OLD-FASHIONED EXPERIENCE: Part One

Aside from my usual grumbling over Hewlett Packard products, I seldom mention brand names in this blog.  Today, however, I’m going to mention a whole raft of them.  Before I’m accused of selling out, though, let me say that none of the firms I mention have paid me to drop their names, nor so much as taken me out to lunch.  Just for future reference, however, I could probably be bought off with a nice fresh rhubarb pie.  

Today’s building materials market is flooded with newcomer brands.  While choice and competition are generally a good thing, the current galaxy of choices in the building field is largely among a whole raft of Johnny-Come-Lately manufacturers, many based overseas, whose main objective is simply to cash in on America’s vast home-improvement market.  This unpleasant fact ought to make consumers think twice before purchasing brands they’ve never heard of before, no matter how slickly advertised.

Quite a few American brands, by comparison, have histories dating back a century or more. While a distinguished past doesn’t necessarily guarantee modern worth--as General Motors can amply attest--there’s nevertheless no substitute for long experience. And there are plenty of experienced old brands to go around.  

One well-known American plumbing fixture maker, for example, traces its lineage back to 1872, when John B. Pierce opened a tinware shop in Ware, Massachusetts. Pierce later founded one of three firms that merged in 1892 to form the American Radiator Company.  In 1929, American Radiator in turn merged with The Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company. By the eve of World War II, products from this unwieldy new combine--it was not called American-Standard until 1948--could be found in about half the homes in the U.S.. 

Just as venerable a name in plumbing is the company founded by 29-year-old Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler in 1873 to produce cast iron and steel farm implements. In 1883 Kohler applied a baked enamel coating to one of his company’s horse trough/hog scalders, thus creating the first Kohler bathtub. 

Other old hands in the building industry include the window manufacturer Anderson, founded in 1903 by Danish immigrant Hans Andersen and his family in Hudson, Wisconsin.  In 1932, in the very depths of the Depression, Anderson introduced the first fully assembled window unit in the industry.  This was a revolutionary idea in a day when windows were either shipped in pieces, or else were locally built from scratch.  

Another familiar name in windows got its start in 1925, when Pete and Lucille Kuyper founded a small Des Moines company to manufacture a novel type of window screen that retracted onto a roller.  The Kuypers’s Rolscreen Company moved to Pella, Iowa, the following year, began manufacturing wood windows, and the rest is history.

Innovations, whether large or small, have been central to the rise of the companies recounted above.  Next time we’ll look at a few more such stalward American brands, some of whom essentially invented their own industries.  So take note, industry reps--there’s still time to get me that rhubarb pie.

BATHROOM BASICS

People do lots of thinking when they remodel a bathroom.  They agonize over colors, countertop materials, and choosing the latest lavatory sink, but too often, they overlook the kind of improvements that would matter most. 

Simply upgrading your bathroom with fancy fixtures and materials won’t do a thing to improve its function.  You’ll just be trading a lousy old bathroom for a lousy new one.  So make sure you don’t miss these basics:

•  Don’t rule out relocating a toilet, a sink, or even a bathtub if doing so would definitely improve the room’s layout.  The old notion that moving plumbing fixtures will break the bank simply isn’t true in most cases--in a major bathroom remodel, the biggest expense is in finishes, not in rough plumbing. 

A common example:  Building codes allow a toilet to be centered in a space as little as thirty inches wide.  Yet many older bathrooms have much more space than that between the toilet and adjoining cabinets or walls.  In a case like this, moving the toilet to the modern minimum may gain you a nice chunk of counter space. 

•  Stay away from hard-to-clean fixtures, no matter how fashionable.  The usual suspects include topmount lavatory sinks, whose raised rims prevent puddled water from being wiped directly into the sink.  And the cleaning headaches inherent in those oh-so-trendy free-standing-bowl style sinks hardly need pointing out.

Likewise, while sparkling glass shower enclosures look great in designer magazines, in real life they’re a drudge to keep clean.  For my money, a shower curtain--which won’t obstruct the room when not in use, and which can be easily replaced--is a more practical choice.

•  In the shower, provide a niche for storing shampoo bottles and the like. Make sure the soap dish is high enough to avoid the need to stoop down, and provide a hook or bar for hanging a washcloth.  A small built-in bench or at least a ledge will be welcome, too.

•  Set aside some wall space for both 18-inch wide face towel bars and 24-inch bath towels. Ideally, the bath towels should be within arm’s length of the tub or shower, and the face towels should be right beside the lavatory sink.  If space is tight, either can be mounted on the inside of the bathroom door, or you can use towel rings instead.

