Monday, December 19, 2011

SO BEAUTY IS JUST FOR THE RICH?

Not long ago, I visited William Randolph Hearst’s renowned estate near San Simeon, California, now a state park better known as Hearst Castle.  With its serene mountaintop setting, verdant gardens, and spectacular view of the Pacific Ocean, the palatial retreat designed by Julia Morgan between 1917 and 1941 was soon nicknamed The Enchanted Hill.  And indeed, soaking up its breathtaking gardens on a crystalline morning is about as close to paradise as most of us will ever get.  Our guide touched on this fact when she ended the tour by sighing: “Well, it’s time for us to go back down the hill to reality.”

This poignant comment got me to thinking.   Is it only Hearst Castle’s extravagance that makes it such a remarkable place?  Or is there something more--something that any one of us, whether millionaire or middlebrow, could bring to our own environment?

Most of us seem to have accepted that beautiful surroundings are the exclusive domain of the wealthy.  Granted, money is a prerequisite to many things in this world, but creating and appreciating beauty are not among them--if they were, all artists would be fabulously wealthy.  Rather, beautiful surroundings are something that any one of us, rich or poor, can aspire to.  We may not be able to create them on the scale that Hearst and Morgan did, but we can do so on the scale of our own homes, and that is enough. 

In fact, what makes Hearst Castle so unforgettable is not merely its lavish design or the drama of its site. Rather, it’s the degree of thought and care that both Morgan and Hearst invested in every aspect of the work.  A diminutive fountain, a beautiful motif in colored tile, a carefully-sited orange tree--it’s the sum of these modest details, and not just the grand gestures, that make the Enchanted Hill sing. 

What’s more, such details, and a thousand others, are within reach of just about anyone who cares to have them.  They hinge upon careful thought and a desire for beauty more than they do on money.  If you’re not convinced, consider that the same people who marvel at what Morgan and Hearst created at San Simeon also feel pangs of longing for quaint French villages or Italian hill towns--places that are hardly the product of great monetary wealth.  Human contentment, it seems, has less to do with extravagance than with the simple degree of comfort and care we invest in our own surroundings:  In its own context, a bright pot of flowers on a windowsill can have just as much impact on the spirit as the most scrupulously-tended formal garden.

Whether castle or cottage, beautiful homes all share the same basic traits.  Some of them we must furnish:  materials--however, modest--assembled with care; patterns to delight the eye; textures to delight the touch.  Others are there for the taking:  fall colors, the trickle of rainwater, the song of a bird, the fragrance of a climbing vine.  Taken together, these are aspects of beauty that all of us can afford, and that we all deserve to have around us.

Monday, December 5, 2011

TOMORROW'S LONG-LOST TREASURES (PART 3 OF 3 PARTS)

Today, almost fifty years after the destruction of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station and San Francisco’s Fox Theater, practically everyone agrees that they were the sort of architectural treasures that deserved preservation.  But with 20/20 hindsight, these are ridiculously easy calls.  The real test, as New York and San Francisco both learned through bitter experience, is to recognize the value in buildings we take for granted in our own time.  This is still much harder than it seems, in spite of all we think we’ve learned about preservation in the interim. 

Why?  The reason is best seen through analogy.  In 1963, when the Pennsylvania Railroad began demolishing Penn Station amid overwhelming disinterest from New Yorkers, the building was fifty-three years old--in today’s terms, the equivalent of a structure built in 1951.  How many people you know would regard a building of this era, however excellent its design or energetic its defenders, as worthy of preservation?  Now suppose that this preservation would also cost a lot of money--perhaps more than a replacement structure.  Now what are the odds of survival?  Viewed in this context, the destruction of Penn Station and a thousand other long-lamented landmarks doesn’t seem so inexplicable.  In fact, without extraordinary vigilance, it’s just as likely to happen again in our own time.

Every generation is blinded by its own biases about what constitutes “worthy” architecture.  Faced with the preceding scenario, we’re just as likely to make the same poor choices our predecessors did.  Our foresight inevitably falls just short of where it ought to be, distorted by the aesthetic lens of the present. 

Today, it’s the exuberant “Googie” commercial architecture of the 1950s and 60s that’s at greatest risk;  tomorrow, it may be buildings our generation finds even less worthwhile.  Is an original mission-fronted Taco Bell worthy of preservation?  A domed Century 21 theater?  How about Apple Computer’s first office building, or the last remaining cell phone tower?       

If you find these choices distasteful or even ridiculous, you’re probably in good company.  But if we hope to preserve architectural history for its real beneficiary--posterity--we have to set aside our own biases, and learn to approach preservation from posterity’s point of view. 

Shopping plazas, burger joints, and motels:  Pennsylvania Station, they ain’t, and that’s just the point.  In preservation, the target moves year by year.  If judging architectural worth from the context of the present was easy, we’d never again have to mourn a lost landmark.

EPILOG

A half-century after the loss of Pennsylvania Station, some New Yorkers have audaciously set out to reclaim their long lost masterpiece.  The Farley Post Office, a sprawling Beaux-Arts work also by McKim, Mead and White that stands not far from the site of old Penn Station, may soon be transformed into a passenger terminal worthy of the magnificent original.  The idea was first proposed in 1991 by then-Amtrak president W. Graham Claytor Jr., and was energetically supported by senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, neither of whom would see it realized during their lifetimes.  

The Farley Post Office was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965 as a direct result of preservation laws arising from Penn Station’s destruction.  It’s an imposing legacy, but it came at a very high cost.


Monday, November 21, 2011

TOMORROW’S LONG-LOST TREASURES (Part 2 of 3 Parts)

Last time, we recounted how landmarks such as New York City’s Penn Station and San Francisco’s Fox Theater were lost to development pressures during the early 1960s.  In fairness, preservation and profit sometimes coincided splendidly even then, as they did at at San Francisco’s pioneering Ghirardelli Square or at Boston’s Faneuil Hall Marketplace.  Yet for the most part, developers then and now have had neither the foresight nor the monetery incentive to be entrusted with preservation-worthy buildings.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the private quest for profit often tramples the public good--it’s both obvious and understandable that, for developers, the bottom line controls all else.  What’s more inexcusable is that our public servants are often equally clumsy stewards of our architectural legacy.  

To cite the most egregious example, one could hardly hazard a guess at the number of preservation-worthy buildings--not to mention whole neighborhoods--that have been destroyed directly or indirectly by our government’s postwar obsession with urban freeway building.  Initially, there were good reasons to improve the nation’s transportation routes.  Eventually, however, this freeway program simply became a juggernaut, with state engineers aiming to entangle every major city in an ugly and brutally-conceived web of concrete and asphalt.  For three decades, the heart of San Francisco’s incomparable waterfront was blighted by just such a structure.  It took an earthquake to accomplish what public protest had failed to do:  Destroy it.

Dozens more American cities remain saddled with freeways that slash through their downtowns, dividing and devastating everything in their path. Even our sensible neighbors to the north were not spared from postwar freeway mania:  In Toronto, the elevated, rusting hulk of the horrendous Gardner Expressway still chokes off the city’s dazzling view of Lake Ontario, an insult which residents are forced to resign themselves to.      

