Critic and author Michael Cannell is out to take designers down a peg. A noble mission, but one fraught with danger: Having declared in the Times that “design loves a depression”, Cannell now finds himself obliged to prove it, and therefore must set about finding examples of downsized, downturned and otherwise recession-inflected architecture. You could accuse him of cherry picking, but there’s a hell of a lot of cherries out there right now.

Take his latest vendange, appearing in Fast Company. Under the provocative title “Do We Really Need Architects?”, Cannell explores the phenomenon, apparently gaining traction, of off-the-rack blueprints for private homes. He’s especially enthused by one plan recently acquired by the online vendor houseplans.com for an “environmentally sensitive” house by Bay Area architect William Turnbull (above, in period-appropriate sepia). Spare, wooden, and weathered as the faces in any Walker Evans photograph, the houses are depression design that’s literally made-to-order.

But that said, does Cannell’s article merit its title? Dial-a-plan doesn’t obviate architects, it merely keeps them in the office turning out plans. And as for Turnbull, it’s not immediately evident what makes his houses particularly suitable to a depressed economy: the costs, financial and ecological, of building one’s own detached home in woody isolation more than offset the thrift of skimping on a hoity-toity architect. Is this legit depression-loving design? or is Cannell just shoehorning the facts to fit his hypothesis?

Do We Really Needs Architects? [Fast Company]