THE BEAUTY OF THE COURTYARD HOME

Traditional Persian courtyard house
with pool at center.

Not long ago, in a bleak industrial suburb of San Francisco, I came upon an old house wedged incongruously between a mustard factory and a plating shop. From the street, there was little to see but a garage and a blank facade, with a narrow gate squeezed between them.  

But beyond the gate was a long narrow passage, and when I reached the end of it I had to pinch myself: I was standing in an amazingly lush secret garden, snugly surrounded by the picturesque bays and roofs of the house. At its center, a waterfall burbled placidly into a meandering koi pond, and narrow paths snaked away into mysterious recesses beyond the cool plants. Compared to the harsh streetscape outside, it may as well have been Wonderland.    

That’s the magic of a courtyard house: It can feel placid and secure in even the most unfavorable location. The ancient Persians, who knew something about harsh surroundings, were wise to this concept thousands of years ago. They built their houses around central gardens designed as miniature representations of paradise, emphasizing the water that was so precious in the parched lands beyond their walls.  

Atrium of a reconsturcted Roman villa at Pompeii,
with the columned peristyle offering shade to
the surrounding rooms.

Urban Roman houses also turned their backs to the street, preferring to face inward toward a garden court they called the atrium.  

But the courtyard house reached its ultimate expression in China. Among the most famous of these is the Wang Shi Yuan (“garden of the master of the fishing nets”), located in a densely-populated district of Suzhou. Despite its crowded setting, the moment one enters the house and gardens, all thoughts of urban congestion vanish. The cleverly convoluted arrangement of pavilions, plants, and water makes the tiny residence seem boundless. 

The Garden of the Master of Nets, located in my second home
of Suzhou, China, is actually a residence
surrounding a central courtyard. First constructed
in 1140, it was restored in 1785.

Given the many advantages of the courtyard house, why don’t we see more of them in the United States? Originally, it was because of our country’s vast area and relatively sparse population. We simply got used to building a monolithic house smack in the center of a huge piece of land. Back then, there was little point in having an enclosed court.

Things have changed, however. Population has increased by magnitudes, and even our formerly spacious suburban lots have shrunk to minimal size, leaving little useful land surrounding our homes. Moreover, urban and suburban streets have become less friendly year by year, making security a top consideration of urban and suburban dwellers.   

The gated courtyard house offers an elegant and time-honored solution to these problems, and many more.  

Traditional Spanish courtyard home in Cordoba.

Unfortunately, U.S. zoning codes haven’t kept pace with the changes in our cities, and they continue to make it difficult to build courtyard houses. Because of long-entrenched setback requirements, regulators continue to frown on zero-setback construction in many residential areas. Most cities continue to demand that homes be surrounded by useless, narrow strips of “setback” land. They still regard a house set in the middle of a property as the norm, making it difficult for progressive builders who wish to use their sites more intelligently.

It’s time our city planners began looking at courtyard houses as a better alternative to conventional, land-wasting houses. Far from being newfangled, it’s an arrangement proven for centuries.  

ARCHITECT FURNITURE: Ouch

Chair designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for the dining room
of the Frderick C. Robie house, Chicago (1909):
Sit up straight, or else.

In a rare moment of humility, Frank Lloyd Wright once conceded:  “I’d hate to admit how many black-and-blue marks I’ve gotten from sitting in my own furniture.”  Wright’s horrific chair designs, with their bolt-upright backs and sharp edges, seem more suited to a medieval torture chamber than to his brilliant and airy interiors.

Wright isn’t alone, however. Modern architects in general are notorious for their dreadful furniture designs. If you’ve ever sat in one of Marcel Breuers’s famed Wassily armchairs—designed in 1926 and still considered a paragon of Modernist style—you’ll know what I’m talking about. Stark and striking to look at, all leather straps and chrome tubing, it’s nonetheless a trial to sit down in.

Wassily chair: Like it or not,
you're going downhill.

Unlike an ordinary chair, which allows the sitter to change positions as comfort or etiquette dictates, there’s only one way to sit in a Wassily chair: the way the architect intended. It’s impossible to sit attentively at the front edge of the seat, for example—the slippery leather is so steeply raked that one inevitably slides back down into the chair. Once there, the razor-strop-like back and seat soon begin to dig uncomfortably into the skin. A few minutes of sitting quickly make it clear that appearance, not comfort, was Breuer’s primary concern.