But urban freeways haven’t been the only disaster foisted on us by state planners.  As freeway building has mercifully declined, they’ve found other ways to kill us with kindness. In California, for example, scores of superb school buildings dating from the 1920s and early 30s have fallen victim to a well-meant but blundering campaign to ensure the seismic safety of public schools.  

In 1967, the state passed legislation requiring all pre-1933 schools to be examined for seismic safety.  Unfortunately, officials took the path of least resistence in effecting this worthy goal. Rather than retrofitting these lovingly-crafted Revivalist buildings, which ran the gamut from Medieval to Gothic, Tudor to Spanish Revival, wholesale demolition ensued.  Almost without exception, the hurriedly-built replacements for these grand old buildings were bland stucco boxes that may--or may not--be seismically safer given what we’ve learned about earthquakes since.  

In the short term, this campaign produced plenty of feel-good press for officialdom.  In the long term, it deprived the public of splendid buildings harking from an era of unmatched civic pride, and condemned generations of students to school careers 
spent in tawdry, third-rate surroundings.

We may shrug off these losses as the lingering planning biases of the Modernist era, confident that such things could never happen in today’s preservation-savvy climate.  Not so:  Fine architecture remains just as much at risk today as it ever was.  We’ll  see why next time.

Monday, November 7, 2011

TOMORROW'S LONG-LOST TREASURES (Part One of Three Parts)

When someone who’s been well-liked passes on, it’s amazing how many people suddenly materialize to pay their last respects.  You’d think it might be better to do this while the person was still sentient and around to appreciate it.

Not that there’s any comparison in degree, but well-liked buildings have often gotten the same treatment.  This is odd because, unlike human beings, our favorite buildings can be around forever if we want them to--almost any infirmity can be dealt with given enough money and effort.  Yet time and again, we allow irreplaceable buildings to vanish before our eyes as we stand idly by, only to wring our hands and mourn when it’s too late to bring them back. 

The story of New York City’s colossal Pennsylvania Station is the classic case in point. Completed in 1910, Penn Station was the largest railroad terminal ever built, and perhaps the crowning achievement of the renowned Beaux-Arts architects McKim, Mead and White.  With its soaring and replendent waiting room modeled on the Roman baths of Caracella, there could hardly have been a structure more worthy of preservation.  Yet in 1963, amid just a scattering of protests from a few ardent admirers (the term “preservationist” had not been coined yet), the cash-strapped Pennsylvania Railroad began to demolish Penn Station in order to sell the air rights above it for development.  

Even today, historians all but weep at the heartrending photographs of this temple of transportation slowly succumbing to the wrecker’s hammer--a process made more excruciating by the building’s unshakeable permanance, which cruelly dragged out demolition for two years and gave New Yorkers plenty of time to rue their inattention.  In a final insult, the station’s replacement turned out to be little more than a banal network of tunnels that burrowed furtively beneath the new sports arena occupying the site.  Of the original Penn Station--by that time reduced to so much landfill in the New Jersey mudflats--art historian Vincent Scully lamented:  

“It was academic building at its best, rational and ordered according to a pattern of use and a blessed sense of civic excess. It seems odd that we could ever have been persuaded that it was no good and, finally, permitted its destruction. Through it one entered the city like a god...one scuttles in now like a rat.”

New Yorkers weren’t the only ones asleep at the switch back then.  San Francisco was likewise scarred by the loss of the Fox Theater, a work of stunning, over-the-top Beaux-Arts splendor by the great theater architect Thomas Lamb.  Built at a cost of some five million dollars and opened in June 1929, the Fox was without doubt one of America’s greatest metropolitan movie palaces.  Yet within a single generation, changing architectural tastes and the rise of television had taken their toll on the Fox.  By the early sixties, its owners were anxious to be rid of it.  

Unlike the demise of Penn Station, the Fox’s impending destruction was widely publicized, and was even commemorated with a final show on February 16, 1963.  Although a few architecture buffs spoke out on the building’s behalf, most people were apathetic, while others, including San Francisco mayor George Christopher, actively supported demolition.  Amid this climate of resignation, the building’s destruction duly began twelve days after closing night.  Today, an utterly mundane (but presumably more profitable) office building carrying the insulting moniker of Fox Plaza occupies the site.

It’s easy to blame greedy developers for many of the great losses our cities have suffered.  Yet our public servants have done their share of bungling as well.  We’ll look at that next time, before we ask ourselves:  Could it happen again?

Monday, October 24, 2011

WHY WE QUIT GETTING PLASTERED

Perhaps the most singular trait of American homes is the hollow, cardboardy thud of our gypsum-board walls.  No one else has anything quite like them.  Mind you, if it weren’t for World War II, our walls might not sound quite so hollow.  

Before the war, American homes were routinely plastered inside--a painstaking process that first required nailing thousands of feet of wooden stripping called lath to the ceiling and walls of every room. The lath was covered with a coarse layer of plaster known as a “scratch coat”.  The wet plaster squeezed through the gaps in the lath, locking it to the walls and ceiling. 

Days later, when the scratch coat was dry, a second “brown coat” was applied to make the surfaces roughly flat.  This, too, had to dry for several days.  Last came the “skim coat”, a thin layer of pure white plaster that produced a smooth finished surface, something like the cream cheese topping does on a cheesecake.  

Depending on the weather, this process could take days or weeks, during which no other trade could work inside the house.  This was how plasterwork had been done for centuries, and there seemed no reason to change.  

Then came World War II, and with it an urgent need for military structures ranging from barracks to whole bases.  Faced with shortages of both labor and material, Uncle Sam was desperate to find faster and cheaper ways to build.  And since beauty was not much of an issue, eliminating plaster was an obvious starting point.

Enter the United States Gypsum Company, which way back in 1916 had invented a building board made of gypsum sandwiched between sheets of tough paper.  After more than two decades, the product they called Sheetrock still hadn’t really caught on.  Even its successful use in most of the buildings at the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1933-34 didn’t do much for sales.  But the urgencies of wartime construction changed all that.  

As the government soon came to appreciate, Sheetrock did away with the need for wood lath, multiple plaster coats, and days and days of drying time (hence its generic name, “drywall”).  Installation was simple:  After the 4x8 sheets were nailed up, the nail holes were filled, paper tape was used to cover the joints, and a textured coating was troweled on to help disguise the defects.

Of course, all this was only meant as a stopgap replacement for plaster, but as you’ve probably guessed, it didn’t turn out that way.  By the war’s end, many builders who’d gotten used to slapping up drywall were suddenly reluctant to go back to the trouble and expense of plastering. 

What’s more, Sheetrock’s arrival coincided with the rise of modern architecture, which preferred plain, flat surfaces to the fussy moldings and reveals of prewar styles.  To Modernist tastes, the fact that Sheetrock couldn’t be molded the way wet plaster could was hardly a drawback.  People seemed more dismayed by the flimsy cardboardish sound of the walls in their postwar homes, but they soon got used to it.

