ARCHITEXT by Arrol Gellner

THE POWER OF PLACE

2012-02-27T12:50:00.000-08:00

Growing up, I got used to seeing the U.S. Capitol on the evening news, usually rising majestically behind Dan Rather as he reported on some national crisis or other. Over the years, its domed-and-colonnaded form has assumed almost mythical proportions. It is, after all, the focal point of what is still the world’s most powerful nation.

Yet when I finally visited Washington DC in my thirties, I was a little let down to find that the Capitol, too, was a merely-mortal and somewhat tired-looking building--one with crooked light switches, runs in the paint, blocked-up windows, and all the other infirmities of an aging structure occupied and continually modified by humans.

That visit made me realize that the real emotional power of man-made structures--even monumental ones like the Capitol--lies not so much in their physical splendor as in the record of human events they represent.

Of course the Capitol is physically impressive. Yet what really transcends all that marble and mortar is the sum of what’s transpired there during the last two hundred-odd years. Crossing the echoing rotunda beneath the Capitol dome, for example, who could help but recall the grainy TV images of John F. Kennedy’s flag-draped casket at its center? It’s this human record that gives the Capitol its mythical proportions--the cavalcade of people and events, and the traces they leave behind over the passage of decades and centuries.

Yet such emotional power isn’t confined to monumental structures like the Capitol. In the New Mexico desert west of Alamogordo, for instance, is a barren spot where you’ll find nothing more imposing than some rusted steel bars and broken concrete jutting from the ground. They are the sole vestiges of a hundred-foot-tall steel tower that was instantly boiled away to vapor by the world’s first atomic bomb.

“The Gadget”--as the bomb was known by its designers--was exploded atop the tower on the early morning of July 16, 1945. The cataclysmic fireball, which one observer described as “the brightest light I have ever seen, or that I think anyone has seen,” fused the surrounding desert sand into a sea of glass.

In 1965, a small stone obelisk was built at the exact center of where the tower stood, marking the world’s first Ground Zero. Yet it’s the tower’s ravaged foundations that carry the real emotional force, standing in mute testament to one of the seminal moments in all history--that frozen split-second in which the atom’s terrible power was first unleashed on humankind.

But better to conclude with a more upbeat example: Your house. No doubt you remember the day you moved in--how slightly odd it felt hanging your clothes in an unfamiliar closet, and stowing your Bisquick in a stranger’s cupboard. Yet every event that’s transpired there since that day has served to strengthen your ties to the place. However humble its physical structure might be, its emotional importance is, in its own way, monumental.

Whether we’re talking about the U.S. Capitol, Trinity Site, or your house, the emotional power of place springs, not just from what we see, but from everything we’ve come to know.

MY SIX-STEP PROGRAM

2012-02-20T15:22:00.000-08:00

Have you seen those motivational speakers on public TV--the ones who can fix all life’s troubles with a few simple guidelines? You can tell the things they say are incredibly profound, because the camera is always cutting away to the audience smiling knowingly, nodding in rapt agreement, or holding back tears. As for me, alas, I soon switch back to reruns of The Simpsons and life goes on as before.

Until now, that is. I’m now a fully-empowered architecture columnist. If those TV lecturers can turn lives around with a few simple rules, by thunder, so can I. Herewith, my six-step program for anyone designing a home or addition:

• Start out sloppy. Neophyte designers always want to jump in and start drafting long before their plans are fully worked out. Architects don’t just sit down, think for a minute, and then start drawing up detailed plans. The real design work gets done in rough sketches--sometimes hundreds of them. Drafting is the final stage, and in many ways, the least important. Computer-aided drafting (CAD) programs are a particular danger for amateurs, since they make half-baked ideas look polished long before they’re ready. If you don’t do enough hard work at the outset, CAD won’t help you--it’ll just give you a flawless-looking set of lousy plans.

• Embrace restrictions. You face almost infinite choices during the planning process, and you literally couldn’t make them unless you had some kind of guidelines to hem you in. Therefore, don’t think of physical or monetary restrictions as an encumbrance. Consider them your greatest aid in decision making.

• Design from the inside out. Don’t regard a floor plan as a big sheet cake to be carved up into the right sized pieces. Start planning with the principal rooms, and let things accrete outward. Don’t worry about walls lining up at this point--you can always tidy things up a bit later.

• Establish a hierarchy. Rank the importance of each room beforehand, so you can decide which rooms deserve the best view, the most expensive finishes, and so on. Typically, major rooms such as the living room, family room, and master bedroom top the list, but it’s your call. If cooking is your big passion, for example, maybe your kitchen should get dibs on having access to the garden, a fancier ceiling, or some other special feature.

• Let old Sol help you out. Adhering to good solar orientation will once again make many of your planning decisions for you. Face living areas toward the sunny southern exposure, and have utilitarian areas (garage, laundry, bathrooms, etc.) face north. Make sure rooms have sunlight at the time of day that they’re used most: the breakfast room facing east for morning light, the dining room facing west for afternoon sun, and so on. Orient bedrooms according to your preference for morning or afternoon sun. Not every site can accommodate these ideals--but the closer you get, the better.

• Lastly, if you get stuck on a design problem, don’t just fizzle out and leave well enough alone. Instead, quit for a few days, and then come back to your plan with a fresh eye. Repeat this cycle until every problem--and I mean every problem--is solved. In architecture, as in life, creative success demands an attention to detail.

Hey, wait a minute--are you watching reruns of the The Simpsons?

THE COLOR PURPLE--OR ANY OTHER

2012-02-13T14:28:00.000-08:00

A while back, I happened to catch a popular radio host discussing some guy in Florida who’d painted his house in his old fraternity colors--purple and gold. Predictably, the man’s neighbors were up in arms.

Now, as offensive as a purple-and-gold house might sound to you, hearing the way the talk show host carried on about it was worse. It was an outrage, he declared in so many words, that people could simply paint their houses any color they pleased, and by golly, there should be a way to stop them from doing it. It was a classic argument for the Taste Police.

The talk show host’s callers threw an even feebler light on the matter. With barely-masked disdain for “ethnic” color preferences, they gleefully ridiculed other people who, God forbid, had painted their houses orange or pink or electric blue.

At best, this sort of thinking is provincial. At worst it’s just plain racist. America’s demographics are changing, and along with many other things that belong in the dustbin of history is the idea that Caucasians have some sort of monopoly on defining good taste for everyone else.

In any case, the whole idea that there are “tasteful” architectural colors is utter nonsense, as even the most cursory survey of architectural history will attest. The architecture of much of the Mediterranean and Asia, to mention just the obvious examples, is beloved for its vibrant use of color. How is it, then, that when these same hues appear on homes in the world’s most multicultural nation, they suddenly become “tasteless”?

What’s more, if strident color schemes are so offensive, why is it permissible for, say, a huge Swedish retail chain to paint their colossal stores in the most galling blue-and-yellow color scheme imaginable, while an individual who paints his house in those colors is seen as some sort of threat to the public order?

Some towns are so mortified by the idea of vivid color schemes that they actually specify the range of colors people can use on their own homes. Surprise, surprise--the allowable “tasteful” colors just happen to reflect the sedate color preferences of Northern Europeans.

