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 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.

Al Jones Architects. Anderson Residence. Shreveport, Louisiana. “The client wanted a traditional Louisiana home that would utilize their large, sweeping property, including a ravine in the rear,” Jones says. “The choice of West Indies style, with wide porches, French doors and large windows, allowed views from all sides and access to multiple courtyards. Much of the finished materials are reclaimed—old handmade brick, old heart pine flooring, old pine interior and exterior beams, and reclaimed slate roofing.”

Wheeler Kearns Architects. “Meadow Lane is a weekend retreat set in an idyllic landscape along the shores of Lake Michigan,” says principal and project architect Jon Heinert. “The empty nester clients desired ‘an escape from the city for family to gather. A place for sunlight. A place to breathe.’ The home's design and orientation optimize the site's unique attributes on a two-acre wooded bluff overlooking the lake.” The house took the 2023 AIA Chicago Design Excellence Awards’ Citation of Merit.

Montalba Architects. Graoni Beach House. Malibu, California. “By raising the house some 16 feet above the existing sea level, the views and light are enhanced, but most importantly, the site is guarded against storm surge and high tides, as well as predicted rising sea levels,” David Montalba says. “The [shou sugi ban charred wood] rainscreen helps further protect the exterior from moisture damage.”

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........

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