Flimsy or not, there’s no doubt that Sheetrock proved a huge boon to the postwar housing industry.  Prior to the war, the typical American developer built about four houses a year.  By the late Forties, a developer like the legendary Bill Levitt was able to churn out 17,000 tract homes at Long Island’s Levittown, sell them for $7,990 , and still make a thousand dollars profit on each.  Mass production was the key to the postwar housing boom, and Sheetrock helped make it happen.  

Just something to bear in mind next time your kids smash a doorknob through the bedroom wall.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

MAKING LIGHT

Next time you head for the bathroom in the middle of the night, consider what the casual act of lighting your way would’ve entailed just over a century ago: If you were lucky enough to have a house with piped-in gas, you could strike a match to the nearest gas mantle to get a blinding white flame. Otherwise, you’d have to stumble your way to the john by the light of a guttering candle. No wonder so many Victorian houses burned to the ground.

Although nowadays it’s hard to imagine a world without electric lighting, it's been with us for a relative wink of an eye. Thomas Edison perfected his incandescent bulb in 1879, after trying out hundreds of filament materials ranging from bamboo to hair to paper (he finally settled on tungsten). Not so well known is that Edison also had to invent a way to evacuate the air from the bulbs--no mean task using Victorian technology.  

Even so, it took another twenty years or so before electric lights had largely replaced gas mantles in American homes. As late as the early 1900s, older houses with gaslight were still being retrofitted for electricity. These transitional houses are easy to spot: the wires leading to the electric fixtures were often run inside the old gas pipes. 

In the early days of electric lighting, fixtures intentionally flaunted naked bulbs so that no one could possibly mistake them for gas.  It was a way for people to advertise their modernity, much as hipsters of the 1990s sported conspicious cell phone antennas on their cars.

Since that time, there have been surprisingly few fundamental changes in residential lighting.  Switches and wiring were eventually hidden inside of walls instead of being mounted on top of them, but other than that, most houses continued to have lighting fixtures in the center of ceilings, much as they had in the days of gaslight. The Revivalist home styles of the 1920s brought a craze for wall sconces--another gaslight derivative--but the fashion had largely died out by the end of that decade.

The first really new development in lighting since Edison’s light bulb was neon tubing, which made a big splash in the early 1930s. It made its American debut in a sign for a Packard showroom, and was soon all the rage as signage in movie theaters and other commercial buildings. However, with its otherworldly glow, it found little use in residential design.  

Fluorescent lighting (not to be confused with neon) was introduced not long afterward.  Being diffuse and hence glare-free, and also producing much more light for a given amount of power, it quickly became the standard for commercial buildings.  Still, no matter how hard architects tried to push its use in luminous ceilings and other Modernist lighting concepts, the sickly blue-green quality of its light did not endear it to homeowners. It took another forty years of improvement, as well as laws mandating its use, before fluorescent lighting was grudgingly accepted into American homes.

In the interim, a number of other high-efficiency lighting types have been developed, including mercury vapor, sodium vapor, and metal halide, but the unnatural spectrum of light they produce has also precluded their use in domestic work. 

By contrast, halogen residential lighting, introduced during the 80s, was an instant hit with the public. Why? Halogen’s warm, yellow-white light is very close to the spectrum of sunlight. Accordingly, engineers are currently working hard to make the next big development in high efficiency lighting--light-emitting diodes, or LEDs--as warm and friendly as incandescent and halogen lamps.

Because the sun, after all, is still everyone’s favorite lighting fixture.  

Monday, September 26, 2011

STYLE SLEUTHING

When it comes to identifying home styles, most people know generic terms such as Victorian, Bungalow, and Spanish.  Really pegging the thing is a little tougher, though.  Although more precise terms like Tudor, Mission, and Craftsman are often casually thrown about--especially by real estate agents, who ought to know better--they’re used wrongly more often than not.  Herewith are some of the most common points of confusion.   

For starters, calling a house “Victorian” is like calling a car “postwar”--it  only describes what era the thing was built in.  Luckily, the four major styles of Victorians are easy to tell apart:  If the house has horizontal siding, false cornerstones, and windows with segmental arches, it’s an Italianate.  If it looks like an Italianate but also has a steep mansard roof, it’s a Mansard.  If it has a square bay window, skinny proportions, and a porch with lots of linear wooden gingerbread, it’s a Stick (also called Eastlake).  If it has windows with colored glass borders, a few curved walls or a turret, and a porch with lots of decorative spindles, you can bet it’s a Queen Anne.  Next category, please.

Bungalow is ageneric term describing any home that’s built close to the ground and has a low-pitched roof.  More precisely, if a bungalow has wood siding or shingle (often with stone or clinker brick trim), it’s a Craftsman Bungalow.   If it has stucco on the outside, it’s a California Bungalow.

The gaggle of labels hung on Spanish-style homes--Mission, Spanish Colonial, Churrigueresque, Moorish, Mediterranean--are another endless source of confusion.  Strictly speaking, Mission refers only to architecture modeled on the West’s Spanish Colonial missions, and would suggest a rather plain house with thick stucco walls, an Alamo-like scrolled gable, and a few decorative barrel tiles, if not a whole roof full of them (for practical purposes, the term Spanish Colonial is essentially synonymous with Mission).  

On the other hand, tile-roofed houses with more ornate features such as spiral columns and elaborate door and window surrounds are called Churriguersque, after the 17th-century Spanish Renaissance architect Jose Churriguera.  Pointed or parabolic arches, ceramic tile accents, and perhaps castle-like crennelation would be clues that you were looking at a Moorish-style home.  Of course, when in doubt, you’re always safe using the term Mediterranean, which has come to include pretty much anything with red tile on the roof.  

The terms Tudor, Elizabethan, or Half-Timbered are often used interchangeably to describe English-inspired homes, but these terms don’t mean the same thing.  A Tudor-style house usually has brickwork combined with restrained half-timbering, steep gables, a massive and prominent chimney, and relatively small windows sometimes topped by a pointed Tudor arch.  By contrast, an Elizabethan-style home would have large areas of leaded windows divided into grids or into the familiar “Olde English” diamond pattern, along with lots of florid half-timbering in repeating motifs. 

While both of the above examples might also be called “Half-Timbered”, that term more properly refers to a building technique and not a style.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned any postwar home styles, it’s because it takes quite a bit of time for style names to stabilize.  Case in point:  During the Sixties, California Ranchers and split levels were routinely called “Contemporaries”, as if they were going to stay in fashion forever.  Today that term is all but forgotten.  

Likewise, today’s gewgaw-laden tract houses are often referred to as “neo-traditionals”, but that term is so vague that it’s unlikely to survive.  Hence, it’ll be a while before we know what posterity deems to call them. 

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

MAINTAINING THE MILLINERY

If architects feel obliged to design timeless buildings, you’d never know it from much of the work being built today.  The current fashion for nonfunctional excrescences and complicated paint schemes bespeaks an increasingly cavalier attitude about the need for buildings to age with grace, and the burdens they create for their owners when they don’t.  