An even more renowned piece of architect-designed furniture is Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona chair of 1929. To this day, it’s an expensive fixture in every snooty furniture outlet. But as lovely as it is to look at, it’s a sad excuse for a seat. The huge, gridded cushions don’t conform to one’s back or gluteus maximus; in fact, the slumping curve of the backrest opposes that of a normal spine. It’s just the seat to offer to guests whom you don’t want sticking around.  

Chair created by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
for the German Pavilion at the
International Exposition in Barcelona, 1929.
Comfortable—if you're built like Gumby.

The architect Philip Johnson nevertheless adored Barcelona chairs, and made them a centerpiece in the living room of his famous glass-box house of 1950. In their defense, he opined: “I think that comfort is a function of whether a chair is good-looking or not.” In other words, anyone with taste would like them just fine.    

It’s ironic that the Modernists, who were always trumpeting functionalism, were the worst transgressors in the dreadful-furniture department. Modernist chairs might have been stunning works of art, but as objects intended for comfortable seating, they were often less functional than the most ormolu-encrusted chair of Louis XIV.

The standard metal folding chair: More comfortable
than any of the above—and not designed by an architect.
If you're interested, look up "Nathaniel Alexander".

What makes contemporary architects so hopeless at designing furniture? I think it’s the same thing that makes many of them bad at designing people-friendly buildings: an overriding concern with radical style at the expense of function and comfort. Too many architects are terrified to do something that might be construed as traditional or evolutionary, and so are willing to abandon what centuries of history has taught them about humankind for the sake of newness and novelty.

No amount of well-meaning theory or rationalization will change people’s natural habits, however.  If you like to sit on a chair sideways, or slumped down, or with your legs crossed, for example, you’re more likely to choose a chair that accommodates you than you are to adjust your behavior. Still, architects seem ever-hopeful that the power of their ideas can change the way people behave. And hey—sit up straight when you’re reading this.

DESIGNING ROOFS: Don't Get Carried Away

Can you count how many different roof types
are visible on this house?
(1890s-era Queen Anne Victorian
on Military Street in Port Huron, Michigan).
Victorians could get away with this,
but you may not be able to.

Every day I see more new traditional-style homes topped by tortured, often incomprehensible roofscapes. Variety is good. Surprise is good.  Bedlam isn’t.

You can’t design an interesting roof simply by melding a bunch of disparate roof shapes together. Even if you’re after a picturesque effect, the elements have to be deliberately composed, and with a touch of restraint at that. Even the most flamboyant Victorian houses will, on close inspection, reveal basically simple roof shapes enlivened by carefully-controlled accents such as turrets and dormers.

If you’re into the Grand Teton school of roof design, it’s especially critical to think through your roof scheme very carefully—it’ll probably be the most visible part of the building. With that in mind, here’s a quick rundown of common roof shapes, followed by some suggestions and caveats for combining them:

Classic gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial home
featuring the English-style "dustpan" dormer.

•  A gable roof is the most familiar type, having two sloping planes with a triangular gable wall at each end. By contrast, a hip roof slopes on all four sides, yielding corner “hips” that climb toward the center. A flat roof has little or no pitch. A shed roof is sort of like a tilted flat roof—it slopes in one plane only.  A gambrel (commonly seen on barns) has two different pitches: steep on the sides, and shallow on top. A mansard has a very steep pitch on all four sides and a flat roof on top, often concealing an attic story inside.

Once upon a time, bargeboards
were a favorite location for ornament.
Not so much today.

A few technical terms may be useful here: Roof slope (properly called pitch) is described in inches of vertical rise over horizontal run—a “4-in-12” roof, for example, has rafters that rise 4 inches in every 12 inches of horizontal distance. The peak of a roof is called the ridge. The lower edge is called the eave. The sloping side edge on shed, gable and gambrel roofs is variously known as the rake, the verge, or the barge—pick your favorite. And now some game rules:

Mansard-roofed Victorian, circa the 1880s.

