One of these houses is under construction in the western suburbs. The other is over 100 years old. Which is the brand new house?

This is sort of a trick question. The house on the left is under construction in Hinsdale. The house on the right is considered to be one of the classics of American architecture. What is interesting is not that one is "new" and one "old" -- let's face it the Boston architect H.H Richardson uses a 12th century French stable as its prototype for the Glessner house -- but what people value and how their tastes develop. The house on the left is Richardsonian Romanesque in style but it pretends to sit on its site like a country house although there is very little room to spare. It mines the fussy, heavy and dark Romanesque houses found on Drexel Boulevard for its precedent. While Richardson's Glessner House transforms its 12th century precedent by enclosing a light filled court, the new house in Hinsdale adds a three car garage (top left). The powerful masonry (see the arched servant entry, top right) of the Glessner House was a provocative rebuke to the overdone exercises in decoration that surrounded it; the house in Hinsdale is just a big dark house. Furthermore, the street wall of the Glessner house is a plane and the openings are cut out of them; the exterior walls of the house in Hinsdale are willy-nilly.

We at makeARCHITECTURE believe that a significant opportunity was lost. Instead of regurgitating what is an ugly house design, the architect could have shown the client the amazing things that are being done with stone today. After all, if you're gonna' spend 5 million dollars on a house, why not do your homework and go through the process? That's what makeARCHITECTURE is dedicated to: going through the process with an idea in mind rather than aiming for a fixed image. It makes for better work. The kind of work that is a pleasant surprise. It's like that class in college where your head hurt but your world became richer and brighter. We'll put up a stone house design of our own, one that's forward-looking and that learns from the past rather than embraces it uncritically. Nostalgia is fine but you can't live in it. If you try, take some time to make distinctions between old houses that are worth copying and those that are better left to the dustbin of history.

What do you think?