NOT MANY OF THOSE LEFT...

How often have you told someone, “I  wish I hadn’t thrown out that old such-and-such, because now it’s a collector’s item. I could probably get big bucks for it.”

True, if you could put every trendy thing you’ve ever bought into a time capsule for fifty years, you’d have a pretty handsome retirement fund. No matter how cheesy a thing seems in retrospect, it eventually rises again. Just look at the current renaissance of pink plastic flamingos and Plymouth Valiants.

One of the interesting things about fashion trends is that the bigger they are, the harder they fall, and the bigger they are when they come back. In the mid-1950s, for example, cars with tail fins were the absolute pinnacle of style. Within a few years, finned cars were so ubiquitous that people got sick and tired of them, and they became an embarrassment instead of a fashion statement.  Today, of course, these same cars are valuable collectors items, and the more outlandish, the better. 

The same applies to architectural styles and domestic decorating trends. During the Sixties, for instance, no fashionable living room was complete without an ultra-square, ultra-uncomfortable sofa flanked by clunky table lamps with shades as big as garbage cans. Along with these went a sleek wooden cabinet combining a lousy radio, a lousy turntable, and four lousy speakers--an apparatus known as a “hi-fi”, for those of you weaned on iPods. By the Seventies, though, all of these swingin’ accessories were migrating to landfills by the millions.

This same holds true for every fashion cycle: Pretty much anything that’s coveted in one era will be despised in the next . We tend to think that our own time--that is, the present--has some kind of special immunity to bad taste, but that’s simply not true. What we find to be unassailably tasteful today will be hated kitsch soon enough. So, you Arts and Crafts aficionados--watch out.

Curiously, the same mysterious forces that create and then destroy fashions also invariably bring them back again, whether we like it or not. Hence, some of today’s hippest folks are outfitting Mid-Century Modern living rooms filled with just the sort of junk I was denigrating earlier. This means it won’t be long before my own particular nightmare comes true, and those incomparably clumsy, ugly and gross furniture designs of the 1970s start showing up in hipster magazines.

The fact that everything--even the stuff we hate--comes around again might suggest that we pack all our discards in Cosmoline and wait around for fifty years. Some of us might actually do this if we had the room. For the most part, though, we just learn to let go of things and assume that somebody, somewhere will keep a few examples.

Knowing this may help prepare you for the moment, fifty years from now, when you hobble into an antique shop and find that that crummy Ikea desk you took to the dump now sells for five thousand dollars.

EBAY: A PROFUSION OF STYLISTIC CONFUSION

The names of architectural styles are often invoked, but seldom used precisely. Even people who should know better conflate styles, whether intentionally or not. In real estate listings, for instance, nondescript old piles are routinely elevated to Victorians, Bungalows, or whatever else happens to be selling. Architects aren’t immune from such stylistic confusion, either: Many of us bandy about terms like Tudor, Elizabethan and Half-Timbered, or Mission, Mediterranean and Moorish without really knowing how they differ.

Still, you’ll never find more stylistic muddlement in one place than you will browsing vintage items listed on eBay. Casual descriptions from lay sellers are understandable, but the many others who represent themselves as antique or collectibles dealers really ought to know what they’re offering. Granted, the idea is to cram as many key words into these listings as possible so that they’ll show up under various search categories--but many examples go well beyond the pale. Here, for instance, are some actual listings for vintage lighting fixtures being auctioned on eBay:

• “1920s Victorian Fixture.” By definition, the term Victorian refers to things dating from the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 to 1901), making this object pretty much of an impossibility. What the seller meant, I suppose, was that the lamp was ornate, and perhaps he or she should have just said so.

• “Vintage Victorian Art Deco Lighting Fixture.” Here’s another time-warped descriptions. The Paris exhibition from which Art Deco took its name didn’t even take place until 1925, nor did the style get much traction in the U.S. until the early 1930s. This, you’ll recall, was long after poor old Victoria had joined the choir invisible. Perhaps the seller could have classified his lamp based on this simple test: Victorian objects typically have lots of floral and/or classical motifs more or less jumbled together. Art Deco objects, on the other hand, have stark geometric decoration in shallow relief. 

• “Circa 1920 Art Deco Ceiling Lamp.”  Once again, time runs miraculously backward. 

• “Art Deco Nouveau Ceiling Lamp.” If this description were accurate, it would be a  lamp worth seeing, since these two styles are just about diametrically opposed. The earlier style, Art Nouveau, spanned roughly the years 1890 to 1905. It made lavish use of sinuous plant motifs such as meandering vines and leaves, with hardly a straight line to be found. Art Deco, as we’ve just noted, caught on a generation later, and was uncompromisingly geometric.

