The end result is visually appealing for the same reason a grove of trees is appealing. The trees all have the same DNA but each tree adapts to its particular circumstance and hence is a unique individual. The individuals make up a coherent ‘grove’ – in which unity underpins the diversity.

Unity underpins diversity in the American bungalow and the earlier Villa.

American bungalows had their origins in the British Arts and Crafts Movement, which promoted the revival of craftsmanship and a love of nature and the arts. Ruskin and Morris, who pioneered the movement in England, believed only socialism could make quality arts and crafts affordable to the masses and vigorously advocated socialist reforms.

However, their ideal of an affordable Arts and Crafts House was actually delivered by capitalists in America. In 1920, Sears and Roebuck created the first bungalow as a kitset house, shipped to the site complete with framing, walls, siding, lights, bathroom fixtures, and kitchen cabinets ready for self assembly.

The basic kitset price was only $900. The average working man’s income in 1920 was about $1,500 – this was truly affordable housing. These bungalow builders used the machine for all the repetitive components but left the finishing details to artisans on site – hence the lead-light windows, rustic interiors and fancy trim.

The bungalow, like the earlier villa, soon made its way to New Zealand, and whole streets of bungalows (from the Indian “Bangla” – in the Bengal style) continue to appeal because of the unity underlying their diversity. In richer neighbourhoods, with more diverse architecture but larger sites, trees and gardens supply the unity.

The currently fashionable monopitch roofs are an abomination. Gable and hip roofs create unifying waves of roofs, like the natural ripples in the sand. A group of shed-roofed houses resemble a pack of dogs snarling at each other with raised lips and bared teeth.

There ought to be a law against it.

Those Medieval Tows

Many people admire the wonderful medieval towns of Europe, such as Sienna in Tuscany, and think “See what those people did, free from any town planning and building codes!”

In reality the common people of Sienna were hardly free. Every commune regulated its own trade and industry, through their guilds that controlled prices, standards, working hours and eliminated competitive trading. No manufactured goods could be imported except at Fair-time, and prices were rigidly controlled. Regulations prohibited inventing new tools, using the unpaid labour of wives and children, or working before the town bell had rung in the morning or after it had rung at night.

As you might expect, building was also controlled by rigid regulation. The ruling élite – Sienna’s ‘Council of Nine’ (Nobles) – regarded their town as a ‘work of art’ and everyone involved in its construction was regarded as an artisan wielding the brush, and applying the paint, totally in accord with a vision of the total canvas. The Council of Nine resisted the new fashions of the Renaissance and forced Sienna to maintain the Gothic style.

One reason for the widespread acceptance of this highly disciplined regime was the long history of a climate of fear described by Paul the Deacon, in 680 AD, eight centuries before the Black Death:

"In this year, plague, with swelling in the groin, again ravaged Ravenna, Grado and Istria, as it had 30 years earlier. Agilulf made peace with the Avars, but Childebert declared war on his cousin Chilperic's son. In the war between them as many as 30,000 men fell. A bitterly cold winter followed, the worst in memory."

Hunger and pestilence were twin scourges, the one augmenting the other, and both were interspersed with periods of bloody warfare.

The parallels with today’s promotion of regulation, intervention and comprehensive urban planning and design, all justified by our current ‘climate of fear’ are a bit of a worry

Our Challenge

Our contemporary challenge is how to enable the development of cities, towns and neighbourhoods, that work and satisfy our aesthetic senses, without sacrificing our ideals of freedom and democracy. The neighbourhoods dominated by villas and bungalows show how it can be achieved in architectural terms. Other theoreticians are drawing on chaos theory and what we are learning about life itself to better understand truly spontaneous order, so as to enable the development of large scale urban developments within a similar nesting of building and infrastructure. But that is another story.