Would you tolerate a law that dictated what color clothes you could wear in public? Or what color car you could park in your driveway? If not, why would you tolerate a regulation dictating what color you could paint your own home? After all, your taste in clothes, cars, or houses comes down to the same thing--a highly personal choice.

The usual tiresome Taste Police response to this assertion goes something like, “Well, if I have to look at my neighbor’s purple house all day, it’s infringing on my personal right to a tasteful environment.”

It’s an argument that doesn’t hold water, because there’s no such thing as an objective standard of taste--one person’s tasteful is another person’s awful, and that’s that. In other words, the neighbor may well find a beige house just as offensive.

Whether other people find our favorite colors tasteful or awful, we still have a perfect right to express them, be it through our clothes, our cars, or our homes. If preserving that right for myself means tolerating my neighbor’s purple-and-gold house, so be it. It sure beats having the Taste Police make my choices for me.

CELLULOID ARCHITECTS

2012-02-06T16:30:00.000-08:00

If you’ve ever chuckled at how your job is portrayed in the movies, be glad you’re not an architect. On film, we’re either saints or we’re psychos. Judge for yourself:

Leading off with some early bad press for the profession is the 1934 horror film The Black Cat, in which Boris Karloff is a loony architect who kills the wife of his nemesis Bela Lugosi, preserves her in a glass coffin, and then marries and kills Lugosi’s daughter. Oh yeah, I forgot--when he’s not busy doing all this, he also runs a satanic cult.

On the other hand, Walter Pidgeon played the consummate gentleman architect opposite Greer Garson in 1942’s Best Picture, Mrs. Miniver. We know Pidgeon is an architect because he carries around a roll of drawings and wears a tweed jacket. Alas, his occupation is incidental to the plot, which was really director William Wyler’s bid to scare Americans out of wartime neutrality.

In 1949’s The Fountainhead, one of the funniest serious films ever made, we don’t see Gary Cooper’s genius-architect character carrying a mere roll of drawings. Instead, he wields a huge rock drill, which co-star Patricia Neal regards with rather excessive interest.

Then there’s the moment when Cooper unveils what’s supposed to be his sublime design for a modern house. In Ayn Rand’s book, this ethereal triumph was left to the reader’s imagination, but on film, an actual image was required. Too bad: At a showing I once attended, when this purportedly brilliant creation came on screen, the audience burst out laughing. You could hardly blame them: The house depicted, no doubt tres cool for 1949, was an over-the-top streamlined job that resembled an old Dairy Queen caught in mid-explosion.

As the quintessential architect movie, it’s a shame that The Fountainhead is so impossibly overwrought, and that its message is so dumb. Director King Vidor has Cooper and Neal dutifully jabbering Rand’s absurd dialog, trying to justify why Cooper should get away with blowing up his own building. And the lesson we take away from the film? If you love something--I mean, if you really, really love it--you should destroy it.

Speaking of destruction, let’s not forget a movie architect almost as scary as Rand’s--squinting, mustachioed Charles Bronsen, in 1974’s Death Wish. The mild-mannered Bronson goes in big for vigilante justice after his wife is killed and his daughter left catatonic by a trio of muggers. Just in case we didn’t get the point the first time, there were four sequels.

The same vintage year brought us The Towering Inferno, in which Paul Newman plays an architect who’s just completed a 138-story skyscraper right in the middle of San Francisco--apparently under a different planning commission. Newman doesn’t get to go hogwild with a .32, but he does get to blame greasy Richard Chamberlain for cheaping out on the wiring in his building, causing a highrise catastrophe, and that counts for something.

Amazingly, Newman and Steve McQueen battled over who got top billing in this Irwin Allen extravaganza--probably the first and last time that actors playing an architect and a fire chief will have that privelege.

The image of the architect as a batty artist type was advanced once again in 2002’s indie film World Traveler, in which Billy Crudup is an architect having a midlife crisis. His solution? He walks out on his family, hits the road, and ”works low-paying jobs, picks fights, and beds lonely rural women,” according to one synopsis.

Sounds like just the guy for that kitchen remodel you’re planning.

FUTURE SCHLOCK

2012-01-31T12:01:00.000-08:00

If you’ve ever seen one of the old Buck Rogers movie serials, with their packing-crate robots and Art Deco rockets shooting sparks, you can appreciate how quaint another era’s vision of the future can be--and how difficult it is to get it right. Yet speculating on things to come, whether in writing, in images, or in three dimensions, is something humans find irresistible.

Architects are no exception. The Futurist movement of the early 20th century, for instance, saw technology as man’s saviour, and liked to wax poetic over things like turbines and high voltage towers. Yet to many modern eyes, their stark, mechanistic cities of tomorrow are not so much redemptive as sinister.

During the 1920s, the Russian Constructivists saw architecture in equally edgy terms. Thanks to Stalin’s growing distaste for their work, their most ambitious ideas, like those of the Futurists, were never built. This fact has ironically worked in their favor, since speculating on the future is a good deal safer than actually trying to build it in three dimensions. Paper predictions remain snugly encased in the context of their own time, while real structures must actually occupy--however uncomfortably--the future they were meant to predict.

Disneyland’s 1957 House of Tomorrow, an all-plastic home designed by MIT and sponsored by the chemical giant Monsanto, is a classic example of this phenomenon. With its plastic furniture, plastic dishes, and molded plastic walls, it turned out to be an almost comically inept predictor of housing’s future. While plastics did find limited acceptance in many kinds of building materials, from drain pipes to windows, the predicted plastics revolution augured by the House of Tomorrow never materialized.

Indeed, the actual building trends of the early twenty-first century show a steady retreat from man-made polymers and controlled environments, back toward organic materials and more environmentally-sensitive design.

Theme parks and expositions in general have been a steady source of futuristic centerpieces, from the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, to the globe-like, 140-foot tall Unisphere at the 1964 fair held on the same site, to the more recent Spaceship Earth, the Florida EPCOT Center’s eighteen-story geodesic sphere of 1982.

Overshadowing all of these is the 605-foot tall Space Needle, centerpiece of the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair. With its concave pylons and flying-saucer superstructure, the Space Needle evoked the sort of future in which people would have robot housekeepers and fly around in jet-powered backpacks--that is, when they weren’t out driving their atomic cars. This space-age optimism even permeates the color names used in the tower’s paint scheme: Astronaut White, Orbital Olive, Re-entry Red, and Galaxy Gold.

As a now charmingly-retro hallmark for Seattle, the Space Needle has been an unqualified success--even today, it remains the city’s biggest tourist attraction. As a predictor of future architectural trends, though, the Needle missed the mark.

The fact that the Space Needle and its futuristic brethren already seemed quaintly outdated within a decade of their completion shows just how risky building a vision of the the future can be. It’s a sure bet that our own “House of Tomorrow” predictions about computer-orchestrated homes--the sort of scenario in which your toaster automatically goes online to buy more Eggos--are just as likely to come to naught.

Still, architects will no doubt keep offering you their ideas of what’s to come. Whether our predictions pan out or not--well, the future will be here soon enough.

SPEAKING INDIRECTLY

2012-01-23T14:18:00.000-08:00

What do movie palaces have to do with how you light your home?

