No pride in architecture

I have lived in Whitefish for my entire life, 22 years to be exact, and over the last four years, I have been a student at Montana State University in Bozeman studying architecture.

Every time I drive home to Whitefish, I cringe thinking about the new developments and other construction projects that are just dropped onto the site.

The city has obviously experienced serious growth in the past years and appears that it will continue to do so. Growth is not the problem; it's the way in which it happens that begins to destroy what Whitefish is really about.

Whitefish is no longer just a small railroad or logging town, it no longer relies completely upon these for life, but what is still to come still needs to respect and honor the past.

This does in no way mean building things that appear old or build like it was still the early 1900s. There is a middle ground where the new and old can commune with each other without destroying the feel of Whitefish, which still manages to be that of a small town.

This fact is a large portion of why people continue to move in. This influx of people has also made it very lucrative for developers to create high-end homes in Iron Horse, for example, and the so-called affordable units around the city.

Before I continue, I do not intend to offend anyone who lives in these places because they are what are available and a place to live is necessary. The developers, and the review boards that give the OK on such projects on the other hand, I could hope to insult, to anger, or to make them think about their role in our city.

We cannot exist without making money, but it has become bottom line. Subdivisions that feature the same building 10, 15, or even 20 times over with small little variations of color, garage size, trim, etc. are the biggest culprit of this.

From an architectural standpoint, there is a nearly impossible chance that the same building should be able to be placed all over a site and still take site conditions into account. The sun is obviously the biggest one.

I would almost bet that if a client went into an architecture firm and told the architect that they wanted to develop some land with houses, and they wanted it to blend in with the surrounding neighborhoods in a cost-efficient manner, but beautifully done, that architect would fall out of his chair in delight.

The truth is that developers begin the process with money on the brain and a cookie-cutter design that is designed to be cheap and easy to build. It seems as if being an architect means much less than it used to.

In the days of ancient Greece or Rome, the architect was greatly revered and respected. A client provided what a building needed to facilitate, and the architect did what they felt was the best solution, taking into consideration the site and history of the site, and the context of what surrounded the site.

Since when do developers know better than the people who spend at least four years in school studying the art of architecture, which is more than making something pretty or making a buck.

While the limits of the city and the number of people continue to grow, we are killing what Whitefish is or should be about. This trend is slowly peeling the fingerprints of the city away and creating another faceless, undistinguished place with no heart.

We need to change something before the place where many others and I call our home ceases to exist as it once did.

Josh Schmidt is a former Whitefish resident now attending school at Montana State University-Bozeman.