Architecture and the American House Now

In our ambition to rigorously determine the leading 200 residential architecture firms in the U.S., we achieved something of perhaps even greater value: a portrait of the state of architecture today.

_{By Richard Olsen, Forbes Staff}

How does one take the current temperature of residential architecture in America—the identification of its fashions, its experimental developments and, moreover, the individuals who are its trailblazers in every state in the nation? It’s a question that demands other questions, including: At that local level, what are the primary market challenges…and opportunities? And in the wake of the devastation that Americans have experienced under their own roofs in 2024 from the new extreme-weather reality, what role should America’s architects, the nation’s building-design experts, be playing in the recovery-and-rebuild efforts of these tragedies? In the last decade, the function of the architect in society has been transformed; and today, as consumers navigate climate challenges and the demands they’re placing on our houses, it’s incumbent upon us to reach a more thorough understanding of what’s so often missing in their design and construction—and the extent to which good architects can improve them and, in turn, our lives.

In our ambition to determine the leading 200 residential architecture firms working in the U.S. today, we at Forbes chose a research-intensive and exhaustively proactive path to making such a proclamation, bypassing the call for entries and pay-to-play models common to architecture’s many established awards and recognition programs. Recognizing that those processes frequently require resources that exceed that of many sole practitioners and boutique shops (the very segments of the profession that comprise the majority of those who do single-family houses) and seeking to establish a higher, more equitable evaluative standard, we aimed to level the playing field by assessing the entire field, or very close to it, state by state. From there, we extended project-submission invitations to each firm whose work we had deemed to meet the fundamentals of our evaluating criteria. And so, by taking the time to do the requisite work—in our case, nearly 10 months in all—we achieved not merely a meticulously assembled list, but something of perhaps even greater utility: a portrait of the state of architecture and the American house now.

21st-Century Problems of Design and Construction

In the U.S., realizing a new house for one’s self, or even remodeling or restoring an existing one, has historically ranked high among the most daunting and costly of life’s major personal goalposts. Today, 15 years after the Great Recession prompted a widespread reevaluation of the U.S. homebuilding industry’s many antiquated standard practices—and in the wake of the pandemic’s homebuilding frenzy—participation in the process of completing such work, including as a client, remains fraught with “uncontrollables.” The shortage of skilled construction labor continues unabated; the latest Home Builders Institute labor market report reveals that some 723,000 new construction workers are needed each year to meet demand.

Meanwhile, for Americans on the coasts especially, it’s becoming increasingly challenging to see nature as anything but a source of disaster. Certainly, the occurrence of flooding, wildfire and other extreme weather events is outpacing the response capabilities of the building scientists and building-code officials who set the benchmarks of what our houses must reasonably be able to withstand. In Florida and California, flooding and fires have residential insurers fleeing the states. The National Flood Insurance Program’s current flood codes are 45 years old and preposterously out of date. Meanwhile, in this era of climate-change crisis, demolition and construction projects together create more than 600 million tons of waste debris annually in the U.S., while the building of new homes accounts for more than 50 million tons of embodied carbon emissions.

Clearly, residential architectural design in America is entangled in its own 21st-century complications. For one, architecture is a world deeply divided, with two distinct camps, the Modernists and the Traditionalists, independently shaping what architecture students are taught and what they ultimately emphasize in the work. Meanwhile, architectural practice is under pressure from changes in how and where design concepts are sourced. In the late 1990s, influential Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa warned of the arrival of an “era of omnipresent visual images” and of the culture’s new “ocular bias”: “Instead of an existentially grounded plastic and spatial experience, architecture has adopted the psychological strategy of advertising and instant persuasion; buildings have turned into image products detached from existential depth and sincerity,” he wrote. “The current industrial mass production of visual imagery tends to alienate vision from emotional involvement and identification, and to turn imagery into a mesmerizing flow without focus or participation.”

Today, little more than a quarter-century later, Pallasmaa’s concerns seem almost quaint. We now reside in a world of image inundation, one whose repercussions are only beginning to be acknowledged. With a growing universe of image- and video-oriented social media, in both consumer and business use, there’s not just a bias toward the visual, but a full-blown psychological dependency on it. In architecture, part and parcel of the overabundance of image sources is the deterioration of the notion that architectural solutions ought to simply be local, growing from place.