Plenty. After electric lighting replaced gaslight at the end of the 19th century, most electric lighting was “specular”, a fancy way of saying it came from a point source like the white-hot filament of a standard light bulb. That situtation changed during the 1920s with the arrival of indirect lighting (“indirect” meaning that the light source is hidden).

Indirect lighting took a while to catch on because, at first, electric fixtures were used just like gas mantles. No one thought of hiding them, since doing so would have been foolhardy with gas. Moreover, exposed light bulbs were initially seen as an emblem of modernity.

If you’ve ever tried to read by the light of an unshaded light bulb, though, you know that the glare they produce can be a real problem. Indirect lighting provided a dramatic solution: By concealing the light source, it diffused the light and, unlike an ordinary shade, completely eliminated specular glare.

Movie theaters were among the first to adopt indirect lighting. Auditoriums needed subdued lighting for safety even during the show, and of course having a lot of glary specular lamps wouldn’t do. Since live theaters had long used concealed footlights along the front edge of the stage--the well-known “limelight” you’ve heard about--it wasn’t much of a stretch to use indirect lighting in other parts of the building.

Perhaps the most dramatic new form of indirect lighting in theaters was soffit lighting. Typically, it consisted of a ceiling that stepped up from a low level at the perimeter (the “soffit”) to a higher one in the center. Lighting fixtures were hidden in a continuous horizontal recess separating the two levels, so that a diffuse, glare-free light would bounce off of the upper ceiling into the space below.

The futuristic hovering effect this technique produced soon became a favorite with Art Deco commercial architects, who used it in countless clever ways. Naturally, it wasn’t long before these ideas were showing up in the latest homes as well.

But don’t think indirect lighting is all just theatrical razzle dazzle. It can be practical as well. For example, if you mount miniature fixtures under your kitchen’s wall cabinets and conceal them with a shallow skirt or “valance”, they’ll light the countertop beautifully, but won’t shine in your eyes.

What’s more, indirect lighting can be remarkably cheap. Since you don’t see the light source, you can use ordinary fixtures costing a few dollars--instead of overpriced boutique fixtures costing hundreds--and still get very sophisticated results. Depending on the space available, ordinary porcelain sockets, light ropes, or even strands of miniature Christmas lights will do the job. Nor does the structure that conceals the lamps have to be expensive: Most soffit lighting, for example, consists of little more than a simple lumber framework finished with drywall.

Regardless of how you design your indirect lighting, though, remember that the lamps will need replacement now and then. Since you can’t always see into the recess that hides the fixture, make sure you can change the lamps by feel alone. And for heaven’s sake, turn off the juice first.

LOTS AND LOTS OF CARS

2012-01-16T19:39:00.000-08:00

A few blocks from my office, there’s a dreary, ten-year-old strip mall fronted by literally acres of unrelieved parking lot. Though it has no fewer than five separate entrances for cars, God help anyone who dares to approach the place on foot. To reach its quarter-mile-long phalanx of storefronts, you can either negotiate the single paltry thread of sidewalk the developers saw fit to provide, or else try to cross a vast sea of dirty asphalt on foot, with cars flashing carelessly past on all sides and bearing down behind you unseen.

One of the many exasperating tenets of postwar planning was the assumption that nobody would ever want to walk anywhere, anytime. Shopping centers, not to speak of downtown streets, were laid out mainly to suit automobiles and not people. Seemingly, the only time a human was expected to walk outdoors was enroute to the driver’s seat.

Yet many people do walk, and hopefully many more will do so in coming years. What with traffic snarls, interminable waits at signals, and the inevitable battle for parking, it’s often quite literally faster to walk three or four blocks than it is to drive that far. And mind you, I say this as a lifelong motorhead.

Given all the bad things we’ve found out about designing cities around cars instead of people, modern planners are doing their best to bring pedestrians into this creaky old equation. It’s a fine idea in theory, but in practice, wherever cars and pedestrians mix, the cars invariably win out. The reason is obvious: Since a car weighs twenty to thirty times what a person does, any contest between the two will not end up in the pedestrian’s favor. Hence, we’re psychologically conditioned from childhood to subordinate ourselves to those big bad cars.

Less obvious, but just as problematic, a car also takes up about thirty times as much space as a person on foot, resulting in vast areas of our cities that have no function whatever but to store our four-wheeled friends. All told, we pave over about forty percent of our cities solely to accomodate motor vehicles (in Los Angeles, the figure is said to be closer to sixty percent). This autocentric environment extends right into our own homes, one-quarter of which we happily devote to garage space.

Unfortunately, despite the rhetoric of New Urbanist planning, which promises to reverse these twisted priorities, little has changed on the ground. I recently stopped in at yet another shopping complex not far from my office, this one barely two years old. Unlike the stupefying strip mall mentioned earlier, this “retail village” employs many of the latest New Urbanist planning ideas--varied building facades, happy little plazas, pretty paving, and the like.

For hapless shoppers, alas, these potentially lovely surroundings are completely co-opted by the constant stream of cars that go barreling right through the heart of the place. That’s right: For some inexplicable reason, automobiles weren’t barred from what might have been a charming little shopping lane.

A smattering of New Urbanist rules, it seems, hasn’t been enough to change the game. Those big bad cars are still winning it.

THE OUTSIDERS (PART THREE OF THREE PARTS)

2012-01-09T16:53:00.000-08:00

In the past, an architect was just what his Latin name suggested--a “master builder”. Practical experience was the most important schooling such a person could have, and architects thus trained gave us the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Parthenon, and all the cathedrals of the Middle Ages.

Only during the past hundred years or so has the right to use the title “architect” been determined by academic degrees and testing rather than by practice. In 1897, Illinois became the first state to require that architects be licensed. California followed suit in the early years of the new century.

The National Council of Architectural Registration Boards was founded in 1919 and held its first annual meeting two years later. Given the ever-increasing complexity of building technology, the remaining states instituted requirements for licensure over the next thirty years, with the last two holdouts, Vermont and Wyoming, doing so only in 1951.

Today, no one may use the title “architect” in the United States without fulfilling a seven-and-a-half-year long course of education and office internship, including an exhaustive series of examinations. Despite the rigors of this procedure, mere possession of an architectural license has never been a guarantee of talent. Or, as my old boss used to put it, “You can have a fishing license, but it doesn’t mean you’re gonna catch any fish.”

Conversely, a lack of formal education and licensure hasn’t always ruled out extraordinary ability. The last two columns in this series recounted six non-architects--Frank Lloyd Wright, Addison Mizner, Cliff May, Carr Jones, Buckminster Fuller, and Craig Ellwood--who changed the course of architecture and, just as important, made the world a more interesting and beautiful place.

None of the six had formal training or licenses (in Wright’s case, his practice predated licensure requirements). Wright and Mizner gained their entire architectural educations through apprenticeship--Wright with Louis Sullivan, and Mizner with Willis Polk. May, Jones, Fuller, and Ellwood had no formal architectural training whatever.

None of this is meant to suggest that no schooling is better than bad schooling, or that licensure is unimportant. But it does suggest that there are alternatives to the usual way we teach architecture and building, and how we judge architectural skill.

It’s no accident that each of the gifted non-architects cited above learned his craft mainly through practical experience, not through academics. Today, a handful of schools still struggle to include such hands-on training--Wright’s Taliesin and Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti among them. Yet for the most part, the architectural establishment remains firmly entrenched in the belief that formal schooling and office internship are the only legitimate basis for competence and licensure.

