Jeremiah Eck, FAIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Jeremiah Eck is the author of The Distinctive Home: A Vision of Timeless Design and The Face of Home: A New Way to Look at the Outside of your House. He is a former lecturer at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he continues to offer professional development seminars on houses. In addition, he speaks frequently about how architects may better serve their clients, and serves on numerous public service committees.

Firm: Eck | MacNeely Architects inc., Boston

Years in practice: 30

Educational background: BA from Colgate; MArch from Columbia

First job: I first worked in New York City with a company called Mitchell/Giurgola.

Hobby: Landscape painting

Current read: Caesar: Life of a Colossus

Whom you most admire: Honest people.

Why you became an architect: I was attracted to the combination of art and science.

What’s the hardest part of your job: I think the hardest part is that, as you get older, you know more, but the clients generally have to be taught in the same way each time. Doing a building for a client is a rare thing. They do one or two in a lifetime, sometimes more, but usually it’s one or two. Yet, I’ve done maybe 300 to 400 buildings. It’s hard to start at square-A with a client over and over again. The tendency is to want to say “shut up and listen to me,” but you can’t do that. That’s not how you work with a client, so it can be very difficult. You tend to want to have clients who have more empathy with that position as you get older, respect what you do, and don’t act as if they’re the architect, which I think, happens a lot when you’re a young architect.

How clients are changing: I think if anything, they’re becoming less savvy. There are certainly a lot of savvy clients, don’t get me wrong, but I think that the American culture is sort of culturalist. It’s not a culture that promotes and understands architecture, and I think it’s essentially because most of the culture is artistically blind. All you have to do is go to a place like Barcelona and you see architecture embedded in the culture. Here it’s not at all.

Dwell, Design Within Reach, Target, and the Robert Stern house book—all that stuff—I think is encouraging, but it’s a tiny fraction. It’s not the first time in the history of our country that designers have done those kinds of things. All too often, I think it’s used as a marketing gimmick rather than a real art, but I’m not discouraging it. It’s a good start, but far from the holistic artful approach to a culture that we should all have. There are very few beautiful buildings. There’s this sense somehow that unless it’s Modern, it’s not art. You see people [thinking], “Well, that’s architecture because it’s contemporary.” I think that’s all fine, but it’s not really architecture. It’s only part of it. So there’s a kind of dichotomy that’s always set up between us and them, which I think is very American, and architects, too, are to blame. They have argued for the last 50 years about whether the contemporary house or the traditional house is the more important. Meanwhile, the vast majority of houses were built without us. Over half of all single-family houses have been built in the last 30 years and a very tiny proportion was done by architects. So we can argue all we want about whether a contemporary house or traditional house is the best, but meanwhile the rest of the culture doesn’t care one iota. Maybe they care, but they don’t know even how to get there. We as architects, I think, have failed enormously. But so has the culture in general.

Best practice tip for colleagues: Listen. Just listen to your clients and you’ll be surprised how much they’ll let you do if you actually listen to them.

Advice for young architects: Don’t imagine that every job is your masterpiece. One will come along sooner or later. By definition, you can only have one. Don’t try to do beautiful buildings. Try to do good buildings. Sooner or later you’d be surprised how good they really are.