For too many architects, how a building looks in its opening day portrait seems to matter more than how a it will survive the rough road of actual use.  After all, any building is ageless once it’s safely enshrined in the architect’s portfolio. How it fares in real life is often something else again.  

Paint remains the number one vice of shortsighted architects. While five-color paint schemes are a guaranteed grabber on opening day, it’s only a matter of years--and sometimes months--before all that painstaking brushwork chips, fades, and requires recoating.  Renewing such complex designs is an expensive undertaking that, when it’s done at all, seldom approaches the quality of the original job.  

Nor is much thought given to exactly how such painted structures will be maintained.  In a recently-built outdoor shopping plaza, for instance, I came across a hundred-foot-long pergola meant to support climbing vines, which the architect unexplicably chose to build out of painted steel.  Did he or she ever consider how this structure, preordaineded as it was to rust, would be repainted once it was overgrown with creepers?  

Fabric awnings are another common bit of architectural flim-flam.  Among the most short-lived products in architecture, awnings are indispensible for their intended purpose--providing shade and shelter.  Too often, though, they’re used gratuitously, like so much silk ribbon, in the hopes of adding a festive air to an otherwise dull design.  Inevitably, most examples are mildewed, faded, or hanging in very un-festive tatters within a few years.

Many architects who do manage to resist the quick fix of fabric awnings instead fall prey to horizontal glass canopies--another idea that looks lovely in a computer rendering, but simply doesn’t work in practice.  Gravity being what it is, all those crystalline surfaces quickly collect an unsightly layer of dirt, dust, and dead insects--an outcome that even the most rigorous maintenance can’t prevent.  

Then there’s the whole panoply of outriggers, props, sunscreens, and other gratuitous bric-a-brac that nowadays sprout from building facades  For lazy architects, such offhand applique’ is yet another shortcut to visual impact.  After the fad for gewgaws inevitably passes, however, these features serve mainly to ensure an excruciatingly dated look.  

None of these are willfully negligent design choices on the part of architects--just stupid and misguided ones.  We architects think nothing of devoting hours or days to choosing colors and finishes. Yet a glance at much recent work suggests we spend much less time thinking about that most fundamental of architectural qualities: a building’s ability to grow old with grace.

As the reformed Modernist architect Edward Durell Stone put it in 1966: “Architecture is not millinery.  Fashions pass by, buildings remain to become grim reminders of transient enthusiasms.”


Tuesday, August 23, 2011

TUNING UP A CRANKY OLD KITCHEN


If your house predates the Depression, your kitchen probably looks something like this:  It’s cut up by multiple doorways, has a freestanding range pushed against one wall, no real place for the fridge, and a wee patch of counter on each side of the sink. 
But don’t blame the architect for these shortcomings.  When these kitchens were designed, cooktops, wall ovens, and dishwashers--let alone Cuisinarts and yogurt makers--were still years in the future.  All an architect really had to accommodate was a freestanding range, a sink with a few feet of drainboard, an icebox, and a dishwasher--the two-legged kind.

Planning ideals were also different back then, and kitchen functions were often segregated into several small rooms.  A kitchen of the era might be adjoined by a tiny laundry, scullery, mud porch, or breakfast room, or any combination of these.  The resulting clutter of walls and doorways usually left very little space for long stretches of countertop. 

Today, with the need to include all the foregoing appliances and then some, many of these old kitchens have just about reached their functional limits.  But how to make them more efficient without drastic reconstruction?

The key to making an old kitchen more functional lies in eliminating cross traffic from the “work triangle”--the area bounded by the sink, stove, and refrigerator.  Take a close look at your kitchen’s traffic pattern. Often, you’ll find a door leading to the dining room, another into the laundry or other ancillary room, and yet another opening onto the hall, all creating a hopelessly crisscrossed traffic path.  Often, at least one of these doors is redundant and can be filled in to eliminate one source of cross traffic while allowing for longer stretches of uninterrupted countertop.  

Removing walls between the kitchen and other ancillary rooms can also help simplify circulation and free up space for uninterrupted counters.  Better yet, if those rooms are at the rear of the house, annexing them to the kitchen may allow you to open up a dramatic view of the back garden--a subtle but effective way to visually expand the room.  Space for laundry machines, cabinets, or other items displaced by this change can usually be found in a less obtrusive spot.  

Once you’ve eliminated unnecessary traffic routes through the kitchen, you can usually reconfigure the counters in a more practical continuous U- or L-shape.  If the remaining doors are unavoidably located at opposite ends of the room, two separate counters can face each other in Pullman fashion. 

The sink is usually a good starting point for your layout, since it will almost invariably go along an outside wall, either in front of the existing window or a relocated one. Once the sink’s location is fixed, place the refrigerator at one end of the counter or the other. Lastly, you can put the stove anywhere that suits your preferences and the space available.  However, always bear in mind the cardinal rule for tuning up cranky old kitchens:  Keep cross traffic out of the work triangle.   

Monday, August 8, 2011

THE MOMENT FROZEN IN TIME


Halfway up one of the brick walls of my office, part of an old factory building dating from 1907, there’s a single brick that’s twisted slightly out of position.  Beneath it, a solidified ribbon of mortar hangs frozen in a drooping arc, attesting to the fact that the brick was bumped within a few minutes of the time it was placed, while the mortar was still wet.  

All told, there are about six thousand exposed bricks in the walls of my office and some half-million in the building altogether, most of them laid with ordinary accuracy.  That single brick, however, stands out both literally and figuratively.  

Why?  Because it gives an almost eerily direct temporal connection to the moment in 1907 when a mason, now long dead, placed--and then accidentally displaced--that single brick.  Perhaps he nudged it with his foot as he moved along the scaffold;  perhaps he had a few nips of whiskey with his lunch;  or perhaps it was just close to quitting time, and he was tired.  The possibilities are as vast as the likelihood of ever really knowing is small.  The brick can’t tell the story; it can only record the outcome of that moment nearly a century ago.

It may seem odd that imperfections are often the very things we find intriguing in our surroundings, but so it is.  Imperfections, which are the inevitable traces of human effort, are what put a premium on handcrafted objects over machine-made ones.  They tell us that someone--perhaps someone much like us--put heart and soul into making them.  

For this reason, architects have long admired brick, stone, carved wood, wrought iron, and other building materials that provide an obvious record of human effort.  If flaws seem like a strange thing to admire, the alternative is much worse.  Pursuing visual perfection, as some architects are wont to do, is a sure ticket to failure.  This is the inevitable flaw in the sort of frigid Minimalist work that appears ad nauseum in chic design magazines.  While such projects always look smashing in glossy photo spreads, the real test comes later, when time has inevitably begun to affect those “perfect” details and they start showing wear or simply fall to pieces.

For a time following the Industrial Revolution, machine-made objects were regarded as superior to handmade ones.  Yet eventually, social critics such as England’s John Ruskin managed to reawaken the public to the beauty of items fashioned by hand, whose innate sense of life no machine could ever match. 