Today, few would deny the contributions of geniuses like Wright and Fuller, romantics like Jones, Mizner and May, and even consummate front men like Ellwood. Yet the current process of education and licensure, overwhelmingly weighted as it is toward academic and office training, holds little room for such mavericks in the future. That’s a pity, because in many ways, the practically-trained architect follows most closely in the footsteps of the “master builder”.

THE OUTSIDERS (PART TWO OF THREE PARTS)

2012-01-02T10:24:00.000-08:00

Last time, we looked at the careers of Frank Lloyd Wright, Addison Mizner, and Cliff May, all renowned architects who were never formally trained or licensed. Today we’ll touch on a few more architects who made an undeniable contribution to the profession, despite their lack of formal credentials.

Carr Jones, a designer-builder who practiced in the San Francisco Bay Area for almost half a century beginning in the late teens, was a pioneer in green architecture if ever there was one. Jones fashioned lyrically beautiful homes out of used brick, salvaged timber, and castoff pieces of tile, slate, and iron, often wrapping his dramatically-vaulted rooms around a landscaped central court. Perhaps because he was trained as a mechanical engineer and never traveled abroad, Jones was all but innocent of architectural pretension. Instead, he built on unvarying principles of comfort, conservation, and craftsmanship. And unlike many trained architects whose style changes with every faddish breeze that blows, Jones’s convictions remained uncompromised right down to his death in 1966.

R. Buckminster Fuller had no architectural training either, and indeed was expelled from Harvard during his freshman year for "irresponsibility and lack of interest". His first job was working as an apprentice machine fitter. Yet over the course of his long and wide-ranging career, Fuller’s architectural innovations included not only the geodesic dome--his best-known invention--but also the gleaming, steel-sheathed Dymaxion House, a dwelling meant to be mass produced in a factory and installed on the site as you might bolt down a lamppost.

In the context of today’s fussy, retrograde home designs, Fuller’s visionary proposals for the geodesic dome and the futuristic Dymaxion House may draw smiles, but this reflects more on the glacial pace of architectural progress than any flaw in Fuller’s thinking.

Not surprisingly, Fuller dismissed conventional architects, saying: “They work under a system that hasn't changed since the Pharaohs.” During his lifetime, the onetime Harvard dropout received exactly 47 honorary doctorates from universities the world over, and today is deservedly included in practically any general survey of twentieth-century architecture.

One highly influental non-architect had creative skills of another kind. Craig Ellwood was the celebrated Southern California modernist whom one critic called “the very best young architect to emerge from the West Coast in the years following World War II.” A brilliant self-promoter, Ellwood (who was born Johnny Burke and took his tonier surname from a local liquor store) parlayed some minor development experience into a career that reached the highest echelon of modern architecture. So skilled was Ellwood at presenting himself that despite being barely educated--his entire formal training consisted of night classes at UCLA--he was twice considered for the deanship at Mies van der Rohe’s Illinois Institute of Technology.

Understandably, Ellwood took pains to hide the fact that he was unlicensed from his elite clientele, and he relied heavily on a gifted staff to carry out his basic concepts. That he was able to enrapture critics, editors, and clients alike despite his lack of education can only increase one’s admiration for his skill. And in the final analysis, nothing can detract from the breathtakingly elegant steel-and-glass creations that are the legacy of the Ellwood office.

Next week: The common thread among great architects and great non-architects alike.

THE OUTSIDERS (PART ONE OF THREE PARTS)

2011-12-27T19:20:00.001-08:00

Though some of my colleagues might cringe to hear it, non-architects--those who lacked either the formal schooling or the license to legally use the title “architect”--have had a huge impact on American architecture over the past century. If they weren’t architects in the legal sense, they more than lived up to the title’s original meaning of “master builder”.

Why not start at the top? Frank Lloyd Wright’s only formal training consisted of a year of engineering classes at the University of Wisconsin. Thoroughly bored, he dropped out in 1888 and headed for Chicago to find a job. He quickly found one, first apprenticing with the Chicago architect J. Lyman Silsbee, and later and more famously with his “lieber Meister”, Louis Sullivan. In 1893, after a falling out with Sullivan over taking outside work, Wright left the firm and opened his own office, where was able to use the title “architect” only because his practice predated the Illinois licensure requirements by four years.

Wright nurtured a lifelong disdain for traditional architectural training, which eventually led him to found the Taliesin Fellowship, a unique school in which apprentice architects learned largely by doing.

But Wright is only the best-known example of brilliant architects with unconventional or even nonexistent educations. In another vein entirely is Addison Mizner, the California-born, Guatemala-raised, Florida-polished raconteur who improbably rose to become the top society architect of Palm Beach during the Roaring Twenties. Mizner despised school, and accordingly his only architectural training was a three-year apprenticeship with the San Francisco architect Willis Polk. The happy result was a personal style that drew more from his childhood knowledge of Spanish Colonial Guatemala than from the copybooks so beloved by his contemporaries.

Nevertheless, Mizner’s romantic antiquarian villas were considered vulgar setpieces by his academically-trained colleagues. It probably didn’t help that he also ran a business manufacturing mock-antique furniture and building materials, which he used liberally in his own work. Mizner’s career was spectacular but brief; he died in 1933. Today, his surviving Palm Beach work ranks among the finest Spanish Revival architecture in the nation.

On the opposite coast, Cliff May, the San Diego architect widely considered the father of the California Rancher, started his career building Monterey-style furniture. When he began designing Spanish Colonial-style houses for speculative builders in the early 1930s, academic architects dismissed him as a purveyor of kitsch. Yet over time, May’s rambling, site-sensitive designs metamorphosed into the rustic and low-slung homes that Americans came to love so well. All told, May built his Ranchers in forty U.S. states, and their spiritual heirs went on to become the dominant style of the postwar era. Genuine May-designed Ranchers, not to mention his earlier Spanish Revival designs, are now celebrated and studied by architectural connoisseurs.

Despite these formidable accomplishments, May received only late and grudging acceptance from his licensed colleagues--or as he rather poignantly put it, “It took real architects a long time to let me into the club.”

Next time, we’ll look at a few more outsiders who changed the course of architecture, and see what they all had in common.

PROOF THAT GOOD DESIGN MATTERS

2011-12-19T15:30:00.000-08:00

During the past few weeks, every time I’ve had to use yet another badly-designed appliance, or had to sit idling at yet another ineptly-timed traffic light, or had to decipher yet another garbled set of instructions, I’ve thought of one man: Steven Jobs. And I wish there could’ve been a hundred more like him.

There’s no doubt that, with Jobs’s passing, the world has lost one of the most important visionaries of the last hundred years. But for me, the loss has less to do with his putting a computer for the rest of us on a million desktops, nor with his uncanny knack for creating things that people didn’t even know they needed. Granted, these accomplishments are vastly important to Jobs’s legacy. But to my mind, his ultimate triumph was his singular skill at persuading a largely indifferent public that excellent design really matters. He wanted us all to be as passionate about beauty and simplicity as he himself was. And to the extent that Apple’s famously intuitive and user-friendly products are now more popular than ever, he seems finally to have succeeded.

