It dawned upon me a couple of years ago that low cost architecture almost never gets published, never mind medium cost. When it does, it will be with the magnanimous 'well done', patronizing language and phraseology to recognize 'challenging conditions' and 'inventive methods' within a 'framework of poverty': my personal favourite is the 'noble effort', whatever the hell that means. By and large, its all expensive architecture that fills books and magazines. Expensive. Kool. Pandemic. The mass media educates us that first world derived technology in its graphic and vivid form is the bar with which success or failure is measured. In a sense, it couldnt be otherwise, the poor and middle classes are occupied with the basics of survival. Developing contextual solutions to technological and aesthetic questions is simply not an agenda.
Time for some change once again.
We are at a point in our existence where, very shortly, housing is going to be the single most critical issue in the history of architecture. The funky new materials and processes we see being developed today have no current or even distant aim in supplanting existing ones; they are there for the use of the few, the powerful who spend half their lives accumulating wealth and the other half legitimizing it with art, music and culture. Architecture. As symbols of their can do. Will do.
Expensive buildings look cool. Hey, guess what? Expensive new materials look cool. I like the other tack, to try designing cheap cool buildings with methods or materials youd never think could look cool. Tougher maybe. But a touch more rewarding.