Success may very well be the greatest barrier to progress. Success implies satisfaction, which can be the parent of complacency if left unchecked. Perhaps our self-proclaimed success in creating “acceptable” shelter has blunted too much of our desire to experiment, to explore new ideas, to push the limits of imagination, to excel.

Not to say that the shelter industry has conquered all its frontiers. All we need to do is look around at the temporal, feeble performance of much of the shelter we have constructed over the past half century or so, in order to help ourselves to a serious dose of humility or, as some would even suggest, embarrassment. But it is easy to argue that our collective, institutional appetite to improve has been somewhat sated.

The mantra of the mainstream shelter industry has long been the worn-out reference to “safe, decent, and affordable housing,” the battle cry of a well-intentioned federal government in the years immediately following World War II. In his 1949 State of the Union address, President Truman lamented, “Five million families are still living in slums and retraps.”

More than six decades later, it would be hard to provide verifiable evidence that we have improved on that figure. What we do know is that even today a number in excess of 100 million housing units in this country pitifully underperform in energy efficiency, and a great many of those same units lack acceptable air quality, fire and disaster resistance or accessibility.

At the risk of wielding too broad a brush, I might suggest that—as a profession—home builders have all too willingly accepted a bar for their own achievement that has been set unnecessarily low, a common denominator well below even our most modest capabilities.

Now, contrast those results with the projects that we feature. The work of these designers, builders, tradesmen, manufacturers—in short, every person who contributed to them—defies the very notion that mediocrity is the signature of the shelter industry.

They remind us that there is no real success in settling: rather, there is cause for celebration in higher achievement. As an industry, we don’t have to be known for warehousing America’s families in uninspired, underperforming cartons. The results on our September issue’s pages remind us that we alone can once again lay claim to sheltering the “best housed people on Earth”.

When asked to identify his favorite project, iconic American architect Frank Lloyd Wright is often quoted as replying, “The next one!” Let us redefine success, and commit to making the next generation of shelter the best the world has ever known.