The resulting counterreaction ushered in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, as well as its American counterpart, the Craftsman style. Craftsman architecture showcased coarse materials such as rough stone, clinker brick, and carved wood that were pointedly worked by hand, directly refuting the Victorian machine aesthetic. Later on in the early 20th century, Spanish, Tudor, and other period revival styles provided an even bigger canvas for hand craftsmanship.

“Every time a man puts his hand down to cut or carve or chisel or build a house,” wrote the architect William R. Yelland during the period revival era, “he must express his own self.”  It is this self-expression, a record of human passing forever condensed out of evansecent time, that is architecture’s greatest gift.  


Monday, July 25, 2011

THE MOMENT FROZEN IN TIME

Halfway up one of the brick walls of my office, part of an old factory building dating from 1907, there’s a single brick that’s twisted slightly out of position.  Beneath it, a solidified ribbon of mortar hangs frozen in a drooping arc, attesting to the fact that the brick was bumped within a few minutes of the time it was placed, while the mortar was still wet.  

All told, there are about six thousand exposed bricks in the walls of my office and some half-million in the building altogether, most of them laid with ordinary accuracy.  That single brick, however, stands out both literally and figuratively.  

Why?  Because it gives an almost eerily direct temporal connection to the moment in 1907 when a mason, now long dead, placed--and then accidentally displaced--that single brick.  Perhaps he nudged it with his foot as he moved along the scaffold;  perhaps he had a few nips of whiskey with his lunch;  or perhaps it was just close to quitting time, and he was tired.  The possibilities are as vast as the likelihood of ever really knowing is small.  The brick can’t tell the story; it can only record the outcome of that moment nearly a century ago.

It may seem odd that imperfections are often the very things we find intriguing in our surroundings, but so it is.  Imperfections, which are the inevitable traces of human effort, are what put a premium on handcrafted objects over machine-made ones.  They tell us that someone--perhaps someone much like us--put heart and soul into making them.  

For this reason, architects have long admired brick, stone, carved wood, wrought iron, and other building materials that provide an obvious record of human effort.  If flaws seem like a strange thing to admire, the alternative is much worse.  Pursuing visual perfection, as some architects are wont to do, is a sure ticket to failure.  This is the inevitable flaw in the sort of frigid Minimalist work that appears ad nauseum in chic design magazines.  While such projects always look smashing in glossy photo spreads, the real test comes later, when time has inevitably begun to affect those “perfect” details and they start showing wear or simply fall to pieces.

For a time following the Industrial Revolution, machine-made objects were regarded as superior to handmade ones.  Yet eventually, social critics such as England’s John Ruskin managed to reawaken the public to the beauty of items fashioned by hand, whose innate sense of life no machine could ever match. 

The resulting counterreaction ushered in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, as well as its American counterpart, the Craftsman style. Craftsman architecture showcased coarse materials such as rough stone, clinker brick, and carved wood that were pointedly worked by hand, directly refuting the Victorian machine aesthetic. Later on in the early 20th century, Spanish, Tudor, and other period revival styles provided an even bigger canvas for hand craftsmanship.

“Every time a man puts his hand down to cut or carve or chisel or build a house,” wrote the architect William R. Yelland during the period revival era, “he must express his own self.”  It is this self-expression, a record of human passing forever condensed out of evansecent time, that is architecture’s greatest gift.  

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

INTACT, OR IN PIECES?

I recently drove past a nearby business that used to call itself an architectural salvage yard.  The sign now reads, “Ecopark”.  Like the old-fashioned term “junkyard”, which over time has been upgraded to “auto wrecker”, then to “auto dismantler”, and finally to “auto recycler”, this new nomenclature strives to accord the architectural salvage yard some deserved respect.  

More importantly, thanks largely to the green architecture movement, the--um, ecoparks-- are now increasingly seen as a thinking person’s resource instead of a lumberyard for the poor.  

And more power to them.  Since World War II, vast quantities of fine building materials--much of them infinitely superior to the flimsy dreck available today--have been destroyed in the name of progress.  And in an era when anything old was anathema, it was the architectural salvage yards that offered vintage materials a second chance at life.  

While there’s little doubt that we should utilize the sundry bits and pieces of buildings that have met their maker, the wider question is whether we should be demolishing these buildings in the first place.  Many old structures represent an enormous and often irreplaceable investment of money, material, and human effort, and it’s simply bad resource management to replace them with modern-day versions that, all too often, don’t measure up.

Alas, the many impatient and shortsighted bureaucrats among us like to insist that renovating old buildings is uneconomical, since it’s often more expensive than simply building new ones.  Well--so what?  This argument doesn’t even compare apples to oranges:  it compares oranges to Orangina.  While the two must have something in common, you’d be hard-pressed to say what it is.  

In my home state of California, the sweeping 1980s-era campaign to improve seismic safety in public schools offers a good example.  A worthy goal, right? Unfortunately, state planners effected it through the wholesale destruction of superb school buildings dating from the 1920s and 30s, on the grounds that they were ”too costly to retrofit”.  Almost without exception, their replacements were bland, characterless, and generally unloved stucco boxes that may--or may not--be seismically safer according to what we’ve learned about earthquakes since.  The upshot:  a few profitable years for public school architects and contractors, a lot of feel-good press for politicians, and an enormous disservice to generations of students who’ll spend their educational careers in uninspired, second-rate surroundings.

Technical issues aside, there are less tangible reasons why preservation often deserves to trump new construction.  Some of our most susceptible structures date from the interwar era, an unstinting age when quality and permanance were a given, and when budget dollars went into actual construction, instead of  being piffled away on years of procedural wrangling.  The resulting structures unabashedly courted civic pride, not political expedience--a difference that anyone, be they sixteen or sixty, can still readily appreciate.

Kudos to architects using salvaged materials from “ecoparks”.  Yet we should also realize that, often, our forefathers’ legacies are worth a lot more intact than they are in little pieces.  
    

    

Monday, June 27, 2011

LIFE'S LITTLE CONVENIENCES

In one of those introspective middle-aged moments, I recently asked myself, What’s the smartest thing I’ve ever done? The answer came quickly: The smartest thing I ever did was buy a self-inking address stamp. I’ve always hated scribbling my return address onto envelopes--a repetitive, boring, stupid waste of time--yet I was also too impatient to order address stickers or a stamp, since that would’ve meant waiting around a few days to get it. So instead, I continued writing my address by hand for almost twenty-five years.  

Recently, though, I happened onto a stationer’s shop, and ordered an address stamp on a whim. Finally getting that stamp has confirmed something I’ve been suspecting for a while: It’s that daily life actually consists of a whole bouquet of little joys on the one hand, and a whole briar patch of tiny irritations on the other, and that happiness quite simply pivots on converting as many thorns as you can into flowers. So, where I used to feel an acrid twinge every time I had to scribble down my address yet again, I now feel a warm glow of contentment as I neatly impress it in a single, swift motion.  And that, as Robert Frost would say, has made all the difference.  