•  Limit yourself to just one or two roof shapes. For picturesque roofs, the two most compatible shapes are gables and hips; they were a favorite on late Victorian houses such as Queen Annes. Flat roofs, too, will combine with almost every other type, though they won’t always produce an intelligible style.

Other roof shapes are much more difficult to combine successfully. Sheds, hips, gambrels and mansards will usually get into a stylistic brawl when any two are combined. If you pine for one of these shapes, it’s safest to use it exclusively. If you’re adding onto an existing building, the rules are even simpler—copy the pitch, massing and details of the roof that's already there.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Robie House, Chicago, c. 1909:
Now that's a real roof overhang.

•  Use powerful proportions.  If you want overhangs, make them generous—at least two feet or so.   Use heavy barge rafters to prevent the sloping roof edge from looking papery. If you're planning  to have a fascia (a trim board behind the gutter), make it substantial as well.  Avoid fussy elements such as narrow sub-roofs and tiny dormers; they usually end up looking like Snoopy’s doghouse.  When in doubt, make elements bigger than they need to be.

•  Unless you’re absolutely sure of the effect you’re after, avoid combining different roof pitches. More often than not, varied pitches look disorganized or, worse, like a construction error. Stick to a uniform pitch, and rely on the size and arrangement of roof masses for effect.

THE CULT OF MINIMALISM

Minimalist kitchen: Oops, I spilled the molasses.

It’s no wonder architects have such a dreadful reputation among practical-minded people.
Some of us really ask for it. For example, I recently saw a so-called “kitchen” designed by a trendy British architect. Though I generally bend over backward to remain impartial, I’ve just got to come right out and say it: As a kitchen, the design was utterly ludicrous. It consisted of a few huge slabs of Carrara marble serving as counters in an otherwise flawlessly barren space finished with fanatical attention to detail. More telling, however, is what was absent. There wasn’t a single unscripted item—like a cooking utensil, maybe?—that was allowed to disfigure the absolute purity of the architect’s conception.

Minimalist "living" room:
Come on in and make yourself at home.

I was enormously pleased to learn that this kitchen was in the architect’s own home.  I couldn’t think of anyone more deserving.

The cult of minimalist architecture essentially consists of spending the maximum money possible on the least visual results. It has its roots in the International Style of the 1930s, when many architects blindly accepted Le Corbusier’s motto of  “less is more” with little independent thought and even less humor. Architects loved the pseudo-science and precision of the International Style, which for a change made them feel like intellectuals instead of artistically gifted louts.

The public, however, hated the International Style. And although it took fifty years, popular opinion finally managed to stamp it out, no thanks to us architects.

A bathroom, or a near-death experience?
(Architect: Wannemacher+Moeller GmbH.
Photography: Jose Campos)

Still, despite the International Style’s thorough trouncing in popular opinion, its ever-chic minimalist branch has refused to die. Instead, like a spoiled child, it survives on vast-budgeted commissions from the ultra-rich who, incidentally, are the only people who can afford houses no one can really live in.

While the two terms “minimalist” and “vast-budgeted” would seem to be in opposition, they aren't: As the Modernists quickly learned, the more pristine and perfect a design must be, the more it costs to build. So, given the extravagant materials and pointlessly fanatical standards of finish demanded by minimalist architects, big money is a precondition of this style.

In fact, were it not continually subsidized by the over-rich and slavishly showcased by snob magazines, minimalist architecture would quickly die of its own disconnection from reality. The reason is simple: Minimalism runs counter to the laws of entropy. Rather than being in harmony with the inevitable effects of time—wear, aging, and kids spilling Cokes—these obsessively-finished environments are predicated on time standing still. They aspire to a sort of encapsulated perfection, like a gem under a bell jar.

By the way, if you don't like minimalism in white,
here it is in gray.

We’ve already seen how well that approach worked for the Modernists: It didn’t. But at least they made a pretense of doing some social good with their every-man-equal ideals. Minimalist architecture can’t even lay claim to that.  Beneath its pretense of asceticism, it’s just an inverse version of showboating.

In the years since the last gasps of Modernism, we’ve learned (or thought we had) that real people with real lives can’t be fit into theoretical constructs, no matter how elegant or rational.

Most can’t, anyway. So, Mr. Minimalist Architect—I hope you really love your new kitchen.