MAKIN' COPIES

For years now, I’ve railed at people who remodel just to keep up with some architectural fad or other.  But the truth is that we architects are as faddish as anyone else.  A few lead, and most follow, whether consciously or not.

Architectural fads are nothing new.  For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English, Germans, Spanish, and most every other European nation were busily ripping off the French, whose architecture was seen as the epitome of elegance and prestige. As buildings such as the Louvre and Versailles still attest, no one could touch the Gallic flourish for theatrically grand compositions.  As a result, no self-respecting palace of the era, whether in Salzburg or St. Petersburg, was complete unless it boasted Versailles-like formal gardens and was crowned by a Mansard roof. 

In the early 19th century, excavations in ancient Athens and Herculaneum touched off a tremendous fashion for archeological copies of Greek and Roman architecture.  The French were again at the head of this new wave (soon to be followed by the Germans), with each nation building rather fevered copies of the Parthenon and other ancient monuments in the stark style we now call Romantic Classicism. 

Even in America, banks and courthouses in the guise of Greek temples sprang up in every jerkwater town, and no less an architect than Thomas Jefferson jumped on the bandwagon by endorsing the Greek Revival as the keynote style for Washington DC.

The arrival of Modern architecture in the twentieth century brought a whole new level of faddishness.  Alas, while having architects cranking out line-perfect copies of Greek temples was merely tiresome, having mediocre talents copying Modernism was an urban disaster.  While the likes of Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier put infinite care into their austere compositions, lesser architects simply assumed that building anything with glass walls, a flat roof, and white paint qualified them as geniuses.  It didn’t.  Such dreary, bargain-basement Modernism, which still populates a good many American downtowns, is one of the main reasons why modern architecture fell so hard, so fast.  The firm I interned with, for instance, went in big for a late-Modernist trend called Brutalism, leaving behind a legacy of memorably awful exercises in raw concrete.

It’s easy to spot such bandwagon-hopping in hindsight, but not so easy to recognize it in our own time.  Yet the purportedly rebellious styles of recent years have brought us just as many cases of architectural copyism.  One need only count the mushrooming number of buildings with outward-leaning walls, angled props supporting pointless overhangs, and strident color schemes of ochre, bile, and olive to recognize the faddishness of much of today’s work.  

Such aesthetic recycling stems, I suppose, either from intellectual laziness or from the wish to play it safe.  It takes monumental self-confidence and--dare I say it--arrogance, to put something really different before people and willingly be savaged for it.  Ironically, the moment someone does this kind of heavy lifting and manages to survive, the imitators arrive, their glossy magazines firmly in hand. 

So just imagine how many half-baked Frank Gehry knockoffs are still coming your way. 

THE POWER OF PLACE

Growing up, I got used to seeing the U.S. Capitol on the evening news, usually rising majestically behind Dan Rather as he reported on some national crisis or other. Over the years, its domed-and-colonnaded form has assumed almost mythical proportions.  It is, after all, the focal point of what is still the world’s most powerful nation. 

Yet when I finally visited Washington DC in my thirties, I was a little let down to find that the Capitol, too, was a merely-mortal and somewhat tired-looking building--one with crooked light switches, runs in the paint, blocked-up windows, and all the other infirmities of an aging structure occupied and continually modified by humans.  

Of course the Capitol is physically impressive. Yet what really transcends all that marble and mortar is the sum of what’s transpired there during the last two hundred-odd years. Crossing the echoing rotunda beneath the Capitol dome, for example, who could help but recall the grainy TV images of John F. Kennedy’s flag-draped casket at its center? It’s this human record that gives the Capitol its mythical proportions--the cavalcade of people and events, and the traces they leave behind over the passage of decades and centuries. 

That visit made me realize that the real emotional power of man-made structures--even monumental ones like the Capitol--lies not so much in their physical splendor as in the record of human events they represent.

Yet such emotional power isn’t confined to monumental structures like the Capitol. In the New Mexico desert west of Alamogordo, for instance, is a barren spot where you’ll find nothing more imposing than some rusted steel bars and broken concrete jutting from the ground. They are the sole vestiges of a hundred-foot-tall steel tower that was instantly boiled away to vapor by the world’s first atomic bomb.  

