CORONAVIRUS—And The Things We Fear

Author's Note: In this unhappy climate of coronavirus-induced fear, I thought I would reprint an old piece I wrote way back in the halcyon summer days of 2015. I hope it will be a reminder that sometimes, the things we fear are not the things we ought to fear. While the current pandemic should rightly be taken seriously—and it does seem to be—we can also find some reassurance in our old and inarguable friends, the laws of mathematics. They generally give us the story straight and unembellished.

A while back, I was invited to attend one of those neighborhood earthquake-preparedness meetings we have out here in the shaky state of California. I listened with interest as the homeowner who hosted the event described, with evident trepidation, her biggest earthquake fear: that the shaking would cause a power line to fall into the street in front of her home. What should she do in that event, and how could she escape?

Never mind the falling power lines—
watch that pottery on the top shelf.

Now, this lady happened to be an artist—a sculptor in clay—and during this anxiety-fueld discussion over power lines, she was seated directly in front of a tall, spindly hutch completely laden from top to bottom with heavy pottery she’d made, including a huge platter that was precariously balanced on the very top. I pointed out to her that she was much more likely to get beaned by her own artwork than to be harmed by a fallen power line, a remark she took with both great surprise and a touch of resentment.

I mention this to point out how distorted our perception of life’s risks can be. While this lady worried over an infinitesimally unlikely event, she was quite oblivious to the much more immediate earthquake danger of being clobbered by her own falling pottery. 

Worried about carbon monoxide?
Maybe you shouldn't be. You're two hundred
times more likely to croak behind the wheel.

Human nature being what it is, we often seem to fear esoteric risks far more than mundane ones. For example, the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning from gas appliances has been widely publicized in recent years, yet none other than the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (<cpsc.gov/cpscpub/pubs/466.html>) reports that there are typically about 170 cases of fatal carbon monoxide poisoning in domestic settings each year. By comparison, some 38,300 people died in traffic accidents during 2019, an increased risk factor of over two hundred times.   

Actually, driving provides an excellent yardstick for judging relative risk in general, since we do it so casually in the context of daily life. We worry more about burning a candle at home than we do about taking a spin to the local 7-Eleven—yet once again, the average American is ten times more likely to die in an auto accident than in a house fire. Likewise, while many people are nervous around electricity, statistically you’re about fifty times more likely to meet your doom in a car than you are to get zapped around the house.

Your car should scare you a lot more than this does.
You're fifty times more likely to
meet your doom driving than getting zapped.

For better or worse, government-mandated bans on environmental hazards such as asbestos and lead, which are often accompanied by public relations and media campaigns that emphasize danger without providing any sense of relative risk, further conflate big risks with modest ones. Indeed, manufacturers of safety goods trade heavily on such disproportionate fears, and may even amplify the perceived danger, the better to sell hazardous material test kits and the like.

The foregoing doesn’t even take into account perceived domestic risks that border on the irrational, such as phobias of microwave ovens and electromagnetic fields from power lines. Which brings us back to that lady with the pottery: She may as well relax no matter where she’s sitting, because even here in risk-prone California, her chances of being permanantly retired by an earthquake are a fairly manageable one in two million.

What, me worry?

WHY DO ARCHITECTS HAVE THOSE TRIPLE NAMES?

Frank Lloyd Wright: Did he start the
fashion for triple-barreled architect names?
(Image: Mike Siegel, The Seattle Times)

At some time or other, you’ve probably wondered why architects take on those strange, pompous-sounding triple names, right?  You know: Edward Durell Stone, William Wilson Wurster, Edward Larrabee Barnes. I don’t think architects adopt three-part names to sound pompous; I think they do it because their first and last names alone would seem too short or too dull.  I mean, how memorable is Edward Barnes without the Larrabee? 

Of course, the most famous triple name was that of Frank Lloyd Wright, whose family, due to some strange consequence of being Welsh, did more than their share of triple-name-juggling.  Wright received part of his mother’s maiden name, Lloyd Jones—why only part, I don’t know—as well as the last name of his father, William Russell Cary Wright.  After that, things got shorter, but not any clearer: Wright’s eldest son, also an architect, was just plain Lloyd Wright. Get it? Neither do I.   

Oakland's fabulous Fox Theater,
a product of Weeks & Day (1928)

Triple-whammies aren’t the most curious names in architecture, however.  There have also been a whole plethora of repeating monikers, from the famous Greene & Greene (the Craftsman kings) to Rapp & Rapp (the brilliant movie-palace-meisters) to Keck & Keck (postwar Chicago Modernists) to House & House (venerable San Francisco-based green building specialists). Other nepotistic firms, like San Francisco’s Reid Brothers, simply called a spade a spade.

Henry Hoare: Why art thou all giggling?

Then there are those serendipitous couplets that seem unnaturally abundant among architects.  For example, the firm of Reed & Stem, whose name sounds like a snack for pandas, helped bring us New York’s Grand Central Station, while Oakland’s Fox Theater harks from the chronocentric office of Weeks & Day.  San Francisco’s City Hall, of course, was whipped up by the scrumptious partnership of Bakewell & Brown. 