•  Building codes require an exhaust fan only if the bathroom doesn’t have an openable window, but you should plan to include one regardless.  Insist on a top-quality, super-quiet model--not one of those howling bargain-basement jobs.  Better yet, consider a remote-mounted fan, which will be even quieter. 

•  If the bathroom feels cramped but there’s no way to physically enlarge it, try an optical illusion:  Use a large sheet mirror on the wall behind the lavatory, extending from corner to corner and from countertop to ceiling, to visually double the room’s volume.  Although it takes a little extra effort to incorporate a mirror this big, the result is far more dramatic than the usual scrap of mirror screwed to the wall.

•  Lastly, don’t forget storage for bulky items like toilet paper.  To this end, a vanity cabinet is more practical than a pedestal sink, though it may not necessarily suit the style of your house.  Here again, you might wish to trade fashion for function.

DIS-INTEGRATIONS

A while back, I stopped at a locally-owned burger emporium for one of my periodic hits of cholesterol. The giant cheeseburger was stupendous, but the decor was something else again.  

In architecture, there are few things as tawdry as yesterday’s red-hot fashion.  Judging by its unsettling paint job, this restaurant had apparently been redone during the 1980s, when a television series called Miami Vice, of all things, inspired any number of hack architects and decorators to run around purportedly “updating” buildings with appliques of glass block, neon, and stucco, lastly topping them off with the color scheme then approvingly known as dusty rose and teal.   

It’s clear enough why fashion trends exist.  For marketers, it’s a diabolically clever way to ensure that people never remain satisfied with what they have, and instead will eternally crave a newer car, a different cut of clothing, or what have you.  What’s harder to understand is exactly what makes the rest of us--including design professionals--so willing to be swept up in the fashion industry’s calculated tidal pull.

Would any architect or decorator, for example, sincerely believe that a color scheme inspired by a momentary television series would be just the thing to make a lasting contribution to their client’s project?  And for that matter, could any reasonably intelligent client really overlook the stunning shortsightedness of such a concept?

Apparently, they could, and they did.   There are countless moldering examples of this particular fashion cliche still hanging on across the country, ranging from relatively forgiveable examples like my hamburger joint, all the way to egregious revamps of entire hotels, shopping centers, hospitals and even banks--all of them still ridiculously decked out in fading shades of turquoise and pink, and looking more like colossal ice cream parlors than serious institutions.

But of course it’s not fair to pick on weak-willed architects of the Eighties for such dismaying transgressions. Every decade, every era has its equivalent of glass block and neon, and of teal and dusty rose.  Today’s faddish architecture--those buildings bristling with nonfunctional sunshades and outriggers, short-lived varnished wood exteriors, and harlequin paint schemes of olive drab, dried blood, and mustard--are destined to look just as embarassingly dated in a few years. 

The saving grace here, however, is that qualifier “new”.  However trendoid they may be, these buildings were at least conceived with details, finishes, and color schemes that were integral to the whole.  On the other hand, cosmetic updates superficially pasted onto buildings for the sake of chasing one fad or another are by definition dis-integrations.  These kinds of “improvements” are invariably short-lived, and just as invariably diminish any building that is subjected to them.  

Practically every historic structure we cherish today, from New York’s Grand Central Station to San Francisco’s Ferry Building, has had to be rescued from at least one and sometimes multiple “modernizations” perpetrated by architects and decorators, who most assuredly touted them as improvements in their day.  With friends like these, old buildings don’t need enemies.  

THE MIRACLE MINERAL

Over a century ago, American builders began using a remarkable mineral product.  Mined from a type of serpentine rock, it was natural, abundant and easy to produce, yet its unique properties made it almost limitlessly useful.  It was resistant to chemicals and intense heat. It was an excellent electrical and thermal insulator.  Out of its fibers, you could weave a cloth that wouldn’t burn.  You could even mix it with other materials to make them stronger and more fireproof. 

Over the course of the twentieth century, American industry--with the government’s blessing--found thousands of uses for this miraculous mineral.  Woven into a cloth, it was used to insulate electrical wires.  Mixed with a binder, it made a fireproof insulation for pipes and ducts.  Mixed with cement, it made a host of practically indestructible building materials such as corrugated siding, shingles, and flue pipe. Mixed with vinyl, it made an incredibly durable floor tile.  

Nor was its usefulness limited to construction. This same amazing mineral allowed the brakes on your car to survive blistering temperatures. Inside your home, you could find it in stoves, heaters, ovens, toasters, hair dryers, and ironing board covers--pretty much any product that had to resist high heat.  And if you happen to have an older example of any of these items--or perhaps an old furnace down in your basement--that miraculous mineral may still be there, silently doing its job.