• If you think the foregoing descriptions run the gamut, how about this one: “Art Deco Medieval Tudor Porch Lamp.” Let’s see--the Middle Ages, the early English renaissance, and the eye-popping modernism of Art Deco all in one lighting fixture. It turns out that the actual imagery on the lamp--a ring of three fretwork panels depicting speeding chariots, each separated by a flaming-torch motif--was Roman. I can say this with confidence, because the lamp is now hanging in my office.

• Lastly, amid all this stylistic hooey, here’s an accidentally accurate listing: “Rare 1910s Victorian Deco Pendant Fixture”. Yup--that’s a rare one, all right. 

THEY DON’T MAKE ‘EM LIKE THEY USED TO

I often hear people say of some old house, “Wow, they don’t build ‘em like this anymore.” To which I’m often tempted to add, “And it’s a good thing, too.” There’s a lot to be said for the aesthetic of older homes--I’ve said a good deal of it myself--but on the technical side, houses are far better built today than they were just thirty years ago, let alone sixty or a hundred years.  

For one, we know a lot more about protecting houses from all the bad things that can happen to them. Take fire safety: Older houses were built with wooden lath that made perfect kindling, single-wall furnace flues that could rust out and overheat, and damage- and overload-prone knob-and-tube wiring that could smolder and start fires. Modern houses are built with flame-resistent gypsum wallboard, double-wall flues, and better protected wiring systems. They’re also required to have smoke detectors, perhaps the most worthwhile life safety feature of all.

New houses also hold up much better in earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes.  Prewar houses typically had little or no foundation reinforcement and were sheathed with horizontal boards that gave very little lateral strength. They also had rather casually connected floors, walls, and roofs. Today’s houses, on the other hand, have well reinforced foundations, enormously strong plywood shearwalls to resist wracking, and a host of inexpensive yet very effective metal connectors, the sum of which allows new homes to survive natural catastrophes that would probably destroy an older home.

But safety isn’t the only thing that’s improved. New houses are several times more energy efficient than those of just a generation ago, thanks to mandates for better floor, wall, ceiling and duct insulation, double-glazed windows, and more efficient furnaces and lighting.

They’re also more durable. Modern copper water pipes, for example, will easily last the life of the structure, which certainly can’t be said for the rust-prone galvanized steel pipe found in most older homes.  And the “engineered lumber” used in today’s houses--much of it made from mill waste that used to be thrown out or burned--is stronger pound for pound than the solid-sawn lumber used by builders of yore. Even modern glass is better: While the french doors in old houses contain plain glass that shatters into dagger-like shards, the tempered glass required in modern doors crumbles into harmless little granules when broken.

Given that today’s homes are technically superior to yesterday’s, why do developers try so hard to make their new houses look as if they were old? And why do so many people still prefer to live in an old house with all the infirmities noted above?  No doubt it has something to do with the peculiar human tendency to idealize bygone times. Or as the writer and humorist Finley Peter Dunne put it, “The past always looks better than it was; it’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.”

That can’t be the whole story, though. To my mind, when people say they don’t build houses like they used to, they’re not really talking about lumber, pipes, and wiring. They’re talking about the one elusive quality you can’t build into any new house, no matter what the price:  The inimitable dignity of a genuine past.

NUTS, BOLTS, AND RIVETS

NUTS , BOLTS AND RIVETS

In the early 1930s, the Pennsylvania Railroad hired the famed industrial designer Raymond Loewy to restyle its exceedingly ugly electric locomotives.  True to form, the Parisian-born Loewy came up with the GG-1, a stunningly fluid design sheathed in streamlined steel.  The railroad gamely built a prototype, stitching it together with thousands of rivets in the usual manner of the time.  When Loewy was first presented this real-life embodiment of his concept, he demanded in his strong French accent:  “What are all those buttons?”

There’s a lesson here for people designing buildings as well:  Even a great design can be done in by the sort of unavoidable, nuts-and-bolts infrastructure items every building requires--visible pipes, wires, vents, flues, meters, and what have you.  As unsexy as they are, don’t fail to think through these kinds of details, don’t put them off to the last minute, and never, ever leave them up to installers to figure out as they go along.  Here are some notorious examples:

•  Gas meters, electric meters, and electrical entrance panels--none of which are very lovely to look at--should be assigned to a spot that’s completely invisible from the street, ideally in a recessed or screened area.  Never place these items on the front of the building.  Since meters are increasingly read remotely, access is less of an issue than it used to be, but you should still check with your local utility for any restrictions on placement. 