So what does this mean for the prospective client, the individual in search of an architect to help them achieve a 21st-century house—and not just a beautiful personalized living space but a building characterized by a high intelligence quotient and attuned to the ecosystem of its locality?

Through polling architects across the nation on this very topic, we know they are actively engaged in social media as a tool for marketing purposes, just as we know that their clients now go directly to social media for their design-idea source material. And through studying the websites of some 18,000 architecture firms in all 50 states plus D.C., we have seen for ourselves the manifestations on the built environment since Instagram and Pinterest launched in 2010 and, in 2016, Tik-Tok entered the social sphere. Today, random image content is indiscriminately reappropriated in residential design, merging idioms and mixing metaphors, resulting in a confused new architectural globalism. Building codes, for all their value, don’t protect us from our most irresponsible design and construction impulses.

In the U.S., the most glaring manifestation of this new globalism is the modern farmhouse, a now almost standardized expression of a design language with the shakiest of antecedent foundations, one whose popularity is largely attributed to Waco, Texas, interior decorator, HGTV host and bestselling author Joanna Gaines, the “reigning queen of modern farmhouse style.” On Instagram alone, #modernfarmhouse has 2.8 million posts. In our evaluations, we found recently constructed architect-designed examples of it, each far removed from farms or even remotely rural settings, throughout the majority of the 50 states (especially in the city of Los Angeles, which, it’s fair to say, is famously bereft of agriculture). Which all begs a troubling question, in light of the relatively small percentage of architect-designed custom houses realized in any given year: Is this antithesis of place-appropriate design canceling out commissions for genuinely responsible high art architecture? Or is the modern farmhouse merely today’s iteration of the Ranch House style—and one perhaps destined, in the hands of subsequent owners, to be remodeled out of its placelessness?

A Place-Reinforcing Architecture

So it was that Forbes Architecture’s evaluating criteria for the list, its Residential Guiding Principles & Best Practices, was formulated, with direct input from the Forbes Architecture Advisory Board, to eliminate from consideration such examples of superficiality and placelessness in architectural design. Room would be left in the evaluations for individualization, while at the same time requiring an articulated “regional difference”—an architecture that demonstrates an acute awareness of its locality and either preserves local character by extending its core tenets or, alternatively, strives to elevate its fundamental essence through progression.

Still, as always, there was weather with which to contend. All too often, as we moved evaluatively across the U.S. state by state, we found ourselves in geographic locations that were, at that very moment, under siege by sea-level rise, by wildfire, by hurricanes, or by extreme heat or cold. As our evaluating criteria were tested in real time, we modified our approach in acknowledgment of circumstances on the ground. Architectural trends and market factors are of course region specific, if not neighborhood specific, and ever evolving.

Case in point: In the single-family house realm of the Northeast Region, which boasts 51 firms on the Top 200 list, New York remains architecture’s energy center. Here, the typologies of the suburban house, the country house and the beach house provide a demanding geographical diversity, each complete with its own environmental challenges. And whether or not the work involves teardowns, all-new construction remains king. Dominating global finance as it does, New York City, with its economically unparalleled clientele base, continues to draw architecture’s most ambitious practitioners. From the relatively young firm of No Architecture to an office with more than three decades of practice to its credit such as Peter Pennoyer Architects, the group is nearly evenly split between the Modernists and the Traditionalists. Meanwhile, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, each dominated by the suburban typology, collectively reveal the region’s widespread emotional and intellectual allegiance to its history, principally to the Shingle Style but also to Modernism’s deeply planted East Coast roots, while also fostering progressive contemporary work at the highest level. Collectively, the work of Jack Ryan Architect, Estes Twombly & Titrington Architects and Albert Righter Tittmann Architects demonstrates that diversity. Comparatively, while New Hampshire is quiet, with a small core group of practitioners working in regional vernaculars, Maine and Vermont boast a disproportionate number of architects—Elliott Architects and Birdseye among them—engaged in custom residential equal to that of the nation’s highest. In the cases of New Jersey and Pennsylvania, each thoroughly subdivided and built out and wedded stylistically to its past, the opportunities to build from the ground up are few, most often requiring teardowns or storm-related destruction. Rising above such challenges are the likes of Jay Reinert Architect and KieranTimberlake.