The fact is that the average American consumer has been amazingly tolerant of third-rate product design. Consequently--and understandably--any company that knows it can make perfectly good money selling clumsy, overcomplicated, or unintuitive products has no incentive whatever to improve them. And so most don’t.

In Jobs, however, we had the unique case of a businessman on a near-religious crusade to educate his own market, relentlessly challenging us to demand more than the run-of-the-mill crap we’re typically offered.

It’s interesting to note that the Apple cofounder, despite being a pioneer in one of the most technically complex fields yet known to man, was not an engineer but rather a laid-back college dropout with a mystical streak. To add yet another layer of paradox to this singular mind, he was notoriously--some would say tyrannically--demanding of the people who worked for him. But if this is what it took to engender the phenomenally beautiful and beautifully functional objects Apple has created out over the years, then it was all worth it.

As you’ve probably guessed, I write on a Macintosh, and have done since I bought the very first model through an Apple engineer pal back in 1984. So yes, kids--I’ve been a true believer since long before the iPod, iPad, or iPhone even existed. And for many of those years, I tried in vain to convince doubters why there was nothing like using a Mac--in short, why good design really mattered. Thankfully, with the wild success of those assorted i-Things, Jobs was finally able to make that case for me.

Steve Jobs had already revolutionized the fields of computing, film, music, and telephonics. I wish he’d been given the time for even more far-flung conquests, because I have no doubt that the world would have been a better place for it.

We could have used a hundred more like him, but alas, there was only one.

ENOUGH DESIGN, ALREADY

2011-12-05T18:13:00.000-08:00

Not long ago, I handed a young architectural intern a preliminary sketch to be drafted up on the computer. It was a site plan for an agricultural research facility comprising 130 acres, about eighty acres of which were supposed to be reserved for farmland.

A week later, as promised, I received the computer drawing. But lo and behold, the great swath of undeveloped acreage shown in the original plan had been completely filled up with a meandering web of plazas and pedestrian malls in a galaxy of arbitrary shapes--pinwheels, checkerboards, crescents, what have you. Setting aside the fact that these busy forms would only have made sense from the air, they would also have made for some rather difficult farming.

When I asked the intern why she’d added all those features unbidden, she replied: “The plan looked so empty, I thought the client would want to see more things in it.”

This is a problem that afflicts all creative people, so much so that we even have a Latin name for it: horror vacui, or fear of emptiness. Herbert Muschamp, the architecture critic of The New York Times, has called it “the driving force in contemporary American taste...(and) the major factor now shaping attitudes toward public spaces, urban spaces, and even suburban sprawl."

As Muschamp rightly perceives, the horror vacui is especially pronounced among architects. Many, like my young drafter, think that if they don’t fills up every space with an avalanche of ideas and images, however unrelated to the program, they’ve somehow fallen short of their creative charge.

In fact, just the opposite is true. Architecture is a process of reduction, not just compilation. Ideally, the architect distills a complex set of requirements into the simplest form that will both satisfy the client’s needs and offer some measure of personal artistic grace. The avalanche of ideas has its place early in the process, but as things progress, design features that aren’t essential--whether for function or effect--fall away, leaving the final polished kernel of a solution. When carried out with skill, this process doesn’t preclude fanciful ideas, but it does preclude dysfunctional and clumsy ones.

Of course, today’s designers aren’t the only ones afflicted with horror vacui-- it’s a tendency that waxes and wanes over decades. Victorian architects, for instance, couldn’t bear to see an unadorned surface. The dawning twentieth century brought a counterreaction to this compulsive decoration; it began with the Mission Revival and Craftsman styles and reached its zenith with International Style Modernism, whose practitioners turned architectural reduction into an art form.

Ironically, it’s precisely this Modernist austerity that’s sent us hurtling back toward the frenetic gimcrackery so evident in contemporary design. And while architecture without complexity is dull, architecture that’s layer upon layer of complexity is simply meaningless.

As in so many other things, the answer lies in striking a balance. Some of our era’s most idealized domestic architecture--rural French farmhouses, say, or those much-admired vernacular hillside towns in Italy or Spain--are about as spare and simple as could be while still suiting their purpose. Against such a clean sharp background, a single flowerpot or bit of filigreed ironwork fairly bursts with ornamental power.

Alas, like my young intern, many architects still grow fidgety at the sight of a plain white wall, much less an empty plot of land. That’s too bad because, more often than we’d like to think, the best designing we can do is none at all.

THE FAD FACTORY

2011-11-28T12:02:00.000-08:00

We all know that nothing looks more dated than last year’s red-hot style. What’s not so obvious is why consumer styles-- whether clothes, curtains, or cars--come and go with such cyclical certainty. More often than not, the seeds of new design trends are carefully nurtured by their respective industries to spur sales, and then disseminated via design magazines, television shows, and the like. Clever marketing encourages consumers to believe that they’re the ones driving these trends, when in fact it’s more often the other way around.

Once a hot trend inevitably runs its course, another comes along to replace it. Those who literally bought into the previous fashion cycle are left with outmoded items that once again beg to be replaced with more current ones, thereby starting the cycle anew.

The American auto industry brilliantly exploited this marketing ploy during the postwar era. Back then, Detroit’s enormous, chrome-laden cars were heavily restyled each and every year, ensuring that the driver of last year’s model would be acutely aware that his near-new car was already out of date. While most people are now wise to the role of planned obsolescence in selling cars, not so many are aware that the makers of domestic products play the same marketing game.

Take kitchen appliances, for example. Since a washing machine or refrigerator will ordinarily last decades, the simplest way to coax consumers into buying a new one is to make them embarassed at how dated the old one looks. Accordingly, over the years, we’ve seen a whole succession of color and finish fads come and go, each by turns energetically touted as the ultimate in chic. They’ve ranged from the basic sanitary-white appliances of the late 1940s through Turquoise, Coppertone, Advocado, Harvest Gold, Almond, Black, and eventually back to white again.

Of course, merely ending up right where you started wouldn’t carry much urgency as a fashion statement, so appliance makers found a new sales angle: Why, this wasn’t just plain old white--it was White on White.

Given that any fashionable item is doomed to look uniquely dated in a very short time, one wonders why people continue to be so easily swayed by the artificial dictates of fashion, rather than recognizing it for the finely-tuned sham that it is.

At the root of this susceptibility lies, I think, an unfounded lack of confidence in our ability to judge for ourselves. Dig even deeper, and we may find a reluctance to trust one of our most important design tools: our own intuition. For instance, when clients bring me a range of color choices for, say, countertops, they’ll dutifully run through the ones they perceive to be in step with current design trends. But at some point, they’ll show me the one color that really makes their eyes light up, which they’ll resignedly dismiss with some comment such as, “I absolutely LOVE this color, but I know it’s way out of fashion.”

I couldn’t think of a better reason to choose it.

SPACE CASE

2011-11-21T16:24:00.001-08:00

I often get calls from nice folks who’ve drawn up their own plans and want me to check them for problems. Some of these designs are wonderfully creative, yet virtually all of them are sabotaged by the same basic shortcomings: People never allow enough space for hallways, staircases, kitchens, or baths.

