Architects, perhaps more than any other professional group, understand property and real estate and the role it plays in the construction of buildings. But it’s not often talked about it in their monographs or symposia where they prefer to speak about their designs as internally generated or part of a closed history of architecture. A new website, House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate, from Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, hopes to help foreground the importance of real estate in the design, development, and construction of buildings.

House Housing will attempt, as it grows in content and reach, to focus on the repetitious themes, tendencies, and actions of property relations on which architecture rests. Finally, it will broaden these themes by locating housing at the center of the current economic regime, with the United States as an influential node in a transnational network. This website could not be more timely or needed as a reference point in the discussion between real estate and architecture. Have a look!