“The Gadget”--as the bomb was known by its designers--was exploded atop the tower on the early morning of July 16, 1945.  The cataclysmic fireball, which one observer described as “the brightest light I have ever seen, or that I think anyone has seen,” fused the surrounding desert sand into a sea of glass.

In 1965, a small stone obelisk was built at the exact center of where the tower stood, marking the world’s first Ground Zero. Yet it’s the tower’s ravaged foundations that carry the real emotional force, standing in mute testament to one of the seminal moments in all history--that frozen split-second in which the atom’s terrible power was first unleashed on humankind. 

But better to conclude with a more upbeat example: Your house. No doubt you remember the day you moved in--how slightly odd it felt hanging your clothes in an unfamiliar closet, and stowing your Bisquick in a stranger’s cupboard. Yet every event that’s transpired there since that day has served to strengthen your ties to the place. However humble its physical structure might be, its emotional importance is, in its own way, monumental.  

Whether we’re talking about the U.S. Capitol, Trinity Site, or your house, the emotional power of place springs, not just from what we see, but from everything we’ve come to know.

THE COLOR PURPLE--OR ANY OTHER

A while back, I happened to catch a popular radio host discussing some guy in Florida who’d painted his house in his old fraternity colors--purple and gold.  Predictably, the man’s neighbors were up in arms.  

Now, as offensive as a purple-and-gold house might sound to you, hearing the way the talk show host carried on about it was worse.  It was an outrage, he declared in so many words, that people could simply paint their houses any color they pleased, and by golly, there should be a way to stop them from doing it.  It was a classic argument for the Taste Police.  

The talk show host’s callers threw an even feebler light on the matter.  With barely-masked disdain for “ethnic” color preferences, they gleefully ridiculed other people who, God forbid, had painted their houses orange or pink or electric blue.

At best, this sort of thinking is provincial.  At worst it’s just plain racist.  America’s demographics are changing, and along with many other things that belong in the dustbin of history is the idea that Caucasians have some sort of monopoly on defining good taste for everyone else. 

In any case, the whole idea that there are “tasteful” architectural colors is utter nonsense, as even the most cursory survey of architectural history will attest.  The architecture of much of the Mediterranean and Asia, to mention just the obvious examples, is beloved for its vibrant use of color.  How is it, then, that when these same hues appear on homes in the world’s most multicultural nation, they suddenly become “tasteless”?  

What’s more, if strident color schemes are so offensive, why is it permissible for, say, a huge Swedish retail chain to paint their colossal stores in the most galling blue-and-yellow color scheme imaginable, while an individual who paints his house in those colors is seen as some sort of threat to the public order?  

Some towns are so mortified by the idea of vivid color schemes that they actually specify the range of colors people can use on their own homes.  Surprise, surprise--the allowable “tasteful” colors just happen to reflect the sedate color preferences of Northern Europeans. 

Would you tolerate a law that dictated what color clothes you could wear in public?  Or what color car you could park in your driveway?  If not, why would you tolerate a regulation dictating what color you could paint your own home?  After all, your taste in clothes, cars, or houses comes down to the same thing--a highly personal choice.  

The usual tiresome Taste Police response to this assertion goes something like, “Well, if I have to look at my neighbor’s purple house all day, it’s infringing on my personal right to a tasteful environment.”  

It’s an argument that doesn’t hold water, because there’s no such thing as an objective standard of taste--one person’s tasteful is another person’s awful, and that’s that.  In other words, the neighbor may well find a beige house just as offensive. 

Whether other people find our favorite colors tasteful or awful, we still have a perfect right to express them, be it through our clothes, our cars, or our homes.  If preserving that right for myself means tolerating my neighbor’s purple-and-gold house, so be it.  It sure beats having the Taste Police make my choices for me. 

FUTURE SCHLOCK

If you’ve ever seen one of the old Buck Rogers movie serials, with their packing-crate robots and Art Deco rockets shooting sparks, you can appreciate how quaint another era’s vision of the future can be--and how difficult it is to get it right.  Yet speculating on things to come, whether in writing, in images, or in three dimensions, is something humans find irresistible.

Architects are no exception.  The Futurist movement of the early 20th century, for instance, saw technology as man’s saviour, and liked to wax poetic over things like turbines and high voltage towers.  Yet to many modern eyes, their stark, mechanistic cities of tomorrow are not so much redemptive as sinister. 

