For architects the role of design and the shape of practice with regard to affordable housing can be a perplexing puzzle. Today, an architect can hardly hope to create a house that is more affordable, more acceptable, or even more sustainable than what can be produced by the market without an architect. It seems that the greatest potential role for architects in affordable housing is to fall back on one of the Enlightenment-based foundations of the profession: knowledge of what constitutes beauty in built form that gives architects value as purveyors of good taste and social position.1 By using this knowledge in the service of social equity, can we bring the benefi ts of design, namely the experience of beauty, into the lives of those who are less fortunate? Or, can we instead move beyond this construction of the profession entirely and redefi ne not only what we mean by design but also how we practice it and also how it affects those for and with whom we design?