The Vanishing World: On Architecture, Legacy, and the Quiet Rebellion of Care
Photo by Rachel Gant - Liljestrand House, 2012
I visited an estate sale the other day. The house, built in the mid-1970s and designed by an architect, had that rare quality of becoming a world unto itself. It wasn’t just a structure—it was an environment, a philosophy rendered in wood and glass. Floor-to-ceiling windows, tabby concrete, a small prayer room tucked by the entry, and custom doors carved with a repeating motif that echoed through the trim work and furnishings. Everywhere, you felt the presence of a singular vision—intent carried across 6,000 square feet.
Not long after walking in, I heard someone ask if it was a teardown. The question hit me like a slap. Because to me, this wasn’t just a house. It was evidence. Proof that someone once had the means, the time, and the freedom to leave a mark that was entirely their own.
Driving home, I kept thinking about what that home represented. It felt like a kind of cultural artifact—an emblem from a moment in time when it still seemed possible for someone in their 30s to shape a space so thoroughly that it became something more than shelter. It became identity.
Today, that feels nearly out of reach. Most people my age are lucky just to find a basic ranch home with intact plumbing. And even when they do, they’re not starting with a blank slate. They’re inheriting decades of half-fixes and resale-minded renovations. The gesture now is smaller: a painted accent wall, a well-placed thrift find, a moment of personality in a space that was never meant to hold one. Sometimes these gestures cohere. Often, they feel like a whisper inside someone else’s idea of a home.
Money plays a role, no question. But it’s not the only factor. The broader shift is cultural. Mass developers, HOA restrictions, building codes optimized for speed and cost—all of it nudges us toward sameness. Toward the repeatable. Toward safety. Even most architects today couldn’t afford to build the kinds of homes they once imagined in school.
And yet, it wasn’t easy in the 1970s either. Materials were harder to source. Tools were less refined. But maybe the world hadn’t yet fully decided that uniqueness was a liability. Maybe care hadn’t been priced out. Maybe a person could still make something ambitious without being treated as eccentric, or irresponsible.
That’s the generational mirror: once, someone in their 30s could build a world. Now, we inherit those worlds secondhand—glimpsed briefly at estate sales, often misunderstood, often mistaken for something disposable. We try to recreate the feeling through small-scale gestures. Sometimes we succeed. Often we don’t.
But the answer isn’t to romanticize the past. Nor is it to resign ourselves to some story of generational decline. The forces working against individual expression—standardization, economic pressure, the algorithmic flattening of taste—are real. But so is our ability to push back. The greater danger is not that building with distinction is harder now. It’s that we might start to believe it’s no longer possible.
And that just isn’t true.
It takes stubbornness. Vision. The willingness to reject every safe, resale-friendly surface the world tries to hand you. But homes—real homes—are still being made. Worlds are still being built. They might not stretch across 6,000 square feet, but they can still hold a voice, a perspective, a soul.
We don’t have to build for the lowest common denominator. We can build for ourselves—for the people we are, and for the ones we hope will one day stand in the space and feel it. That’s the quiet rebellion still available to us: not just preserving beauty, but creating it. Not because the world rewards it—but because it’s worth doing anyway.