A few years ago, a group of UCLA anthropologists and archeologists conducted one of the most thorough studies of how people live in the United States. The study took 32 middle-class Los Angeles families and observed them as they went about their days, going beyond superficial notions of how people live and into the real nuts and bolts of daily home life. Out of this study came the book, “Life at Home in the 21st Century,” an unflinching look at the often harried state of the modern American family.

One particularly interesting part of the book tracked the families’ movements every 10 minutes over two weekday afternoons and evenings, observing how they use their homes.

Photo courtesy of UCLA Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press.

The above map shows what one family’s movements looked like—a map that Jeanne Arnold, who oversaw the study, said is very representative of all the families. Almost all activity is centered around the family room and kitchen. “The propensity for the family to aggregate near kitchen with table space is almost universal,” Arnold told me.

The dining and living rooms, which occupy about half the total floor area of the first floor, are virtually untouched (excepting someone’s piano lessons). And even though LA has a temperate climate, no one is hanging out on the large porch, much less the 5–6,000 square feet of outdoor space not shown.

Based on the key, I approximate that of the 1344 square feet on the first floor (1540 including porch), 528 are used regularly.

These findings highlight the frequent discord between use and design. Like the guy who buys the 400 hp, 12 MPG euro-speedster only to use it navigating gridlock most of the time, the American home often sits as a power/money/time-sucking monument to unrealized potential.

What would happen if we approached architecture from a data-centric perspective? What if we started with what we know about how we live, about what matters to us, about what’s responsible to the planet—and designed, built and lived accordingly?

LARGE MATTERS

Despite the popularity of tiny houses and urban micro-apartments, the American home keeps growing. In 2013, the US Census reported the average new single-family home was 2662 square feet—a record high that bests pre-bubble numbers by a couple hundred square feet. Globally, only Australia and Canada come close to our architectural girth.

Compare this to 1950, when the average single-family home was 983 square feet. The 1950 home also had more people, with an average household size of 3.37 people, a number that today stands at 2.54. In other words, the 1950 American used 292 square feet against today’s 1065. While new homes don’t necessarily reflect all homes—i.e., existing housing stock will be smaller—the building trend is, and has been, clear for some time: bigger is better.

Size is not inherently problematic. New York’s Museum of Natural History has 1.6 million square feet of floor space. It’s necessary area for a planetarium, a blue whale, cool dioramas, and 5 million annual visitors (.32 square feet per visitor per year). Sometimes increased space befits use. But the American home seems to grow despite the fact, as the UCLA study suggests, that there has been no increased need for functional value, and despite size-related consequences that put our architecture at cross purposes with our emotional, financial and environmental wellbeing.

A PLACE FOR STUFF WE RARELY USE

A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. —George Carlin

Perhaps by design, perhaps by accident, our big homes are being packed with stuff we don’t need, use or want. The UCLA team found that three out of four garages were too filled with stuff to hold cars. They found mothers with elevated stress hormones attributed to managing their families’ possessions.

In a Wall Street Journal article last year, California Closets chief design officer Ginny Snook Scott claimed that about 20 percent of clothes in the average person’s closet are worn regularly, making a walk-in closet more like a mothball fleet than a fighting brigade.

Then there’s the big picture: Americans use about four planets’ worth of resources to sustain their consumption habits, according to the Global Footprint Network. And 2013 saw the sharpest increase in global greenhouse gas emissions in 30 years; a disproportionate amount of these emissions are attributable to manufacturing in China, where our stuff comes from (source).

What if we started designing our homes to fit the stuff we frequently use? What would our kitchens look like if they were only filled with the utensils we actually cook with? What would our closets look like if they only had the clothes we wear? How much stuff would we buy if we shopped in a manner befitting the precarious state of the environment?

A FAR BIGGER PROBLEM

The size of a home often represents the tip of the architectural iceberg. Typically, when a home is large, the land underneath is large. When there are multiple large homes occupying multiple large pieces of land, it results in sprawl.

A huge issue is that many municipalities require minimum floor area ratios (FAR). FAR is the ratio of a home’s floor area to its lot. Small FARs can result in disproportionately large land usage in relation to home size.

To illustrate, let’s say you have a 4,000-square-foot lot. On an urban lot zoned for a 2 FAR, you could build up to 8,000 square feet of floor area on the lot—either an eight story building with 1,000 square feet per floor, a two story building with 4,000 square feet per floor, etc. On the other hand, on a suburban lot with a .5 FAR, you could not build larger than a 2,000-square-foot home.

The US Census reports that the average lot size for a new single-family home sold in the US in 2013 was 15,456 square feet, which amounts to a .17 FAR in relationship to the 2,662-square-foot home. Combine this with an average household size of 2.54 people and you have an average single-family-home-dwelling American occupying over 6000 square feet of land. What this creates is:

Long commutes. Bigger lots continually push homes into suburban and exurban lands, resulting in longer commutes (the average one-way commute in America is 25 minutes). The Gallup-Healthways Wellbeing Index reports that “American workers with lengthy commutes are more likely to report a range of adverse physical and emotional conditions.” Transportation expenses. Transportation often cancels out ostensible savings of a large home in the burbs. For example, sprawling Houston has the eighth most affordable housing of any large city according to the Center for Housing Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology. But residents spend 32 percent of their income on transportation, making it the eighth least affordable large city to live in overall—effectively more expensive than Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco and other “expensive” cities where housing costs are offset by higher incomes and lower transportation costs. Pollution. Transportation accounts for 28 percent of all greenhouse gas emission in the US. As our homes have grown and been pushed further from city centers, our thirst for petroleum has grown accordingly. The EPA reports that a single-family detached house in a suburban development will create four times the emissions—for both house and associated transportation—of a multifamily residence in a transit-oriented development.

What if we designed our homes to account for their associated impact on transportation? Wouldn’t we willingly give up our yards or that extra, unused bedroom in order to shave 20 minutes off our daily commutes, save several thousand dollars a year or make significant reduction in our carbon footprints?

(DE)SIGN OF THE TIMES

In 1970, 40 percent of the American population were married couples with kids (note that the average house size was about 1500 square feet back then). Today, that number has been halved to 20 percent. Not only are household sizes dropping, but more and more people are choosing to live alone. Across the country, about one-third of homes are single-person households—a number that’s significantly higher in most large cities.