The Southeast Region’s sheer geographic exposure to storms from both the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico makes it a uniquely demanding territory for practice, never mind as an evaluative subject. In all, its firms represent 57 of our Top 200. Maryland is represented by especially strong climatically responsive Modern-idiom work, most of it for the suburbs, as in the case of David Jameson Architect and Gardner Architects. The custom-residential markets of Washington, D.C., Delaware, and Virginia each share in the distinction of being mostly concerned with country- and suburban-specific renovation and restoration, specifically of Colonial and Colonial Revival prototypes and their progeny. Long-established firms such as Barnes Vanze Architects and Jacobsen Architecture lead the way. Kentucky, West Virginia and Mississippi reveal little opportunity for the architect of custom houses, while Tennessee is the antithesis, with an abundance of robust work—urban, suburban and country—to show for itself, including in the Regional Modern idiom. Archimania and Michael Goorevich are among those Tennessee firms that landed on the list. Rural and suburban Arkansas is represented by a small but outstanding group of practitioners (Architects 226 and Marlon Blackwell Architects among them), as is Alabama, home to Jeffrey Dungan Architect and Tippett Sease Baker Architecture. Louisiana, with New Orleans’s French Colonial at its nucleus, is a state dominated by historic-preservation-based opportunity, though not without examples of cutting-edge progression, as in the work of Ammar Eloueini Digit-All Studio. For its overall excellence and the diversity of its regional expression, in both the Modern and Traditional modes and mostly suburban in location, Georgia is a standout (among those landing on the list are Point Office Architecture & Design and Summerour Architects), as is coastal South Carolina, represented by firms including McDonald Architects and Court Atkins Group, and North Carolina, home base to Arielle Schechter Architect.

The Asheville-based North Carolina firm Altura Architects, a 2025 Forbes Architecture Top 200 recipient, is another case in point—and one that, at this moment, is literally picking up the pieces of its practice amid Hurricane Helene’s recent widespread destruction of its hometown. Throughout the Southeast, environmental defensiveness in architecture has become a topic of pressing concern, and Altura’s principal, Duncan McPherson, is himself both living it and practicing it. “Altura Architects has been advocating for climate-resilient design through our projects and community outreach,” McPherson says. “Some of our past clients and projects survived Helene extremely well because of that. That said, we are already discussing how this storm will change our design approach and the conversations we have with our clients about what resilient design means. We have an opportunity now, after Helene, to point to this horrific event and use it as a learning tool for current and future clients.”

If a single Southeast state can be accurately said to represent climatically responsive architecture’s front lines for the entire region, surely it is Florida. (Here, in terms of recent construction, while an unconscionable number of bloated Mediterranean Style mansions and McMansions are still being built, there’s also an exciting segment of firms, Modernists and Traditionalists, working toward solving the problem of the Florida house.) Recently, with the state’s Gulf Coast cities having received the brunt of two consecutive category 4 hurricanes, Florida architects are being stretched to help resolve the staggering new realities of determined coastal living. Top 200 listed firm Architecture Joyce Owens, of hurricane-battered Fort Myers, while currently addressing the aftermath of the most recent storms, continues to have 2022’s Hurricane Ian top of mind. The firm’s featured project of the Top 200 list, Island Oasis, was two-thirds complete when the storm barrelled into it. While nearby structures were entirely removed from their sites or lifted from their foundations, Owens’s building survived intact. “Prior to Ian,” Owens says, “our practice was already thinking of the durability of coastal homes and designing homes stronger than traditional ‘piling’ homes. Since Ian, I labeled my practice ‘Coastal Architects.’ I don’t think I knew earlier that all the painful permitting [Florida’s building codes impose some 27 different inspections on a given house] and trying to design correctly had given us insider knowledge. We just had to listen and learn over the years.”

