John Brown, RAIC, is on a profound mission, one that doesn't involve anything as mundane as scaling K2 or swimming the English Channel. The soft-spoken Canadian wants to simultaneously improve the quality of mass-market housing and make better houses more attainable for the middle class. As an architecture professor, he teaches students to become good designers and, through various professional efforts, he's instructing the public to identify good design, so they can and will make better housing decisions in the future.
Source: residential architect Magazine
Publication date:
July 1, 2009
By Nigel F. Maynard
John Brown, RAIC, is on a profound mission, one that doesn't involve anything as mundane as scaling K2 or swimming the English Channel. The soft-spoken Canadian wants to simultaneously improve the quality of mass-market housing and make better houses more attainable for the middle class. As an architecture professor, he teaches students to become good designers and, through various professional efforts, he's instructing the public to identify good design, so they can and will make better housing decisions in the future.
Brown also practices what he teaches. With the help of his wife, Carina van Olm, who oversees business operations, and designer Matthew North, he runs a multidisciplinary practice called housebrand. Part real estate agency (Brown is a licensed Realtor), architecture firm, general contractor, interior designer, and furniture store, housebrand claims it's “a new kind of design firm”—one of the first in North America to integrate all of these house-related disciplines “into one seamless process.”
Although the business model is unconventional, housebrand specializes in approachable, practical modern architecture that seeks to delight its clients. Yes, the firm will design and build a new house from the ground up, but its primary passion is “tailoring” outmoded existing homes to the way people really live.
poetic license
Born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, Brown took a circuitous path to architecture, avoiding along the way his physician father's suggestions that he study medicine. “I didn't know what I wanted to do, so I went into engineering, and I absolutely hated it,” he says. After graduating with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Manitoba and no clear plans for the future, Brown decided to visit the university's architecture school; the experience so moved him that he applied to The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. “I realized it was what I was meant to do,” he says. “We started doing basic design exercises, and it seemed to make so much sense because it was a nice mix of the rational and poetic.”
Brown graduated with his M.Arch in 1984 and headed off for postgraduate work at Columbia University, lured by the opportunity to study with influential British architect/thinker Kenneth Frampton. “I was there just as his critical regionalism essay was coming out,” he recalls. “And it was very important to think about how you can take the ideals of modern architecture and temper them with site, climate, and regional influences. But it became even more important over the course of my career.”
After Brown earned his Master of Science degree in building design, he moved to Dallas to find work. Alas, it was inauspicious timing, during the economic recession and S&L crisis of the mid–1980s. Record unemployment and the prodding of his sister led him to apply for a teaching post at the University of Calgary, a job he accepted in 1985 at the age of 28. The academic world has framed his development ever since. Expanding on Frampton's writings, Brown—now the associate dean of Calgary's architecture school—studied architectural theory and worked to reconcile its relationship to practice and the built environment, experimenting with new materials, designing furniture, and doing design/build work.
But ultimately, he wanted to put his theories to the test and did so by launching his first firm, Studio Z, in 1990. Although he earned design awards for several high-end custom homes, Brown didn't find working for wealthy clients fulfilling. “It made me feel good and it made them feel good, but it didn't make much of a difference.”
Yearning to have a greater impact in the larger world of market-rate housing, he researched how the merchant builder industry works and how the masses live and feel about housing. “I looked at the real estate industry, appraisals, and banking, and I tried to get a sense of the whole picture and how I could fit into that.”