There have also been a few, well, unfortunately-named architects, from the English landscape designer Henry Hoare, to Boston’s Gothic Revival master Ralph Adams Cram.  Still, the grand prize must certainly go to that unlucky 18th-century French architect, Eustache Saint-Fart.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe:
Five names is better than three.

Some architects packed so much horsepower they only needed one name: Imhotep, Calicrates, Michelangelo. At least one, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, didn’t find his real name arty enough, and so invented his own: Le Corbusier.

The late architect I. M. Pei at age 100:
Bang bang bang—I wish I had a
a moniker like that.
(Image: Bobby Doherty/New York Magazine)

For a while during the Seventies, there seemed to be a lawyerly belief among architects that the more partners you had in your firm’s name, the better. Hence, venerable offices that started with one name—say, Walter Ratcliff--grew into impossible clunkers like Ratcliff, Slama, and Cadwalader. My former employers, the relatively mellifluous Reynolds & Chamberlain, briefly transformed themselves into the utterly unmanageable Reynolds, Chamberlain, Leaf, Ruano, Mowry. No wonder business slowed down. Then again, some architects, like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, didn’t have any partners at all, and still had five names.

After the laws forbidding architects from advertising were eased in the Seventies, firm names seemed to get more image-savvy.  You began to hear more hip names like Ace Architects and SITE, or else touchy-feely ones ending in Group, Collective, Collaborative, or Partners.    

Personally, as an architect whose name is rythymically mundane yet impossible to spell, I sometimes yearn for a handle with a little more firepower--something punchy and staccato, like I. M. Pei. I mean, bang-bang-bang--if I had a name like that, maybe I’d be designing skyscrapers too, instead of sitting here writing this.

ARCHITECT ESSAYS: How's That Again?

A treehouse hotel in Hana: It's one thing
to have architects design them,
but quite another to let them write about it.

In Hana, Hawaii some years back, there was a design competition in which architects were supposed to design a treehouse. Sounds like fun, right? Can’t turn that into some heavy-handed philosophical thing, right?

Wrong.

While many of the ideas were fascinating, the sponsor made the mistake of also asking the architects to write about their designs. With their usual aplomb, many managed to turn this endearing concept into another leaden opportunity to proselytize.  

My favorite quote came from an architect who wrote: “A treehouse is neither a tree nor a house. It establishes a symbiotic relationship between the tree and a house.  Our intervention is interwoven within the tree. Its movement allows this relationship to fluctuate, blurring the edges.” 

St. Pauls Cathedral, and the fussy balustrade
insisted on by the "ladies" on St. Paul's
Board of Commissioners.

Bad enough that we have to tolerate the sort of palaver found in both trade and popular magazines about architecture. Now architects themselves seem convinced that, in order to appear sophisticated, they too have to express themselves in gauzy riddles.  

That’s a shame, for one of the marks of a great architect is the ability to explain an  idea with clarity and simplicity--a skill that goes back centuries.    

The brilliant Sir Christopher Wren was charged with rebuilding London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral after the Great Fire of 1666. From the outset, Wren found his work being  tampered with by the meddlesome old men who formed the church’s board of commissioners. When construction reached the tops of the walls, he saw to his dismay that the board had once again interceded, substituting a rather fussy parapet with balusters for the plain one he’d designed. Wren coolly responded to this affront by observing: “Ladies think nothing well without an edging.” 

A typical Chicago Queen Anne of the 1880s: Frank Lloyd Wright
was no fan of "the murderous corner tower" or much else, for that matter..

Frank Lloyd Wright, for all his 19th-century-style purple prose, could also express himself with both immediacy and wit. In his autobiography, he described the Queen Anne-style houses he’d found in Chicago shortly after his arrival in the 1880s:

“All had the murderous corner-tower...either rectangular across the corner, round, or octagonal, eventuating in candle-snuffer roofs, turnip domes or corkscrew spires. I walked along miles of this expensive mummery, trying to get into the thinking processes of the builders.  Failed to get hold of any thinking they had done at all.”

Edward Durell Stone's US Embassy in Delhi, c. 1960:
Sixty years on, its "permanence, formality, and dignity"
confirm that Stone practiced what he preached.

In the 1960s, architect Edward Durell Stone spoke along similar lines, although in this case, he was renouncing his own Modernist heritage: “Style has been overemphasized:  There are books devoted to architecture that do not show plans explaining the basic conception...architecture is not millinery. Fashions pass by, buildings remain to become grim reminders of transient enthusiasms.”

In a prescient sentence I wish I’d written, he concluded: “Much of our modern architecture lacks (the) intangible quality of permanence, formality and dignity. It bears more resemblance to the latest model automobile, depending upon shining, metallic finish--doomed to early obsolescence.”

Stone made that statement almost forty years ago. If only more of today’s architects could see that clearly and speak that plainly. Instead, even with a subject as endearingly simple as a treehouse, we get cryptic psychobabble references to “fluctuating symbiotic relationships”, “interwoven interventions”, and movements “blurring the edges.” 

Blurring indeed.