and selling them as houses to the dummies who didn’t know better. He did however, have a quirky view of what a successful roof was to his enterprise.

He started out in the early 1950s selling houses like “hotcakes” on Sunday morning; like doughnuts to policemen on their coffee break. Needless to say, his sales were successes to behold. Along about 1955, he wanted to stay successful, so he hired a Hollywood set designer to create some magical and quirky and distinctive designs for his new houses. What came next was watershed… literally.

His designer created a model home with a distinctive new roof design that magically and instantly caught on with the Palm Springs show biz crowd, as a statement. He launched his creative new design into his new desert subdivision and had folks standing in lines, trying to buy into his futuristic community. He was set!

Two to three years later when he had started a couple of other new housing tracts, and his new design was clearly a success and the money was still rolling in, and he was on the front pages of this and that newspaper and magazine. Unfortunately, there was a 7.3 magnitude earthquake centered 40 miles northeast of Palm Springs.

The “designer roofs” began to leak when it rained. Surely the earthquake was the source his leaky roofs! So he set upon a plan to continue the design, taking bandaid measures to overcome the effects of earthquakes, without outwardly changing the landmark distinctive design. Rain was not a high priority; everything around Palm Springs is a big d*mn desert!

The forces that played with his ego in this case were very strong. He was in denial and indecision about his roof design. Denial prevented the “what” from entering his vision. Indecision conspired to block the “when” to make corrective action. After all, his design was a success, and his pockets were full of money, and folks were still standing in line to buy more houses.

That all changed in the fall and winter of 1959-1960. Turns out that was a banner year for rainfall throughout California. And the water damage to all his houses, some now four or five years old, was devastating. It began effect the very structure of the houses.

Insurance companies, homeowners (some very rich in their own right), Riverside County, and ultimately, the state of California, stepped in with lawsuits, court orders, complaints, and unpaid insurance claims. He nearly lost it all, along with his mind.

His denial and indecision can be summed up as a distortion of his vision. His vision of what a house actually was, needed something he saw no need to add. After all, the money [W A S] still rolling in. This was his distortion of reality.

What his Hollywood set designer, the concept home designer guy, had come up with is houses with the eaves higher than the customary roof peak. He had designed a funnel for the water to flow in one direction, to the center. Measures to guide offending waters away were inadequate such that any under-grad physics or mechanical engineering student, not to mention conventional Architect, would see a giant, enormous, really big, red flag in his design. Water damage was inevitable.

But wait! This was the 50s! Our builder was selling houses in the desert (where it never rains), to millionaires. What could go wrong? His distorted vision was a fear of change, protected by denial and indecision, blocked his seeing what did eventually go wrong.

His denial blocked the information that there even was a problem, and his indecision delayed the necessary changes, not just bandaids, to avert the inevitable. In all fairness, Frank Lloyd Wright had endorsed the design as being a statement of a new age of what a home can be. Who could doubt Frank Lloyd Wright? The large plate glass windows facing outward and the roofline disappearing into the center was startling and pleasing at the same time. He had missed the obvious. Remember the question… he had created a fence, not a house. After all, a fence would provide as much safe watershed as his house could.

It turned out that by 1961, the solution was almost as maddeningly simple as the problem had been maddeningly difficult. Punch a big hole in the roof at the lowest point where all the surfaces merge, about a foot in diameter, collect the runoff in a culvert that runs through the air-conditioning cabinet in the center of the house, ending six feet under the flooring (slab), filled to floor level with ‘p’ gravel. Voila! Future catastrophes avoided!

Can anyone here at Babble listening to me, hear that perhaps this is an allegory of what I witness wherever I am, over and over again, day after day. There is a common thread throughout. The builder had a distortion in his vision that had a simple fix, but he refused to update, upgrade, modify and otherwise change his approach for fear the change would be worse than the condition he was fixing. After all who knew houses better than Frank Lloyd Wright?

Rod


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poster:64bowtie thread:426035
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20041202/msgs/426035.html