This lesson applies to home design as well. Forget the 400-square-foot master suite  and the remote-controlled hot tub: Domestic comfort, and by extension domestic happiness, doesn’t reside in the sort of useless gimmicks so common in new houses today. Rather, it’s a host of tiny and very ordinary conveniences that help tip the balance toward a happy house. Here are a few of them worth insisting on: 

In the entry:  A floor finish that’ll take some punishment and look better for it; a convenient place to put not just your coat, but your shoes and a dripping umbrella; a comfortable place to sit; and a place to put things while you fumble for your keys.

In the kitchen: Base cabinets with shelves that pull out;  a really quiet dishwasher and disposer; a smooth-surfaced range that won’t catch crumbs and grease; a range hood that actually does something besides make noise; and a place to put the garbage and recycleables without having to fumble around under the sink.  

In the bathroom: A lavatory counter matched to your height, so you don’t have to stoop to use it; a sink that water can’t puddle behind; faucets you can grip even with soapy hands; a mirror with lighting fixtures on either side instead of overhead; a toilet-paper dispenser within normal human reach; a powerful exhaust fan that doesn’t drone or whine; towel bars you can reach from the shower; and a bathroom heater that warms your whole body and not just the top of your head. 

Inside the shower: A permanent place to keep soap and shampoo; a place to sit down; and enough room to wave your arms a little without banging into the walls.

In the bedroom: A good, glare-free bedside reading lamp and a handy place to keep a couple of books; a closet with room for the winter blankets;  and closet doors that let you get to the whole closet, not just one side or the other.  

In the living room: Anything that will entice people to actually hang out there instead of in the kitchen.

At the back door: A roof for shelter from the rain, and a “mud room” for gardening shoes, pet food bowls, and all the rest of the messy flotsam that gathers on the back porch. And, oh yeah--a back porch. 

In general: Rooms that are sunny at the times you use them; floors that are warm in winter and cool in summer; windows that look out on something other than the neighbor’s house.  

And no roof leaks. Architects have had two thousand years and more to come up with watertight roofs, but you still have to put them on wish lists like this one. 

Monday, June 13, 2011

A STAGE FOR LIVING

A while back, I was amusing myself with a trendy architecture magazine chock full of frigid minimalist designs, accompanied by the often hilariously stilted pronouncements of their architects.  Suddenly, amid this predictable context, a photograph of a perfectly charming Spanish Revival home fairly jumped off the page at me. Unlike the edgy trendoid homes usually featured in such publications, the place looked warm, inviting, and completely livable.

I soon found out why. It wasn’t designed by an architect at all, but by a Hollywood set designer.  His architectural rationale was refreshingly simple: Create a timeless home that was comfortable for its owner. No trace of double-talk there.
For me, this pointed up a frequent trait of architect-designed homes. Too many are statements of doctrine—whether Modernist, Deconstructivist, Minimalist, or whatever--rather than stages for their owners’ lives.

I use the word “stage” deliberately, not in the sense of an artificial, make-believe construct, but rather as a setting that complements the lifestyle of its owner. And despite the scads of high-tech and minimalist designs that crop up unendingly in the trade magazines, I’ve never yet had a client request a house that was cold, hard, and clinical inside. On the contrary, my most tech-savvy clients long more than anyone for the sort of familiar home styles they recall--or perhaps just imagine--their grandmothers living in.

During the early twentieth century, a number of practitioners specialized in designing such “stages for living”. In Southern California, the early work of Cliff May  drew on the honest palette of Spanish Colonial architecture to produce rustically beautiful homes that were also eminently liveable (May, incidentally, was never licensed as an architect).  In the Bay Area, William R. Yelland evoked the rustic vernacular of France’s Auvergne region, whose charm he had admired during his service in the Great War, while Carr Jones--a man trained in mechanical engineering, of all things--wrought lyrically beautiful homes from salvaged brick, lumber, and iron.  

On the opposite coast, Florida’s Addison Mizner conjured up unforgettably exotic Spanish Revival/Mediterranean/Venetian Gothic confections for the center of Palm Beach--buildings which even today set the standard for Floridian architecture.  
All of these architects were dismissed by their more “serious” colleagues as mere set-dressers, concerned with atmospherics and little else. Meanwhile, the Modernists, in their ploddingly earnest way, made heroic efforts to showcase concrete, steel, and glass in residential work. Ironically, over seventy years later, it’s the work of the purported set dressers that remains cherished both for its livability and its timelessness. 
    
How could the pointed nonchalance of a May, Yelland, Jones, or Mizner have ultimately prevailed over the intellectual rigor of Modernist doctrine?  And why would a set designer’s creation of adobe, wood and wrought iron seem infinitely more appealing than the self-consciously showy work contrived by other architects on those same magazine pages? Is it possible that humans feel some kind of natural kinship to ancient materials and building styles?

Perhaps the answer is right in front of us, and has been for millenia:  While we design to please the mind, the heart remains the final judge.

Tuesday, May 31, 2011

SKIM-MILK TRADITIONALISM

Check the movie pages lately, and you’re liable to think time is standing still. According to film critic Roger Ebert, 2011 will bring us a record twenty-seven film sequels. Among the franchises represented--or rather, re-represented--are Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Muppets, and Mission: Impossible, themselves derivatives of creaky old television fare. This insistent recycling of worn-out pop culture points up an interesting paradox: While studio execs will nonchalantly blow fifty million dollars on yet another pumped-up remake, they seem utterly mortified by a fresh idea that might entail a particle of risk. Instead, they cling to the safety of familiar old TV pablum, slowly dragging cinema down to the level of the boob tube.

Speaking of creative bankruptcy, there’s also a nasty bit of architectural recycling I’d like to see left back in the twentieth century: It’s the reflexive and uninformed use of classical design elements, in which a grab-bag of historical details are applied without concern for scale, proportion, or even common sense. Since the popularity of traditional architecture began to rebound in the 1980s, such haphazard detailing has become ever more widespread. Worse than simply being inauthentic, such design seems to signal that residential architecture, like cinema, is creatively bankrupt.

Traditionalism is a comforting throwback to the past, and its popularity rises whenever people find the times either too fast moving or too unstable. It happened after the Industrial Revolution and during the Roaring Twenties. Today, it’s the upheavals of the Information Age and the effects of a lingering recession that have people pining for the old and familiar.  
While traditional architecture can have unquestionable majesty, achieving it is not just a matter of plastering on a bunch of ready-made gimcracks. In too much of today’s architecture, elements such as columns, arches, and quoins are applied without any real understanding of their historical purpose; instead, they’re simply stuck on at random, like bits and pieces poked into Mr. Potatohead.  

Since traditional architectural elements are rooted in historic usages with very clear rules, they can’t just be combined willy-nilly. For instance, an arch crowned by a keystone--an assemblage born of masonry construction--will always look phony when carried out in your typical paper-thin wood framed wall. Likewise, a Corinthian column, no matter how authentic its detailing, has no reason to exist unless it’s visually holding something up. Compounding the problem, even well-designed projects seldom have the budget to do real justice to traditional elements, usually resulting in buildings tarted up with clumsy details made of Styrofoam. 