During the 1920s, the Russian Constructivists saw architecture in equally edgy terms.  Thanks to Stalin’s growing distaste for their work, their most ambitious ideas, like those of the Futurists, were never built.  This fact has ironically worked in their favor, since speculating on the future is a good deal safer than actually trying to build it in three dimensions.  Paper predictions remain snugly encased in the context of their own time, while real structures must actually occupy--however uncomfortably--the future they were meant to predict. 

Disneyland’s 1957 House of Tomorrow, an all-plastic home designed by MIT and sponsored by the chemical giant Monsanto, is a classic example of this phenomenon.  With its plastic furniture, plastic dishes, and molded plastic walls, it turned out to be an almost comically inept predictor of housing’s future.  While plastics did find limited acceptance in many kinds of building materials, from drain pipes to windows, the predicted plastics revolution augured by the House of Tomorrow never materialized.  

Indeed, the actual building trends of the early twenty-first century show a steady retreat from man-made polymers and controlled environments, back toward organic materials and more environmentally-sensitive design.   

Theme parks and expositions in general have been a steady source of futuristic centerpieces, from the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, to the globe-like, 140-foot tall Unisphere at the 1964 fair held on the same site, to the more recent Spaceship Earth, the Florida EPCOT Center’s eighteen-story geodesic sphere of 1982.  

Overshadowing all of these is the 605-foot tall Space Needle, centerpiece of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. With its concave pylons and flying-saucer superstructure, the Space Needle evoked the sort of future in which people would have robot housekeepers and fly around in jet-powered backpacks--that is, when they weren’t out driving their atomic cars.  This space-age optimism even permeates the color names used in the tower’s paint scheme:  Astronaut White, Orbital Olive, Re-entry Red, and Galaxy Gold.

As a now charmingly-retro hallmark for Seattle, the Space Needle has been an unqualified success--even today, it remains the city’s biggest tourist attraction. As a predictor of future architectural trends, though, the Needle missed the mark.  

The fact that the Space Needle and its futuristic brethren already seemed quaintly outdated within a decade of their completion shows just how risky building a vision of the the future can be.  It’s a sure bet that our own “House of Tomorrow” predictions about computer-orchestrated homes--the sort of scenario in which your toaster automatically goes online to buy more Eggos--are just as likely to come to naught.  

Still, architects will no doubt keep offering you their ideas of what’s to come.  Whether our predictions pan out or not--well, the future will be here soon enough.

ARCHITECTURAL EXTRAVAGANZAS

The Carson Mansion in Eureka, California--perhaps America’s most recognized Victorian house--is so preposterously ornate that it approaches caricature.  Lumber magnate William Carson was anxious to showcase the marvelous versatility of his California redwood, so he made sure his architects, the brothers Samuel and Joseph Newsom, pulled out all the stops in his mansion’s design.  And did they ever:  Since its completion in 1886, Carson’s soaring gingerbread confection has remained the last word in Victorian bombast.  

The Carson Mansion is a good example of what might be called an architectural extravaganza--a design that represents the zenith of its era.  Such works usually arose in the most prosperous times, which accounts for their frequent appearance during the 1880s, the Roaring Twenties, and the supremely confident decades following World War II.  Whether we call such buildings outrageous, way out, or over the top, we know an extravaganza when we see it. 

  

“Over the top” rather literally describes the works of architect John Eberson, the inventor of the “atmospheric” movie palaces of the 1920s.  In Eberson’s theaters--Florida’s Tampa Theater is a fine example--the audience was seated in a mock outdoor garden or courtyard, surrounded by antique building facades complete with statuary, fountains, fake ivy, and stuffed birds perched on the windowsills.  Overhead, mechanically-projected clouds drifted lazily across the auditorium’s vaulted “sky”.  When the show was about to begin--or should I say continue?--the clouds slowly yielded to darkness and constellations of twinkling electric stars.  Today, thanks to their endearingly high-kitsch concept, Eberson’s atmospheric theaters are among the most celebrated of all movie palaces.

