MORE MEANINGLESS YEAR-END STATISTICS

The Cleavers at the dining table, circa 1958:
More Americans now claim to converse in the living room.
Wally, is that true?

Since the end of a decade is a time people like to put out all kinds of dumb statistics, here's my contribution. I've culled these from the barrage of media kits I get every month, many of which feature homeowner surveys of various kinds—statistics on what type of appliances Americans want in their kitchens, what rooms they like to eat in, that sort of thing. They’re put out by manufacturers to sell a product, so naturally they’re biased in one direction or another.  Still, some of the results may surprise you:

Sorry, remodeling this 80s bath will have to wait—
the kitchen is even worse.

•  Contrary to the familiar stereotype of families conversing over dinner, some forty percent of Americans claim—I say claim—that they have most family conversations in the living room. Sort of puts the lie to the Cleavers, doesn’t it?  If this finding is true, it contradicts the current planning trends of either downsizing the living room or omitting it altogether. On the other hand, it may just show that forty percent of Americans are liars.  

•  Americans overwhelmingly agree that if they could afford to remodel just one room in their house, it would be the kitchen.  Fortunately, this fact dovetails nicely with the old real estate maxim that regards kitchens (along with baths) as one of the few types of remodels that return their investment when the house is sold.  

An island can work great, but only if you have tons and tons
of room to accommodate it.

Surprisingly, only 15% of Americans chose the bathroom as the first room they’d remodel.  Still, that was good enough to take second place on the wish list. 

•  Almost half of all homeowners would like an island cooktop in their kitchen.  Apparently, these are the people who’ve never worked at one before. While cooking islands may look great in TV kitchens, they’re patently impractical for real-life cooking.  For one thing, they require both cooking utensils and sloppy ingredients to be needlessly carried across an aisle.  Worse, they’re also tremendous space hogs, gobbling up dozens of precious square feet in useless aisle area.  My advice?  Unless you’ve got both money and space to burn, skip the island kitchen.  

Simply press the button, and twenty pounds of trash
will be turned into twenty pounds of trash.

•  Ostensibly, one in seven Americans pine for a trash compactor--an appliance that essentially turns twenty pounds of trash into twenty pounds of trash.  Actually, with all the recycling going on nowadays, most households should have very little garbage left over to compact. Ah well—chalk one up for the marketing industry.

•  Two out of three Americans want a garbage disposer. No big surprise there. Curiously, though, people in the eastern half of the nation demand batch-feed  models—those in which the stopper has to be installed to turn the machine on—

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

while out west where I am, people overwhelmingly prefer continuous-feed models.  Apparently, we westerners still like to live dangerously.  Interesting, no? 

Oh, never mind. Happy 2020.

TOUCHING ARCHITECTURE: Don't Leave Out The Tactile Dimension

Berlin'e Brandenburg Gate: Go ahead and touch it.
(Architects: Langhans and Schadow, completed 1791)

“Please don’t touch!”  

You won’t see that admonition in great buildings too often, as you usually do in museums and galleries. If architecture really is an art—”frozen music”, as Friedrich von Schelling put it in 1809—then it’s the most engaging and people-friendly art there is.  

The famous knife0edge corner of
I. M. Pei's National Gallery in
Washington D.C:: It's been touched
by a million sticky-fingered kids.

Whereas great works of painting and sculpture are almost invariably off limits, even the greatest works of architecture seldom carry such restrictions. The Brandenburg Gate doesn’t have a sign saying, “Please don’t touch the columns.”  The famously alluring knife-edged corner of I. M. Pei’s addition to the National Gallery in Washington D.C. carries the smudges from a million sticky-fingered kids, yet no one grumbles about it, except maybe the janitors. For the most part, the world’s greatest works of architecture are eminently available for tactile inspection. This is living art in the best sense.

Well, so what?

A whole plethora of textures awaits
visitors to Frank Lloyd Wright's
Fallingwater in Bear Run, Pennsylvania

Touch—the opportunity for tactile exploration of form and texture—is one of the most important yet neglected aspects of architecture. Though you may not be aware of it, when you enter a building for the first time, you don’t just look at it—you feel it. Consciously or not, you judge whether it’s flimsy or substantial, elegant or seedy, real or fake, all by touch. Do the railings wobble and the floors bounce underfoot? Or do things really feel like they’re here to stay?

Touch also provides much of the pleasure and variety in architecture. Among the most brilliant aspects of Frank Lloyd Wright’s work was his studied use of contrast in material textures. For example, his 1936 masterpiece, Fallingwater, is a virtual symphony of stone and stucco, steel and glass. As you move through it—or through any other fine work of architecture—such combinations work subliminal magic on your psyche. You come away tingling without quite knowing why.  

Today's interiors use acres of drywall,
and they feel cheap because they
ARE cheap.

Alas, today it’s the vanilla twins of stucco and drywall, along with the incomparable elegance of vinyl windows, plastic moldings, and pressboard doors, that provide the dominant textures in our homes. Our houses aren’t just built cheap—they feel cheap, too. Even though today’s pumped-up extravaganzas are routinely tarted up with crown moldings and glitzy hardware, these items usually flunk the touch test.  More often than not, they feel cheap, hollow, and flimsy.   

By contrast, textures abound in Carr Jones's
Hermans Residence, Oakland, California, 1928
(Lovely photo by my co-author Doug Keister)

Is there an alternative?  Consider the work of an architect such as Carr Jones, who built lovely, personal homes of brick, clay tile, and wrought iron. Though these are among the most ancient and humble building materials, they impart both rich textures and an incomparable sense of solidity. Thanks to them, every surface in Jones’s houses delights not only the eye, but the hand as well. 

Maybe in today’s wired, net-surfing culture, in which so many of us—including me—sit around diddling plastic keys all day, our appreciation for the genuine and permanent textures of life has slipped a little.

If so, I’m sure we’ll come around again.  I just get that feeling.

THE GRAMMAR OF ARCHITECTURE: Cut The Bull

Calvin Coolidge:
"You Lose."

Unlike the present occupant of the White House, the thirtieth president of the United States, Calvin Coolidge, 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, saying:  “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, particularly in light of today's events.  And while politicians might be the first to learn from Coolidge’s reticence, designers could take a few hints too.  

Can you guess what Frank Lloyd Wright's central theme
was for the Robie House? (Oak Park, Illinois: 1909)

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:  

Utter incoherence: Designs like this demonstrate
why simplicity is a virtue.

•  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.

Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion of 1928.
Now this was a guy who knew when to shut up.

•  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.

Don't forget that not all architecture is serious:
Spadena House, Beverly Hills, California,
Designer: Harry Oliver, 1921.

•  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.