TRADE | Southern Building Culture is Returning
TRADE | Southern Building Culture is Returning
A masonry specialist explains how he is bringing back placemaking one home at a time
Written By Austin Tunnell
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.
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 percent good buildings—simple, authentic structures arranged in a way that create spaces and provide a meaningful context for the 1 percent of 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 ten 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 percent 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 percent of the total down to limit your out-of-pocket costs. For example, a $250,000 house plus remodel at 3.5 percent 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 well-paying job to make $12 an hour, as I did a little over five 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, and 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.
Austin Tunnell is a Designer, Builder, Mason, Urbanist. After a brief stint as a CPA at KPMG and 2 years in the Peace Corps, Austin’s path into building began in the jungles of Panama where he was first introduced to the idea that how we build shapes how we live. Captured by the idea, he went on to apprentice for a master mason and timber framer. He plans to expand Building Culture to include apprenticeship programs, R&D, manufacturing, education and resale of traditional materials and methods—aiming to build a culture that expresses its ideals in a multi-century architecture: a whole new Building Culture. @Build_Culture
This is an excerpt from a piece that was originally posted on Strong Towns on August 26, 2021. All photos provided by author.