Stairs are undoubtedly the biggest booby trap for neophyte planners. Even a relatively steep, straight stair climbing your basic nine-foot-high story requires a bare minimum floor area of three by ten feet--and this doesn’t include the top and bottom landings or the thickness of the enclosing walls. L- or U-shaped stairs need even more room. Yet people routinely show me designs for second-story additions in which the entire staircase is miraculously packed into a linen closet. They’re usually crestfallen to learn that, in fact, the new second-floor bedroom they thought they were adding will only be replacing the one wiped out by the stairs.

Kitchens are typically overcrowded as well. The absolute minimum aisle width between facing countertops--even those on islands--is four feet. Although this may seem excessive on paper, it won’t be once you’ve got doors, drawers, and dishwasher racks projecting into the aisle, not to mention a few bystanders “helping” you cook. Nor should sinks and cooktops have less than eighteen inches of counter space on either side--and again, this includes islands.

Even when they know there really isn’t enough room to accomodate everything they want, amateur planners will often try to cheat their way out of the problem by cannibalizing other spaces. Clothes closets are a common victim: Although they need to be at least two feet deep, people are always trying to whittle a few inches off them to buy space somewhere else. Forget it--jacket sleeves cannot be fooled by this strategy.

Other immutable rock-bottom minimums:

• Foyers need to be at least six by six feet.

• Hallways, like stairs, can be no less than three feet wide.

• Walk-in closets need to be at least five feet wide for a single-sided arrangement, and seven feet wide for a double-sided one.

• Double lavatory sinks require a countertop at least six feet wide. Never mind those dinky five-foot examples you find at the big-box store--that’s just wishful thinking.

• Toilets should occupy a space at least 30 inches wide when between a wall and a counter, and at least 36 inches wide when between two walls.

• Stall showers require a space no less that three feet square; tubs and tub/showers need at least 2 foot 8 inches by 5 feet.

• Garages must be at least 19 feet deep inside. And don’t dream of trying to squeeze a furnace, water heater, or washer and dryer into that minimum, either.

When space is tight, both architects and amateurs can be tempted to fudge minimum dimensions by a few inches here or there. Don’t. In fact, it’s good practice to allow a few inches more than you need, since finishes, trim, and unexpected errors or obstructions often conspire to nibble away preciousroom from a space that’s already squeezed. If you can’t accomodate the above minimums, you may need to rethink your wish list. Better to throw a few things overboard than to sink the whole ship.

PAINTING PAINS

2011-11-14T12:10:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when I was a punk architect in my twenties, I asked a well-known local contractor what he considered the most important factor in a good remodel. I suppose I was fishing for an answer along the lines of, “Excellent design”, or at the very least, “A decent set of plans”.

His one-word reply: “Painting.”

He went on to explain that he had a sort of fetish for excellent painting. He maintained that the quality of the paint job was what really set apart a top-notch project, because when all was said and done, the paint was the surface that everyone saw.

At the time, having just recently emerged from Berkeley’s incomparably touchy-feely school of architecture, I remember thinking to myself, “Now, this is one shallow cat.” But over the years, I’ve come to realize that he was absolutely right. Not that good design isn’t important--obviously, I think it is, or I’d become a hot dog vendor on the Berkeley Pier quicker than you could say Mies van der Rohe.

But the fact is that even the best design and the finest workmanship can be instantly reduced to a tawdry mess by the sort of slapdash painting that’s all too common these days.

Skilled painters are accorded far too little respect, partly because there aren’t that many of them. Instead, the field is swamped by low-balling incompetents who think the ability to wield a dribbling roller qualifies them to use the title “painter”. Most find work solely because they’re cheap. Top-quality painters are further cursed by the fact that the painting phase occurs toward the end of the project, just when overextended owners are most likely to start tightening their purse-strings.

Alas, whether you’re building from scratch or remodeling, cutting corners on painting is likely to cost you dearly. My not-so-shallow contractor friend was exactly right: Painted surfaces are ultimately what most people notice. Hence, if your house looks like it was painted by Mr. Magoo on crack, all of your earlier efforts will have been in vain. Here, then, are some bare minimum standards to expect from a paint job:

• The coverage should be uniform, without a watery, skim-milk appearance. In addition to proper application, using top quality paint makes a big difference here. A good painter will automatically insist on using the very best paint. If you find your painter using econo-buy paint, plan to be disappointed with the results.

• Borders between different colors should be sharply cut in without wavering.

• Painted wood windows should have a sharp, clean line where wood meets glass, not a raggedy edge.

• There shouldn’t be a speck--and I mean not a speck--of paint or overspray on stone, brick, glass, tile, unpainted metal, or any other finished surfaces. Nor should there be overspray on shrubbery, walkways, natural wood structures, or roofing if it’s an exterior paint job. Don’t buy the frequent excuse that the resulting mess can be cleaned up later--nine times out of ten, it won’t happen. Instead, insist that all surfaces are properly protected in the first place. Door lock hardware, for example, should be removed--a procedure that takes a few minutes per door--not painted around as is common with cut-rate practitioners.

The standard for neatness is simple: Paint what’s meant to be painted, and don’t mess up the rest.

IVY LEAGUE ARCHITECTURE

2011-11-07T13:20:00.001-08:00

“The physician can bury his mistakes,” Frank Lloyd Wright told the New York Times in 1953, “but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.”

Such wisecracking aside, Wright probably new better than most architects the value of integrating nature into his work, and not just as a remedy for aesthetic failure.

A visit to Taliesin, his home in central Wisconsin, makes this amply clear: The house is wrapped around the crest of a hill on three sides--”not on the hill, but of the hill”, as Wright liked to say--and the erstwhile farmboy’s love for nature informs every nook and cranny of the place.

Whether cottage or mansion, a truly livable house should, like Taliesin, seem inseperable from its site. Sometimes, the simple passage of time and the attendant growth of planting are enough to create this effect, as many an overgrown bungalow will testify. If you can’t wait around fifty years, however, there are also a number of design strategies that can help weave a new home or addition into its site right from the start.

• Build decks or terraces as close as possible to the interior floor level, rather than having a back-porch-like stair leading down to them. Since a house that’s markedly above the outside ground level can feel cut off from the outdoors, creating outdoor space that’s flush with the ground floor will both visually expand the interior space and help integrate it with the surroundings.

If the vertical distance to the outside grade is more than a couple of feet, consider having several levels of decks or terraces that gradually step down to the ground. Use level changes of two or at most three steps, each no more than six inches high, and avoid using single steps, as they can create a tripping hazard. Integrate planters or beds for trees and shrubs into the layout to help visually smooth the transition from indoors to out.

• Except where there are doors leading outside, don’t install paving or other ground-level hardscaping right up to your home’s exterior walls. A house with bare paving meeting bare walls has about as much connection to its setting as the hotel on a Monopoly board. A better approach is to leave a planting bed at least three feet wide between the foundation and any paving. Make sure you provide drainage so this area doesn’t become a swamp during the rainy season.

• Extend architectural details such as walls, colonnades, or porches from the house into the surrounding landscape. One of Wright’s favorite techniques was to have low walls radiating root-like from the building, visually tying it to its site. Often, these walls also formed integral planters that helped from a transition to the natural landscape.

Traditional architects could be equally adept at this technique: Spanish Revival homes, for example, often featured an arcade or a pergola extending from the house into the garden, or a covered veranda that formed a space halfway between indoors and out.

