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.  

    

    

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.  

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.  

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.  

MISSION MANIA

When I was a kid, the height of furniture fashion was a style called “Danish Modern”.  It wasn’t very comfortable--nor, it turns out, was it even all that Danish.   The chairs were linear, with big slab-like cushions that did a lousy job of conforming to your gluteus maximus.  The tables had a lot of nasty, smack-your-knee-and-see-stars kinds of corners.  But we gladly put up with such discomforts because the stuff was, after all, called “modern”--and in the 1960s, modern was the only way to be.

Today, of course, we’re much more discriminating.  We admire furniture of the 60s as an appealingly naive emblem of the Jet Age, but by and large we’ve concluded that an older, more storied look is the way to go.  So what do we do?  We adopt yet another style of furniture that’s linear, uncomfortable, and not all that attractive, and which, even though it’s called Mission, has nothing whatever to do with missions.  But it’s got the stability of long history, and that’s the thing we pine for in these scary times.

Mission furniture has more to do with the late-19th century English Arts and Crafts movement and such proponents as Gustav Stickley and William Morris than it does with the California Missions or Mission Revival architecture.  Early mass marketers of the style, however, preferred to present it as a rough-and-tumble American phenomenon rather than a snooty British one.  

Regardless of Mission’s murky heritage, one thing is crystal clear:  With its sharp corners and church-pew surfaces, it’s certainly among the most uncomfortable furniture styles of the last ten centuries.  It gives Danish Modern and even Frank Lloyd Wright’s diabolical chairs a run for the money.  

I know that at this point a lot of designer types will start sputtering in their caramel lattes about what a pioneering concept the Mission style was, what geniuses the Arts and Crafts folks were, and how dare I, a lowly architect and even lowlier writer, criticize such brilliance?  Actually, I agree--the Arts and Crafts folks were indeed geniuses, and if you’ve ever seen the refined artistry of an original Morris or Stickley piece, you’re no doubt as certain as I am.  

Trouble is, the vast majority of Arts and Crafts, er, rather Mission furniture was not made by Morris, Stickley, or any of the other craft studios whose work is rightly coveted these days.  Adhering to the highest standards of craftsmanship naturally made for miniscule production, which in turn ensured that only the wealthy could afford their work.  

At any rate, by the time Mission furniture caught on with the masses, the craft studios had already moved on to other things, leaving the ordinary Joes and Josephines of the early century to settle for knockoffs from Sears and Roebuck.  Now, while using mass production to make products more affordable is a great American tradition, it also brings about an inevitable dilution of quality that eventually saps the artistry from any design.  That’s why a Model T is not a Rolls-Royce.  For the same reason, most of the Mission furniture that’s come down to us is clunky, pedestrian, and literally run-of-the-mill.  

Which brings me back to the current encore of Mission mania.  The style has already become ubiquitous in the media, appearing not only in print but in movies, commercials and sitcoms.  Spindly Mission knockoffs are now standard fare in those giant discount furniture stores.  

You may wonder how long this can last.  For me, the sure sign that a style is on its last legs is when it starts appearing in the lobbies of chain motels.  Well, guess what?

Have a seat in the lobby, folks.  Just mind those sharp corners. 

A GREEN GIANT

If you think today’s “green” architects are pioneers, take a look at the work of Carr Jones.  An obscure engineer-builder, Jones clung stubbornly to environmental priniciples we’ve only lately come to cherish--and he started doing it back in the Teens.    

Jones was born in Watsonville, California in 1885.  He attended the University of California at Berkeley and received a degree in mechanical engineering in 1911.  Around this time he designed and built a simple redwood cottage for his parents in Berkeley, kicking off a long and colorful career as what we’d nowadays call a “design-build contractor”. 

But Jones was ahead of his time in other ways.  He worked in large part with recycled materials--brick, slate, timber, scrap steel and bits of salvaged ornament--from which he managed to conjure lyrically beautiful homes that transcended their humble origins.  

Jones’s houses are almost invariably built of roughly-laid bricks left unfinished to show their natural range of colors; many have a gently curving floor plan embracing a central courtyard.  His unmistakable elevations are graced by an array of turrets, dormers, and chimneys.

Interior walls are of exposed brick as well, enlivened by a variety of arched openings.  Overhead, massive, exposed roof trusses of salvaged timber provide dignified drama.  The genius of these houses lies in their perfect balance of the familiar and the unexpected--on the sense of calm lent by an ancient palette of materials, played against the builder’s continual ability to surprise.  In a Jones house, every window frames a charming vista; every room is a spatial banquet; every corner holds architectural delight.

Though Jones’s houses share many traits with the Storybook Style homes of the 1920s--aged appearance, serpentine curves, and whimsical details--in his hands these features are organic rather than superficial.  It’s a happy result of building in a true medieval vernacular, without undue concern for perfection or popularity.  Jones chose his materials and designs not because they were fashionable, but because he believed in their absolute fitness for domesticity. 

Just where someone trained as a mechanical engineer acquired these refined sensibilities, we may never know.   There’s no doubt, however, that Jones would have been quite comfortable working in today’s dawning era of earth-friendly architecture.

Like many pioneers before him, building with an unwavering conscience brought Jones neither financial success nor even much recognition during his lifetime.  When Revival styles lost favor after World War II, the demand for his lovely and personal works became even more modest.  He completed a scattering of postwar commissions in the San Francisco Bay Area and designed his final residence in 1966, dying on the morning that its foundations were being chalked out on the site.  Jones’s stepson, Doug Allinger, completed the project following his death, and has admirably carried on Jones’s building philosophy in his own work.

Alas, Jones didn’t live to see the birth of the ecology movement in the late 60s, nor the subsequent rise of green architecture--events grounded in the very ideas he’d been practicing for half a century.

# # #