What’s more surprising to me is how well a triple-decker built for middle class professionals in 1910 does fit the needs of students (and middle class professionals) in 2010.

I think I’d disagree that there isn’t a pattern language in modern homebuilding. Open-plans and huge garages and industrial kitchens and so on are all very much patterns which get replicated over and over for a reason (apparently they sell houses). The problem, I think, is that people are only so good at figuring out what they actually want — different than what they think they want — and those patterns don’t actually provide value for many important use-cases. They’re fads, or they provide value I don’t care about, that isn’t useful. (What, exactly, is the value of an open-plan house anyway? I hate them. Why would you not design for some amount of noise isolation?) It’s a pattern language designed around the automobile and cheap gasoline and a Picket Fences idea of nuclear-family life.

The Somerville triple-deckers around me weren’t built any more consciously, but the pattern language they used turns out to have more lasting value — certainly more value for me as an unmarried student in a world where I don’t own a car, and have available to me cheap and reliable public transportation and a combination of stores serving basic needs within easy walking distance and stupid-simple online ordering for everything else.

Our culture is changing too fast for any evolved pattern language to keep up.

I don’t know, I think I might find a house built around “birth control, pizza delivery, internet, supermarkets, and thermal glass” a terrifying place to live. I envision it looking a lot like a suburban split-level. Would it have a kitchen? Would it be anything but a series of bedrooms and a bathroom and some common space designed for watching television?

One of the advantages of the Somerville triple-decker pattern is how flexible it is. You have anyone from unrelated college students to a young couple to an old retired couple living on the first floor, and a gaggle of college kids or post-college yuppies or a small family or an older extended family living on the second and third floors. You have houses that double as startups, and social spaces, and shared workspace for projects, in ways that are less possible in the suburban nuclear-family model. (Though not impossible, cf. the garages of Silicon Valley.) You don’t live the same way your neighbors do, but that’s fine, because the pattern is general enough to work most of the time, and be adapted to fit specific use-cases.

(I keep discovering features of the Somerville triple-decker, eg. if you put up curtains or blinds and keep them closed during the day in the summer, the house stays pleasantly cool, and then you can open up the windows at night to get some breeze. Air conditioning? Who needs that?)

And I would totally get milk delivered to my house if the option were available to me.

I agree that the old Media Lab and the Stata Center are disasters, but I think the problem is hiring famous name architects who care more about making a statement than making a great building.

I also agree that most local housing stock is awful, but I also wonder whether they’ve stolen a feature from software development: featuritis. Marble countertops? Check. Stainless steel appliances? Check. They’re all the same, because they’re afraid that being different would cost them. The most ridiculous bit seems to be the trend towards more smaller rooms in order to up the room count, and especially towards way too many bathrooms, even if they’re cramped and stupidly located. When we were looking, I think we saw a 2 bedroom place with 3 1/2 bathrooms at one point. Insane.

At least in Cambridge, there seems to be a small stock of interesting, funky, unique, functional and sometimes beautiful homes. Out of 20 or so we looked at, we saw two. The first was the very first place we looked at, and we were outbid by $1000. The second was the place we bought. But maybe Arlington is even worse in that regard.