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.  

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.  

    

    

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. 

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.

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.

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>.)

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.