• Lastly, always think of your house as an integral part of its site, rather than being an object placed on top of it. Plan the garden as a series of outdoor rooms that are an extension of the indoor ones, and make the ones nearest the house serve as transition points between inside and out.

WHY WE QUIT GETTING PLASTERED

2011-10-31T12:54:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the most singular trait of American homes is the hollow, cardboardy thud of our gypsum-board walls. No one else has anything quite like them. Mind you, if it weren’t for World War II, our walls might not sound quite so hollow.

Before the war, American homes were routinely plastered inside--a painstaking process that first required nailing thousands of feet of wooden strips known as lath to the ceiling and walls of every room.

The lath was covered with a coarse layer of plaster called the “scratch coat”. The wet plaster squeezed through the gaps in the lath, locking it to the walls and ceiling. Days later, when the scratch coat was dry, a second “brown coat” was applied to make the surfaces roughly flat. This, too, had to dry for several days. Last came the “skim coat”, a thin layer of pure white plaster that produced a smooth finished surface, something like the cream cheese topping does on a cheesecake.

Depending on the weather, this process could take days or weeks, during which no other trade could work inside the house. This was how plasterwork had been done for centuries, and there seemed no reason to change.

Then came World War II, and with it an urgent need for military structures ranging from barracks to whole bases. Faced with shortages of both labor and material, Uncle Sam was desperate to find faster and cheaper ways to build. And since beauty was not much of an issue, eliminating plaster was an obvious starting point.

Enter the United States Gypsum Company, which way back in 1916 had invented a building board made of gypsum sandwiched between sheets of tough paper. After more than two decades, the product they called Sheetrock still hadn’t really caught on. Even its successful use in most of the buildings at the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1933-34 didn’t do much for sales. But the urgencies of wartime construction changed all that.

As the government soon came to appreciate, Sheetrock did away with the need for wood lath, multiple plaster coats, and days and days of drying time (hence its generic name, “drywall”). Installation was simple: After the 4x8 sheets were nailed up, the nail holes were filled, paper tape was used to cover the joints, and a textured coating was troweled on to help disguise the defects.

Of course, all this was only meant as a stopgap replacement for plaster, but as you’ve probably guessed, it didn’t turn out that way. By the war’s end, many builders who’d gotten used to slapping up drywall were suddenly reluctant to go back to the trouble and expense of plastering.

What’s more, Sheetrock’s arrival coincided with the rise of modern architecture, which preferred plain, flat surfaces to the fussy moldings and reveals of prewar styles. To Modernist tastes, the fact that Sheetrock couldn’t be molded the way wet plaster could was hardly a drawback. People seemed more dismayed by the flimsy cardboardish sound of the walls in their postwar homes, but they soon got used to it.

Flimsy or not, there’s no doubt that Sheetrock proved a huge boon to the postwar housing industry. Prior to the war, the typical American developer built about four houses a year. By the late Forties, a developer like the legendary Bill Levitt was able to churn out 17,000 tract homes at Long Island’s Levittown, sell them for $7,990 , and still make a thousand dollars profit on each. Mass production was the key to the postwar housing boom, and Sheetrock helped make it happen.

Just something to bear in mind next time your kids smash a doorknob through the bedroom wall.

THE QUALITY KILLERS

2011-10-24T15:18:00.000-07:00

A few years back, at the height of the dot-com boom, I came across a bronze plaque outside the headquarters of one of those instant internet giants. In consummate public-relations prose, its text declared the company’s absolute commitment to quality and excellence at every level, invoking all the usual corporate buzzwords of the era. What really fixed the plaque in my memory, though, was that one of its most mundane phrases was mispunctuated, reading “it’s ideals” instead of “its ideals”.

Given the firm’s purported obsession with quality, you’d think they’d have given their mantra a quick proofread or two before committing it to bronze.

This incident reminded me that a commitment to quality demands tangible final results, not just a lot of high-flying babble. It requires vigilance down to the very last detail--even to a lowly apostrophe.

Quality relates to architecture and construction in much the same way: The last little details can make the difference. Hence, a project that’s going along swimmingly can still become shark bait in the last few days, because that’s when many of the parts you really notice are completed. The trouble is, this is just about the time the owner, the contractor, and yes, even the architect are tired, impatient, and rushing to get things buttoned up.

Too often, this means that the most conspicuous details get the least effort and attention.

Here are some notorious quality killers that can sabotage a project at the last minute:

• Moldings such as baseboard, door trim, and ceiling cove are often treated as last-minute frou-frou by harried contractors, even though they’re among the most obvious finish items. Quality killers include inaccurate or open miters, ragged or splintered cuts, and gaps between moldings and floors, walls, or ceilings. All standing moldings (such as door trim) should be installed plumb and square. Running moldings (such as baseboard) should align properly and have clean, tight miters, or in the case of internal corners, coped butt cuts. Gaps should be neatly caulked. The last step, mind you, is seldom carried out but is a must for any quality installation.

• Indifferent painting is the surest way to destroy a quality job. Ironically, although paint is the predominant finish on most houses, the painting phase is often cursed from being carried out late in the project, when money and patience are at low ebb. Hence, workmanship suffers either because the job is rushed or because incompetent painters are hired in a misguided attempt to save money. The quality killers: Excessively thick or thin application, drips and runs, ragged or wavy brushwork along edges, and paint on fixtures, finish hardware, masonry, or glass. None of these shortcomings should be tolerated.

• Highly conspicuous finish hardware items such as door locksets, cabinet pulls, towel bars, grilles, and the like usually get hasty treatment because they’re among the very last items installed. The quality killers include mismatched finishes (polished brass mixed with satin brass, for instance), off-plumb or misaligned pulls or trim plates, crooked towel bars, and locks and catches that don’t engage properly. Insist that such items are neatly installed and are placed perfectly plumb, level, or square, as appropriate.

And in case you think fussing over such details is obsessive, one last remark about that would-be internet giant with the big bronze plaque: “its” gone out of business.

AIRPORT ARCHITECTURE: Same Old Approach

2011-10-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

Flying isn’t what it used to be. The fact that air travel has become overly familiar, even routine, is one reason. The more recent equation of airplanes with doom and destruction is another. Yet there’s a more concrete reason that flying has lost much of its romance: The modern urban airport just isn’t the sort of place we’d like to spend time in.

The mechanics of travel weren’t always something merely to be endured. During the heyday of the passenger railroads, arriving, departing, or even just hanging around in one of the great major terminals--whether Portland, Cincinatti, or Washington DC--was an experience to remember. A first-time visitor couldn’t help but feel thrilled in such a temple of travel.

Approaching an unfamiliar airport, on the other hand, more often elicits a rising sense of dread. Even the most architecturally celebrated of them are maddeningly difficult to navigate. For example, after an eternity of construction bedlam, San Francisco’s airport finally boasts a magnificent new International Terminal. Yet reaching it from either the highway or from public transportation remains a nightmare for any first-time visitor.

Most of us navigate airports by one of three methods, the only reliable one of which involves already knowing the way. Failing that, we walk around slack-jawed, trying to figure out directional signs that ought to be obvious, or else we simply follow the crowd and eventually stumble onto our objective.

With all this confusion within, don’t even ask about what airports look like from the outside. What with changing technologies and endless reconstruction, architects long ago gave up trying to give airport exteriors a unified appearance.