The miraculous mineral is asbestos, a substance whose modern reputation is considerably more sinister than when it was found in countless industrial products.  Long-term occupational exposure to asbestos is now known to cause a number of terrible lung diseases, one more ghastly than the next.  The risk of exposure to the amounts of asbestos found in a typical older home is less clear, but on the premise of being better safe than sorry, asbestos is no longer manufactured in the United States.  Nevertheless, since it was used in thousands of long-lived domestic products, and because its peak period of use stretched from World War II well into the 1970s--in fact, the last U.S. asbestos mine closed only in 2002--its complete removal from the environment is a virtual impossibility.  

Millions of older American homes contain significant amounts of asbestos, found mostly in the form of insulation on steam pipes or heating ducts, in resilient floor tiles, acoustic ceiling tiles, and sprayed acoustic ceilings, and in asbestos-cement shingles, building panels and flue pipes.  Although removal was once widely considered the preferred remedy, today many authorities believe that the safest approach is to leave asbestos-containing building materials in place so long as they’re in good condition and not subject to disturbance. For the official policy in your own area, contact your local hazardous materials authority.

So it is that, after a century of vast commercial use, the miraculous mineral has now become the malevolent mineral.  If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it’s that sometimes, things that seem too good to be true--whether X-rays, atomic power, DDT or asbestos--are in fact exactly that. 

TWENTIES TECH

Every so often, there’s a brief span of years in which innovation comes thick and fast.  In the area of building technology, the Roaring Twenties was such an age.  The houses of this decade were chock full of new ideas that, quaint as they seem to us now, let Americans live more comfortably than ever before.

The homes of the 1920s were, for one, the first to truly integrate electricity.  In prior years, clumsy surface installations of switches and wiring were still common, along with lighting fixtures that often consisted of little more than a naked bulb at the end of a cord.  The Twenties brought the wide use of two-button switches flush-mounted in brass plates, with the  “on” button elegantly marked by a circle of mother-of-pearl.  Electric wall sconces became the lighting fashion of the day, while electrical outlets moved from jury-rigged affairs screwed to the wall to being inconspicuously flush-mounted in the baseboard.  Granted, few rooms had more than one or two receptacles, but then this was an era of few electrical gadgets besides floor lamps and radios.

Another high-tech feature unique to the era was a built-in aerial serving that entertainment mainstay of the day, the console radio.  Rather than mounting an ugly mast on the roof as was later done for television, builders of the Twenties cleverly looped wire through the attic to form a giant hidden antenna. 

A simpler but equally useful convenience was the pass-through mailbox, in which letters dropped through a slot beside the front door slid into a small inside compartment behind a grillework door.  Alas, this charming device could never accomodate today’s huge quantities of junk mail. 

The 1920s also brought the wide use of speaking tubes, the low-tech ancestor of those garbled intercoms we’ve all learned to hate. Used mainly in upscale apartment buildings, speaking tubes were simply a network of tin pipes leading from a central panel at the front door into each apartment. Each end of the tube had a trumpet-like opening, allowing visitor and occupant to communicate without need for electronics. 

Also found in better apartment houses was central electric refrigeration, the forerunner of today’s home refrigerators.  In this system, a compressor in the basement furnished the cooling power for a small refrigerated cabinet in the kitchen of each apartment.  Cumbersome as it sounds, this was still a big advance over the standard cooling device of the era: A block of ice.  

No doubt the most technically sophisticated building innovation to take hold during the Twenties was air conditioning, a luxury so expensive that it was initially found only in movie palaces and in the best class of public buildings.  In those days, the machinery required to air-condition a building took up roughly the space of a four-car garage, and was deemed so impressive that at least one theater installed plate glass show windows to let passersby admire their mechanical wonder from the sidewalk.  

One innovation of the Twenties that never did catch on was a patented radio speaker hidden in a chandelier--a device that probably had more than a few startled dinner guests choking on their dumplings.  Then again, even this curiosity might have succeeded if the Great Depression hadn’t stopped it cold, along with all the other hijinks of this exuberant era. Thankfully, the greatest legacy of the Roaring Twenties--some of the most charming and livable houses in America--still largely survives.

BYZANTINE BRIBERY

Some years back, the FBI raided San Francisco’s Department of Building Inspection and arrested an official for allegedly taking bribes from a contractor.  It was yet another embarassment for an organization that, rightly or wrongly, has long suffered from a reputation for favoritism and improprieties.  At the time of the arrest, the department had been under FBI investigation for five years.  