•  Figure out where each and every downspout will go.  Unless you’re using them as outright ornaments--a rare strategy--then the less visible they are, the better.  Never put downspouts on the front of the house if the sides will serve just as well. Don’t snake them all over the walls to avoid obstructions--figure out the most direct and least conspicuous route ahead of time.  Lastly, don’t use more downspouts than you need.  Contrary to usual practice, it’s seldom necessary to have more than one downspout for every forty or so feet of gutter. 

•  Don’t let plumbing vents sprout like acne on an otherwise pristine roof.  First off, have your plumber combine nearby vents together at attic level, leaving the fewest possible pipes penetrating the roof.  If necessary, run the remaining vents laterally so that they exit the roof in a reasonably inconspicuous place. This extra effort will be doubly worthwhile, since in addition to looking bad, plumbing vents are among the most likely spots for leaks to develop . 

•  Water heater and furnace flues should also be barred from conspicuous roof surfaces whenever possible. In modernist designs, flues can sometimes be used as a design feature, but that trick won’t wash with traditional styles.  Instead, you can usually run multiple flues into a single false chimney, which both reduces the rooftop clutter and offers potential for an interesting design feature.

Oh, and about that streamlined locomotive:  At Raymond Loewy’s insistence, all the subsequent examples of the GG-1 were built with a smooth, welded skins instead of being “buttoned” together with rivets.  Today, it’s considered among the great industrial designs of all time.

THE FINISH-GO-ROUND

Which do you prefer, shiny finishes or matte ones?  New-looking finishes, or old? Granite, glass, and chrome, or brick, wood, and iron?  

All of these have gone in and out of fashion over the years. We tend to think that any finish that’s popular in our own time is the ultimate word in good taste, but we couldn't be more wrong.  No matter how execrable an outdated finish may seem today, you can be sure that it, too, was the height of good taste in its own time, and that sooner or later it’ll be chic all over again.  So, you haters of Harvest Gold appliances--beware.

The popularity of some finishes--paint colors, for example--simply depends on the cyclical comings and goings of fashion.  Color fads are largely created by the industries involved, although clever marketing makes it seem like consumers are driving the demand.  And since the prior color fad must be portrayed as unappealingly dated before the “new” colors can perk up sales again, successive color trends are intentionally extreme, running from pastels to primaries to whites to deep saturated tones, the better to differentiate what’s hip from what’s hopelessly passé.   

New technologies bring other types of finishes to the fore. In the mid-19th century, for instance, raw brass, which tarnished to a clove-brown color if it wasn’t kept polished, was the usual material for hardware and plumbing fittings. In the late 1880s, though, the introduction of nickel-plated fittings quickly made tarnished brass obsolete. Despite nickel’s propensity to wear through to the metal underneath, it remained popular until the arrival of more durable chromium-plated finishes around 1930.  

Chrome has had an exceptionally long popular run because of its ease of maintenance.  Still, when earth-toned colors were being pushed during the 1970s, brass came back for an encore.  This time, though, a clear lacquer coating was used in an attempt to keep it permanently shiny.  Eventually, in their never-ending pursuit for fresh offerings, manufacturers also came up with artificially patinated finishes--brushed brass, antique brass, and the like--that tried to mimic the warmth of natural patination.  

This brings up another force behind popular finish trends that can influence both marketers and consumers alike--that of historical circumstance. After World War I, for example, American soldiers returned from the front charmed by rural Europe’s timeworn vernacular architecture, and by the early 1920s intentionally rustic or distressed finishes such as hammered iron, mottled stucco, and adze-marked wood were showing up in new houses.  During the late Twenties, though, another historic event--the 1925 Paris exposition that give the world Art Deco--helped drive a complete reversal of this trend.  By the early 1930s, smooth, highly polished surfaces such as glass, tile, and Monel metal had made rustic and patinated finishes look laughably outdated.  

And so it goes--one finish vogue arriving, another departing.  Yet no matter how unfashionable a finish may seem to our marketing-biased senses, rest assured it never permanently leaves the scene:  One of today’s more popular finishes, oil-rubbed bronze, is neither plated nor lacquered, and therefore oxidizes to a clove-brown color and develops wear highlights very much like the old unlacquered brass of Victorian times. In other words, after a century and a half, some things are pretty much back where they started.

WELCOME TO NOWHERE

Traveling the United States has, among other things, gently tutored me that the residents of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania pronounce their town’s name WILKS-bree, not Wilks-BAR; that the good citizens of Vermont call their capital MontPEELyer, not MontepeLEER, and that that lovely town in southern California is called LaHOYA even though it’s spelled La Jolla. These are nuggets of everyday wisdom that book learning can seldom impart, but that being on the spot can teach one in a hurry.