But architects and builders aren’t solely to blame for this dead-end recycling of traditionalism. A good chunk of the blame lies with civic design review boards, who’ve become infatuated with the idea that all architecture should reflect its “context”--the look of the existing surroundings. In too many cases, this simply amounts to a directive requiring architects to design in a traditional style, whether that aesthetic is valid or not.  It’s a concept that’s both retrograde and simple-minded--at its best merely maintaining the status quo, and at its worst yielding a series of increasingly bland, skim-milk derivatives of buildings that are already copies of yet other buildings.  It’s no way to move forward, for cities or for architects.   

Anyway, while all this stuff shakes out in the new millenium, I’ll be waiting for the latest sequel of Francis the Talking Mule.




Monday, May 9, 2011

FULL REVERSE

We live in a dazzling new era. In almost every field, vibrant innovation brings great promise for the future. How sad, then, that the housing industry is racing headlong into the 19th century.  

Granted, we’ve seen quantum leaps in residential energy efficiency--most of them compelled, mind you, by government legislation. Beyond this, developers seem content to let meaningless gimmicks and foam plastic frou-frou represent their best ideas for the 21st century. Personally, propellerhead gizmos that fill your Jacuzzi while you’re out stuck in traffic are not my idea of a lifestyle improvement.

While all else moves bravely forward, today’s new homes are instead regressing to the overblown proportions of Victorian times. Now, as a student of architectural history, I love Victorians as much as any paint remover salesman. But that doesn’t make them a paradigm for the future.  

Victorian homes were in large part a response to the industrial innovations of the 19th century. By the 1850s, a new construction technique known as balloon framing (which gave us the familiar 2x4 stud wall) was finally doing away with the laborious joinery of post-and-beam construction. Around the same time, the wire nail machine replaced costly hand-wrought nails with dirt-cheap mass-produced ones. These breakthroughs went hand in hand, suddenly making it both cheaper and faster to build homes of unprecedented size.  

The availability of mass-produced, machine-made ornament quite literally put the icing on this Victorian cake, eliciting a mania for decoration that has only recently been approached again.   

By the close of this era of increasingly bloated homes, it was already obvious that you could have too much of a good thing.  

The vast, high-ceilinged rooms of Victorian houses squandered space and trapped heat, while their labyrinthine floor plans made for a lot of wasted steps. And of course those wedding-cake moldings were quickly revealed to be a maintenance nightmare. If this doesn’t sound familiar to owners of today’s new homes, it will soon enough. 

These kinds of failings are a big reason Victorian design was held in such contempt after the turn of the century. A few decades of living in needlessly oversized and overcomplicated homes had given people some real insights into practical living.  The result was a popular movement aimed at designing smaller, simpler and more efficient homes--a concerted backlash against the Victorian era.  

Builders at the threshold of the 20th century had the good sense to recognize and respond to these demands.  It’s notable that even during the boom years of the 20s, they didn’t feel obliged to offer enormous homes for the prospering middle class.  On the contrary; houses became the smallest they’d been in a century.     

Nowadays, the thought of looking to developers for smaller and more practical houses would strike most people as laughable. Meanwhile, as more and more pompous (and profitable) extravaganzas go up, fewer and fewer working people can afford to own a home at all.   

A hundred years ago, builders were meeting the demands of a new era filled with changes and challenges. Today’s developers are once again in a turn-of-the-century mood.  Too bad it’s the wrong century.  


(This post was reprinted from an entry in my blog Architext, which you can view at <arrolgellner.blogspot.com>.)


Monday, April 25, 2011

INTACT OR IN PIECES?


I recently drove past a nearby business that used to call itself an architectural salvage yard.  The sign now reads, “Ecopark”.  Like the old-fashioned term “junkyard”, which over time has been upgraded to “auto wrecker”, then to “auto dismantler”, and finally to “auto recycler”, this new nomenclature strives to accord the architectural salvage yard some deserved respect.  More importantly, thanks largely to the green architecture movement, the--um, ecoparks-- are now increasingly seen as a thinking person’s resource instead of a lumberyard for the poor.  

And more power to them.  Since World War II, vast quantities of fine building materials--much of them infinitely superior to the flimsy dreck available today--have been destroyed in the name of progress.  And in an era when anything old was anathema, it was the architectural salvage yards that offered vintage materials a second chance at life.  

While there’s little doubt that we should utilize the sundry bits and pieces of buildings that have met their maker, the wider question is whether we should be demolishing these buildings in the first place.  Many old structures represent an enormous and often irreplaceable investment of money, material, and human effort, and it’s simply bad resource management to replace them with modern-day versions that, all too often, don’t measure up.

Alas, the many impatient and shortsighted bureaucrats among us like to insist that renovating old buildings is uneconomical, since it’s often more expensive than simply building new ones.  Well--so what?  This argument doesn’t even compare apples to oranges:  it compares oranges to Orangina.  While the two must have something in common, you’d be hard-pressed to say what it is.  

Public school buildings offer an excellent example.  The 1980s brought a sweeping campaign to ensure the seismic safety of California schools.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, state planners effected this worthy goal through the wholesale destruction of superb school buildings dating from the 1920s and 30s, on the grounds that they were ”too costly to retrofit”.  Almost without exception, their replacements were bland, characterless, and generally unloved stucco boxes that may--or may not--be seismically safer according to what we’ve learned about earthquakes since.  The upshot:  a few profitable years for public school architects and contractors, a lot of feel-good press for politicians, and an enormous disservice to generations of students who’ll spend their educational careers in uninspired, second-rate surroundings.

Technical issues aside, there are less tangible reasons why preservation often deserves to trump new construction.  Some of our most susceptible structures date from the interwar era, an unstinting age when quality and permanance were a given, and when budget dollars went into actual construction, instead of  being piffled away on years of procedural wrangling.  The resulting structures unabashedly courted civic pride, not political expedience--a difference that anyone, be they sixteen or sixty, can still readily appreciate.

More power to architects using salvaged materials from “ecoparks”.  Yet we should also realize that, often, our forefathers’ legacies are worth a lot more intact than they are in little pieces.  
    

    

Monday, April 11, 2011

FULL REVERSE

We live in a dazzling new era. In almost every field, vibrant innovation brings great promise for the future. How sad, then, that the housing industry is racing headlong into the 19th century.  

Granted, we’ve seen quantum leaps in residential energy efficiency--most of them compelled, mind you, by government legislation. Beyond this, developers seem content to let meaningless gimmicks and foam plastic frou-frou represent their best ideas for the 21st century. Personally, propellerhead gizmos that fill your Jacuzzi while you’re out stuck in traffic are not my idea of a lifestyle improvement.

While all else moves bravely forward, today’s new homes are instead regressing to the overblown proportions of Victorian times. Now, as a student of architectural history, I love Victorians as much as any paint remover salesman. But that doesn’t make them a paradigm for the future.  