This event got me to thinking about the nature of corruption in building and planning departments--not just in San Francisco, but across the country.  It would be easy to blame a few bad apples for this not-uncommon problem, but in fact the process may deserve as much  blame as the personnel.  

Bribery is, of course, one way of circumventing normal channels that don’t function adequately. In the days of the old U.S.S.R., for example, staple foods like chicken, beef, and pork were often very scarce. Not surprisingly, corruption flourished under these conditions. While ordinary Russians routinely stood in line for hours for the chance to buy a few scraps of meat, people with money and influence could easily obtain fine wine, caviar, chocolate, or anything else they fancied. 

Thankfully, in the United States, we don’t have to bribe the butcher to score a few pork chops--we can just pick up a package, pay for it, and leave. If only getting a building permit were so simple.  Instead, it’s become one of the most exasperating processes in all of government.  Despite the best efforts of officials in many cities, obtaining a permit often still takes more time than constructing the actual project.  

Now, generally, we Americans are a very patient people.  We don’t mind jumping through our fair share of hoops to get what we’re after.  Yet there’s a point at which a process become so onerous and complex that even reasonable people try to circumvent it--not because they have criminal minds, but because each and every one of us has a limit of tolerance for unreasonable red tape.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either.  After all, the American Revolution grew out of what normally law-abiding people saw as unfair taxation by the Crown. This kind of rebellion against unfairness is, if anything, a classic American trait.

The unfairness inherent in many big-city building permit processes is this:  Thanks to a labyrinthine bureaucracy, homeowners with ordinary resources must struggle for permission to build simple and innocuous home additions, while big-league applicants who are savvy, well-connected, and able to afford elaborate lobbying measures (whether legal or otherwise) can typically prevail with projects of far greater impact on the public.

It’s evident that if the approval process weren’t so convoluted, fewer ordinary citizens would be tempted onto the dangerous path of foregoing permits altogether.  Neither would well-connected applicants look for special treatment, nor would building officials be tempted to grant such favors in return for compensation. 

If we’re still shocked--shocked!--to find bribery in some of our building departments, we shouldn’t be. When a process becomes as byzantine as this one has, attempts to circumvent it are inevitable. And as we already know, people with means can always get their caviar, while the rest of us wait in line for scraps.

DESIGN FOR ITS OWN SAKE

Thanks to the old stereotype of the architect hunched over a drafting board, tee square in hand, many people still think that an architect’s main purpose is to draw “blueprints” (nowadays more properly called working drawings).  The trouble with this romantic notion is that it suggests that architects are paid to draw, when in fact they’re paid to think.

In truth, producing working drawings is a tedious but relatively incidental aspect of the architect’s charge.  It’s roughly analogous to taking a novel that’s been written in shorthand and typing it into a computer.  The essential creative work--if it’s been done properly--is all but finished, and only the mechanics of formatting remain. 

Alas, this preliminary thinking, which is the real kernel of the design process, takes a lot of time and effort and yet may not yield much of a tangible product until much later.  Considering this dearth of physical results, it’s gratifying that many people nevertheless perceive why spending fifteen percent or so of their building budget on architecture might be a worthwhile investment.  

Still, there are also lots of perfectly intelligent people who are mystified, annoyed, or even angered that a few sheets of drawings should take months to complete, cost them many thousands of dollars, and further delay them from getting their project under construction.  These people quite reasonably reckon that all that money spent on mere paper could buy them a bigger Jacuzzi or a fancier front door.  

I can only counter such reasoning by pointing out that architects provide a service, not a commodity.  To say that your architectural investment only buys you a few sheets of paper is like saying that the cost of a Harvard education only gets you a lousy little diploma.

There are plenty of familiar arguments for hiring a licensed architect, most of them having to do with the technical side of the process. For one thing, the high level of detail found in a good set of working drawings--far from scaring off contractors as some people fear--actually makes the bidding and construction process easier and more accurate.  For another, an experienced architect can help circumvent building code booby traps that can make for nasty (and costly) surprises during construction.  These services alone can save thousands of dollars in lost time and change orders.  Hence, that seemingly extravagant fifteen percent fee can repay itself quite rapidly.

Beyond these cut-and-dry reasons for hiring a professional, however, there’s one more--perhaps the only one that architects care passionately about--and that is the pursuit of good design for its own sake.  Obviously, there are cheaper ways to get plans drawn than by hiring an architect, and no doubt there are times when a design that’s merely “good enough” would probably suffice.  But from this architect’s perspective, at least, there can’t be much magic in this kind of undertaking.  After all, humanity’s rise over the millenia has come, not from doing things well enough, but from doing them as well as we knew how.