The Midwest Region, in nearly its entirety, according to our study of its American Institute of Architects member firms, comprises a series of challenged markets for the architect of custom single-family houses. Here, in each state, amid a small number of firms doing exceptional residential work for urban and suburban settings—13 of them made the Top 200—we found a preponderance of defunct firm websites and offices engaged almost exclusively in commercial architecture. Illinois proved similarly limited. In Chicago, one of America’s great architectural cities, instances of teardowns represent what little new custom single-family projects get designed and built from the ground up today. Nonetheless, rising to the fore were firms including Wheeler Kearns Architects and Studio Dwell.

The Southwest Region’s 23 listed firms are indisputably anchored by Texas, a state with anything but a shortage of top-tier firms, the best of them, including Mell Lawrence Architects, Lake Flato and Baldridge Architects, specializing in a uniquely Texan, predominantly Modern approach to principally suburban single-family houses. Of the Top 200 list’s firms, the 15 from Texas produce work that best illustrates, more so than that of any other state, how to successfully “build” upon historic precedent, subtly but surely referencing as they do the legacies of the state’s iconic 20th-century residential practitioners, most notably David Williams, O’Neil Ford and MacKie & Kamrath. If the markets of New Mexico, where historic preservation dominates, and Oklahoma, which is generally small on the custom single-family front, are relatively quiet, Arizona’s, for its population at least, is not. Here, the practice of design-build, in which the architect also operates as the general contractor, as in the work of Tucson’s DUST, is fast becoming the state’s standard. Meanwhile, in the work of the list’s four Arizona firms, the state’s sublime tradition of Desert Modernism, solidified most notably throughout Phoenix in the 1950s in the single-family work of Alfred Beadle, continues statewide with resolute spiritedness.

The exceptional work of the 56 firms from the American West that make up the Top 200 list, while revealing Western architecture’s typically profound sense of overall sympathy for and harmony with its sites, collectively illustrate the tendency of the last decade toward more formal and even inward-looking living. In Alaska, Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, firms producing houses for extreme-climate mountain settings, each carried out in a Modernist or contemporary design language, dominate what ultimately met our evaluating criteria. Colorado, for its part, was more diverse typologically, but similarly the work that met our criteria was Modern or contemporary in style. Between the examples of Anchorage’s Black + White Studio Architects and Basalt, Colorado’s CCY Architects, potential clients can find thrilling variations. Nevada, represented by Hawkins & Associates and assemblageSTUDIO, proved a diminutive market for custom single-family houses, as did Hawaii, where Craig Steely Architecture and Tadpole Studio lead the way. While in the case of Utah the research revealed that the state’s architects are engaged almost exclusively in commercial and institutional work. Oregon and most especially Washington, states that have formidable histories of 20th-century Regional Modernist accomplishment, each offered our process an abundance of impressive houses to consider, including, in the case of Seattle-based Top 200 firm atelierjones, architecture conceived specifically for fire-prone areas and fire recovery.

California, meanwhile—with its total number of licensed architects exceeding that of any other state in the nation—is indicative of the varied cultural codes and terrain that define the distinct experiences of Northern, Central and Southern California. It is an architectural world of infinite possibility, with fire defensiveness, in the case of San Francisco’s Studio VARA at the forefront. Statewide, California, with its dire housing shortage driving quick-fix development, has produced an astonishing number of green-flag-waving generic takes on Modernism. Otherwise, California is home to a great volume of climatically attuned examples of the house of today. L.A. residential architecture, in acknowledgement of Los Angeles County’s current population of more than 9.8 million—whether located in suburban tracts, the canyons or at the beach—almost universally imparts an unmistakably urban sensibility. While firms based in San Francisco, the Monterey Peninsula, Santa Barbara and Palm Springs tend to produce an architecture, in its interior and exterior effects, that aims to be softer, more expressive of its natural surroundings.

Through it all—from Maine to Florida to Minnesota to New Mexico to Hawaii, in all of the work that represents the list’s 200 firms—if there is an unexpected throughline in our collection, it’s the determined pursuit of a factor that, amid all the emphasis of the last few decades on understanding green-building certification, seems to have been lost on too many: the urgent need for the element of beauty in architecture; the recognition that, as building scientist Joseph Lstiburek said, “For a building to be taken care of, people have to want to take care of it, and people don’t take care of ugly things. Ugliness is not sustainable.”

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