Victorian homes were in large part a response to the industrial innovations of the 19th century. By the 1850s, a new construction technique known as balloon framing (which gave us the familiar 2x4 stud wall) was finally doing away with the laborious joinery of post-and-beam construction. Around the same time, the wire nail machine replaced costly hand-wrought nails with dirt-cheap mass-produced ones. These breakthroughs went hand in hand, suddenly making it both cheaper and faster to build homes of unprecedented size.  

The availability of mass-produced, machine-made ornament quite literally put the icing on this Victorian cake, eliciting a mania for decoration that has only recently been approached again.   

By the close of this era of increasingly bloated homes, it was already obvious that you could have too much of a good thing.  The vast, high-ceilinged rooms of Victorian houses squandered space and trapped heat, while their labyrinthine floor plans made for a lot of wasted steps. And of course those wedding-cake moldings were quickly revealed to be a maintenance nightmare. If this doesn’t sound familiar to owners of today’s new homes, it will soon enough. 

These kinds of failings are a big reason Victorian design was held in such contempt after the turn of the century. A few decades of living in needlessly oversized and overcomplicated homes had given people some real insights into practical living.  The result was a popular movement aimed at designing smaller, simpler and more efficient homes--a concerted backlash against the Victorian era.  

Builders at the threshold of the 20th century had the good sense to recognize and respond to these demands.  It’s notable that even during the boom years of the 20s, they didn’t feel obliged to offer enormous homes for the prospering middle class.  On the contrary; houses became the smallest they’d been in a century.     

Nowadays, the thought of looking to developers for smaller and more practical houses would strike most people as laughable. Meanwhile, as more and more pompous (and profitable) extravaganzas go up, fewer and fewer working people can afford to own a home at all.   

A hundred years ago, builders were meeting the demands of a new era filled with changes and challenges. Today’s developers are once again in a turn-of-the-century mood.  Too bad it’s the wrong century.  

Monday, March 21, 2011

HEY, CUT THE BULL

Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the United States, was a man of few words. His terse responses to the press have become legendary. It’s said that a reporter once breathlessly approached him, calling out:  “Mr. President, I bet my friend here I could get you to say three words.”  

Coolidge’s reply:  “You lose.”

Silent Cal’s presidential record may have been less than stellar, but his aversion to bombast remains a lesson to us all. And while politicians might be the first to learn from Coolidge’s reticence, designers could take a few hints too.  

That’s because architecture is a visual language, and just like a spoken one, it can get cluttered by a lot of extraneous blather. 
It’s no accident that grammatical terms such as idiom, context and articulation also appear in the language of architecture. Moreover, many of the bromides of good communication—be clear, be concise, make your point and get out—apply to design as well.  

As a great believer in both simple writing and simple design, I humbly offer a few guidelines to help slash architectural bombast:  

•  Use a strong central theme rather than a number of weak ones. Just as the title of an essay informs all of the statements to follow, an architectural composition should have a single dominant idea that suffuses the whole. The theme might lie in the way rooms are organized—in a courtyard, perhaps, or in a cluster—or it might have to do with using a favorite combination of materials, or even a certain style of roof. Other elements can support or echo the central theme, but they shouldn’t compete with it, since this only dilutes your overall statement.

•  Remember that, more often than not, simplicity is a virtue. The mind tires when it’s forced to wade through a lot of excess information, whether it’s verbal or visual.  A clear, concise, immediately comprehensible design is far better than a conglomeration of elements drawn from hither and yon.  Leave out anything that doesn’t relate to the “argument”. If you’re feeling tempted to include, say, a whole plethora of moldings in your design, first ask yourself whether they’ll strengthen your statement, or just obfuscate it.

•  Know when to shut up. In 1863, a then-famous orator named Edward Everett gave a florid two-hour dedication speech at a Pennsylvania cemetery. At the same event, the nation’s president spoke for just a few minutes.  Which speech do we remember? Right—the one we call the Gettysburg Address.

And just as a speech loses effectiveness if it goes on and on, a strong design motif can become cloying if it’s endlessly repeated.  If you love round-arched windows, for example, you might use them in one prominent focal area and, if it’s appropriate, repeat them in a few other subsidiary locations--but don’t go wild and make every window in the house round-topped.

•  Finally, don’t forget to include a bit of humor. There’s enough bad news in the world as it is, so both language and architecture can benefit from the occasional spark of wit. Recall that even the most pious of architectural monuments, the Gothic cathedrals, were rampant with highly personalized carvings of gargoyles that no doubt gave their creators a few good laughs, and still do the same for us all these centuries later.  


Monday, March 7, 2011

TRASHIN' FASHION

If I’ve ranted and raved about any architectural subject over the years, it has to be the idea of fashion-driven “modernization”.  With today’s renewed appreciation of historic residential designs such as the California Bungalow, you’d think that designers would finally get the message that every architectural period has its finer points.  We’ve seen the pattern umpteen times:  After five or so decades of neglect and abuse, older styles are suddenly rediscovered and cooed over by designer types, while other, more recent styles are patronizingly judged to be in need of “improvement” by superimposing today’s fashion biases upon them.  I still routinely hear interior designers advising homeowners on “getting an updated look” and “contemporizing”--words that instantly set my teeth on edge.

Architectural styles have always followed a cycle of initial popularity, decline, disgrace, and rediscovery.  Victorian homes, you’ll recall, were held in contempt for the first half of the 20th century, during which time countless examples were either demolished or just as irrevocably destroyed in the process of being “modernized”.  Today one wouldn’t dream of stripping the ornament from a Victorian house and slathering it in stucco, but during the Forties, that’s precisely what many architects and designers urged their clients to do in order to get an “updated look”.  

Sounds ridiculous now, doesn’t it?  Yet apparently, we’ve learned nothing from such mistakes.  Regardless of the quality or thought that went into their design, examples of past styles that are currently out of favor--for instance, the spare and unadorned Modernist homes of the Sixties--are deemed unworthy of the same appreciation we’d give a Craftsmen Bungalow or some other style that’s currently chic.  Design elements that are integral to Modernist architecture--slender window frames; plain, ornament-free walls and ceilings, and flush doors--are blythely replaced because the don’t happen to fit in with the current mania for plasticky, frou-frou-laden design.

A basic truth of aesthetics is that the more fashionable something is now, the more unfashionable it will be later--and not very much later, mind you.  Yet, driven by the relentless juggernaut of advertising and fashion industry hype, both designers and homeowners continue to buy into the bogus idea that a thirty-year-old house needs modernizing, while a sixty-year-old house needs restoring.  

This is an exquisite bit of pretzel logic.  First, we’re encourouraged to remove everything that makes the original house belong to its era; then, a few decades later, we’re supposed to wring our hands in regret and try to put it all back.  Why not cut out the middleman, and simply keep your house in its original style?  

Improving a house by revamping it with momentarily trendy features is the architectural equivalent of dressing Ishi in a three-piece suit.   I could cite any number of vintage homes that have commanded higher sale prices for being in fine original condition, but I challenge any architect, designer, or decorator to cite a single example of a fashion-driven residential makeover done ten or fifteen years ago that can still be considered an improvement in light of changing tastes.  No kidding--I’d really like to hear about it.