The Roaring 20s also gave America one of its most outrageous Spanish Revival houses, improbably named Scotty’s Castle, and just as improbably located in Death Valley, California. The Castle was built  by a wealthy Chicago insurance executive, Albert Johnson, though it was named for Johnson’s longtime companion Walter Scott.  In 1926, after amassing some 1500 acres of Death Valley land, Johnson began work on the main buildings of his 12,000 square-foot house.  A construction engineer and two architects collaborated on the design, which included custom furniture and hardware.  A crew of craftsman was imported from Europe to carry out the detail work, and no expense was spared in the Castle’s construction: Johnson spent over $50,000 on a pipe organ for his music room, while Scott bragged that the wrought iron work alone had cost $168,000. 

By 1931, however, with the Depression rapidly sapping his fortunes, Johnson had to call it quits with some twenty percent of the project still unfinished. Even at that, Scotty’s Castle represented such a high-water mark of Twenties-era optimism that it was eventually acquired by the National Park Service and opened for tours.  

But don’t think that more recent times haven’t given us some architectural extravaganzas as well.  Though we may not appreciate it yet, the vast indoor shopping malls and highrise-atrium hotels of the 1970s, the theme bar-restaurants of the 80s, and the dot-com billionaire mansions of the 90s will likely all yield candidates for such honors in the future.  And of course pretty much any hotel casino built in Las Vegas during the past decade--those brazenly ersatz renditions of Paris, New York, Rome, or Venice, complete with Eberson-like indoor streets under artificial skies--are sure to find a place in this boffo hall of fame. 

SWEATING THE DETAILS

There are enough headaches in planning a home or addition without fretting over where the towel bars go, right?  Unfortunately, it’s just such trivial details that can sabotage all your efforts if they’re left to the last minute.

Certain classes of items are commonly ignored or overlooked during the design process, not only by do-it-yourselfers, but by architects as well.  Typically, they’re accessories that seem so minor they don’t command serious attention until it’s too late.  

In laying out a bathroom, for example, few people will take the time to decide exactly where the towel bars and toilet paper holder will go--usually because they’re too busy thrilling to the prospect of that new designer lavatory or sunken tub.  Yet the day-to-day convenience of a bathroom hinges more on those two humble accessories than on any fashionable plumbing fixture.  How often have you used a bathroom where the toilet paper roll was on the wall directly behind you, requiring Houdiniesque contortions to reach it?    

The only way to avoid such dismal outcomes is to decide in advance exactly where everything will go, right down to the smallest piece of hardware.  For example, if you’re right-handed, the toilet paper holder should ideally rate a spot to the left of the toilet, about even with the front of the bowl, and about thirty inches off the floor.  The opposite arrangement will work almost as well, though it’s less natural, but after that, your options go downhill fast.  

As for towel bars, you should reserve some unsullied wall space for at least one 18-inch bar for face towels and one 24-inch bar for bath towels (two of each is even better). Every robe hook, shoe rack, soap dish, clothes rod, or what-have-you in your project should get the same careful consideration.

Light switches, like toilet paper rolls, often end up in places they shouldn’t be, though it’s more often due to last-minute changes forced by jobsite conditions.  People often assume they can fit a switch in any sliver of wall that’s as wide as the switch cover plate.  Not so:  The extra wall studs required around doorways and in corners often won’t leave enough room to squeeze in the necessary electrical box.  Therefore, if you don’t want to end up having to move a switch to the wrong side of a doorway during construction, make sure you leave plenty of room between the door trim and any nearby obstructions.  Multiple switches require correspondingly more breathing room.  

On the exterior, downspouts are probably the most common accessory to suffer from benign neglect.  I’ve seen many exquisitely-designed homes despoiled at the last minute by tangles of ugly downspouts snaking hither and yon across the walls--all because the architect or owner didn’t find that lowly detail sexy enough to be worthy of careful attention.  

In this case, as in the others, you have to sweat the details--sexy or not.  It shouldn’t be left for subcontractors to decide where the downspouts go, since they’ll usually just slap them up wherever it’s most convenient.  Instead, find out how many are required, and then scout out the best locations yourself.  Don’t put downspouts on the front elevation if a less conspicuous spot is available.  Avoid unnecessary offsets and angles, and on gutters that run along the side of the house, put the downspouts toward the rear corners of the house, not the front.  

Take the same sort of care in locating gas and electric meters, plumbing vents, flues, and all the other incidental bric-a-brac that can clutter up a home’s exterior.  Place them out of sight, or at least where they won’t be visually obtrusive.  Make sure they end up where they do for a reason, and not just because no one was paying attention.

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.