Article Title: Little House on the Drawing Board

Excerpt: A spartan budget of $100 a square foot for 1,000 square feet wasn\'t the only hitch. Jacobs, the founding editor of Dwell magazine, the glossy bible for the Bauhaus crowd, is a devotee of modern design. To qualify as her dream house, the architecture would have to belong to this time. Not yesteryear in Burgundy or at Monticello, but now.

Excerpt: Jacobs does make an intriguing discovery: A good number of mostly young, very inventive architects are working on designs for cheap, cool houses that could be replicated. She calls them the New Pragmatists.

Excerpt: For now, big homebuilders are hammering away on studs and rafters for 1.7 million neo-traditional houses in the United States this year. They are layering their creations with the aspirational grandeur of faux stone turrets, Mediterranean tiles and entryways framed by soaring plastic columns. Houses are getting bigger -- the median is up to 2,200 square feet -- while families get smaller. Creature features -- home theaters, formal laundry rooms and spa baths -- grow unabated, while little attention is paid by builders or homebuyers to the kind of energy-efficient, environmentally sound design that inspired the National Building Museum's "green" Glidehouse, a prefab model Jacobs doesn't mention, but which is in the aesthetic ballpark.