Alas, traveling the U.S. also reveals a dismaying transformation that’s more obvious year by year:  What was once a nation of kaleidoscopic architectural variety is slowly being turned into a homogeneous landscape stretching from coast to coast--one in which freeways and boulevards, suburbs and downtowns all look more or less like their counterparts everywhere else.

As a nation founded on individualism, it’s a sad trend, especially since it’s being furthered by a number of forces we usually think of as positive.

One is our ever-increasing speed of travel and communication.  Among the earliest such milestones was rail travel, whose speed and convenience profoundly shrank the nation during the latter half of the nineteenth century, linking city, farm, and suburb.  Our familiar standard time zones--an attempt to rationalize train schedules nationwide--are one enduring legacy of this period, 

A generation later, the rise of the automobile set off even more dramatic changes, culminating in the construction of the interstate highway system after World War II.  And as American cities were brought closer, regional distinctions became more blurred.  The interstates also hastened the rise of standardized architecture, beginning with off-the-shelf designs of gasoline stations, hamburger joints, and motels.  Suburban shopping centers were next, anchored first by large chain department stores and later by the ubiquitous big-box outlets. 

Now the last bastions of regional distinction, the downtown cores, are succumbing to the same brand of monotony.  In city after city, shopping streets are lined almost exclusively with the usual suspects--the Gaps, Barnes & Nobles, Banana Republics, and the other overfamiliar retail chains--bringing on a rather queasy sense of deja vu. Is this Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine?  

Civic design review boards, who fancy themselves the guardians of the built environment, have only helped increase urban banality by promoting the idea that there are “right” and “wrong” styles of architecture for such settings. At the moment, traditionalism is the reflexively “right” style, and those eerily similar shopping streets with their happy applique storefronts are as much a product of modern planning ideals as they are of chain-store commercialism.   

Lastly, for all its positive effects in networking America, the very universality of the Internet is ironically helping dissolve what few traces of regional idiosyncrasy remain.  What a loss it will be if the brilliantly uneven patchwork quilt that is America is allowed to fade into a monotone devoid of the offbeat or the unexpected--a  nation whose cities have been Wal-Marted, Old Navied and Starbucked, networked and new-urbanized into lookalike places, set apart by little more than signposts reading “Welcome to Wilkes-Barre”, or Montpelier, or La Jolla, or your town.

STILL HANDING US SETBACKS

“Let every house be placed...in the middle of its plat,” said one of America’s best-known city planners, “...so there may be ground on each side for gardens or orchards or fields, that it may be a green country town, which will never be burnt and always wholesome.”

It’s a tribute to the framer of this dictum that modern city planners still fervently adhere to it.  The trouble is, it was made by William Penn, the founder of Pennsylvania, around the time he laid out Philadelphia in 1682.  A lot has changed since then, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at our planning codes.

Even though residential building lots have shrunken from acres in Penn’s time to a few thousand square feet in our own, most suburban planning codes hardly acknowledge the difference.  They still doggedly insist on strips of setback land surrounding houses, no matter how narrow or useless.  

Essentially, setbacks are reserved areas on each edge of your property, like margins on a page, that you’re not allowed to build upon.  The idea is to help ensure William Penn’s ideal of houses spaced well apart, with usable land on all sides.  Given the long historic trend toward higher land prices, smaller lots, and bulkier houses, however, many suburban setback requirements no longer make sense.  

Today’s typical five-foot side yard setbacks, for example, serve mainly to mandate sunless, useless slivers of land between houses. Yet rather than doing away with these vestigial separations altogether, moribund planning codes stubbornly cling to them, stymieing the growth of more intelligent arrangements.

Among these alternatives is zero lot-line development, a way of laying out houses so that one long side--ideally the north side--lies directly on the property line.  The strip of setback land normally required on that side can then be compounded with the setback on the opposite side of the house, yielding one larger and more useful outdoor court, while leaving the actual distance between houses unchanged.  

Typically, to comply with fire codes, houses in zero lot-line arrangements have a solid, windowless wall on the north.  While this feature draws moans of horror from design-review zombies who demand lots of happy-happy windows, it actually enhances both privacy and energy efficiency.  What’s more, it allows proportionately more glass to open onto the south-facing outdoor space.  

Another land-friendly alternative is the courtyard house, which takes the zero lot-line format and bends it into a U-shape or a rectangle.  In this case, all of the outside walls lie on the property line, much like an urban commercial building. Completely enclosing the court in this way gives additional space and privacy without squandering a single square inch to unusable setback land. 

If these sound like radical new ideas, they’re not.  Cities in Asia and the Middle East have benefitted from such arrangements for thousands of years.  Nevertheless, Americans who’d like to develop their own land more intelligently still face an almost insurmountable setback battle in most planning jurisdictions.  After three hundred-some-odd years, even William Penn might find that pretty silly.