Of course, there was a time when airports, like railroad terminals, were designed to look all-of-a-piece. Among the few that survive more-or-less intact are the modest but remarkable Spanish Revival gem in Santa Barbara, California.

When Modernism hit town, though, it became fashionable for airports to be inspired by the objects they served: aircraft. This was a refreshing concept back in the early 1960s, when Eero Saarinen completed his famously swoopy TWA terminal at New York’s Kennedy (then Idlewild) Airport. Alas, architects have drunk from the same well countless times since--albeit without Saarinen’s audacity--thereby turning the concept into a well-worn cliche.

In the ensuing decades, it’s become acceptable for airports to be disjointed aesthetic jumbles so long as they vaguely resemble airplanes, with lots of shiny metal, curvy plastic panels, and carpeting on the walls. Never mind that there’s no intrinsic reason why an airport lounge should look like the cabin of a 747, any more than your garage should look like the inside of a Toyota.

Today, with the growing despair over security, overcrowding of terminals and airplanes, and the shaky financial shape of the airline industry, airport architecture seems likely to remain stuck in the plastic-and-stainless steel rut it has occupied for decades.

Rail travel never did regain its cachet after World War II, and the palatial terminals of railroading’s golden age sadly gave way to mundane structures that could barely compete with the local Greyhound station. Likewise, perhaps, the airport’s day as a romantic portal to other worlds has been doomed by the very ordinary thing that air travel has become. Short of rocket rides to the moon, I wonder what can replace it.

MAKING LIGHT

2011-10-11T16:21:00.000-07:00

Next time you head for the bathroom in the middle of the night, consider what the casual act of lighting your way would’ve entailed just over a century ago: If you were lucky enough to have a house with piped-in gas, you could strike a match to the nearest gas mantle to get a blinding white flame. Otherwise, you’d have to stumble your way to the john by the light of a guttering candle. No wonder so many Victorian houses burned to the ground.

Although nowadays it’s hard to imagine a world without electric lighting, it's been with us for a relative wink of an eye. Thomas Edison perfected his incandescent bulb in 1879, after trying out hundreds of filament materials ranging from bamboo to hair to paper (he finally settled on tungsten). Not so well known is that Edison also had to invent a way to evacuate the air from the bulbs--no mean task using Victorian technology.

Even so, it took another twenty years or so before electric lights had largely replaced gas mantles in American homes. As late as the early 1900s, older houses with gaslight were still being retrofitted for electricity. These transitional houses are easy to spot: the wires leading to the electric fixtures were often run inside the old gas pipes.

In the early days of electric lighting, fixtures intentionally flaunted naked bulbs so that no one could possibly mistake them for gas. It was a way for people to advertise their modernity, much as hipsters of the 1990s sported conspicious cell phone antennas on their cars.

Since that time, there have been surprisingly few fundamental changes in residential lighting. Switches and wiring were eventually hidden inside of walls instead of being mounted on top of them, but other than that, most houses continued to have lighting fixtures in the center of ceilings, much as they had in the days of gaslight. The Revivalist home styles of the 1920s brought a craze for wall sconces--another gaslight derivative--but the fashion had largely died out by the end of that decade.

The first really new development in lighting since Edison’s light bulb was neon tubing, which made a big splash in the early 1930s. It made its American debut in a sign for a Packard showroom, and was soon all the rage as signage in movie theaters and other commercial buildings. However, with its otherworldly glow, it found little use in residential design.

Fluorescent lighting (not to be confused with neon) was introduced not long afterward. Being diffuse and hence glare-free, and also producing much more light for a given amount of power, it quickly became the standard for commercial buildings. Still, no matter how hard architects tried to push its use in luminous ceilings and other Modernist lighting concepts, the sickly blue-green quality of its light did not endear it to homeowners. It took another forty years of improvement, as well as laws mandating its use, before fluorescent lighting was grudgingly accepted into American homes.

In the interim, a number of other high-efficiency lighting types have been developed, including mercury vapor, sodium vapor, and metal halide, but the unnatural spectrum of light they produce has also precluded their use in domestic work.

By contrast, halogen residential lighting, introduced during the 80s, was an instant hit with the public. Why? Halogen’s warm, yellow-white light is very close to the spectrum of sunlight. Accordingly, engineers are currently working hard to make the next big development in high efficiency lighting--light-emitting diodes, or LEDs--as warm and friendly as incandescent and halogen lamps.

Because the sun, after all, is still everyone’s favorite lighting fixture.

OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE

2011-10-03T16:01:00.000-07:00

A few years years back, just before the real estate bubble burst, a housing tract inspired by mass artist Thomas Kinkade’s bucolic townscapes and happy-happy cottages opened near Vallejo, California. Many people found this idea amusing, if not horrifying. But while there’s much that can be said about Kinkade’s trademark painting style--none of which I’ll say here--there’s nothing new about architecture being influenced by art. It’s been happening for centuries.

During the 1600s, for instance, the dynamic forms, layering of space, and dramatic use of light found in Baroque painting enormously influenced concurrent Baroque architecture. In the middle of the next century, the Italian G. B. Piranesi’s engravings of ancient Rome foreshadowed the rise of Romantic Classicism, an architectural style whose austere, sharply-drawn classical forms went on to dominate the 1800s.

Piranesi’s Carceri, a volume of engravings containing eerily atmospheric depictions of imaginary ruins, was especially influential to a branch of Romantic Classicism known as the Sublime. Set in motion in the late 1700s by the otherworldly designs of the Frenchmen C.-N. Ledoux and and L.-E. Boullee--many never built, some perhaps not even buildable--architects of the Sublime school used stark geometric forms raised to colossal scale to evoke feelings of awe bordering on apprehension.

Meanwhile, a romantic style of landscape painting gave rise to architecture’s Picturesque movement, whose work aimed to capture the rustic charm of naturalistic art in three dimensions. An early Picturesque landmark of 1744, the English garden of Stourhead, was in fact literally based on a landscape painting by Claude Lorrain done a century earlier. Later Picturesque works in England, such as the thatch-roofed peasant cottages conjured up by royal architect John Nash in 1811, continued to exploit the romance of Picturesque art--perhaps the closest historical parallel to those tract homes based on Kinkade’s work.

While representational art might seem more likely to inspire architects, abstract art has had, if anything, a more powerful influence. During the Teens, the work of the Futurists--an art movement that deified technology to an almost nauseating degree--was soon reflected in the architecture of the Russian Constructivists, whose startling mechanistic projects of the Twenties might have been widely influential had they not lost favor with Joseph Stalin soon afterward.

The Modernist architects Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius had close links with both Expressionism and with the Dutch movement known as de Stijl (Corbusier himself was a painter early in his career). The rectilinear geometries of de Stijl artists such as Piet Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg profoundly influenced Modernist floor plans and elevations, many of which resembled abstract art in themselves.

Unlike most of the foregoing examples, of course, Kinkade hardly represents the artistic vanguard of his era. Still, the fact that many laypersons--not to speak of critics--consider his work banal doesn’t mean Kinkade’s influence can be dismissed. Norman Rockwell’s paintings were long considered to be sentimental dreck; critics pointedly referred to Rockwell as an “illustrator”, refusing to dignify his work with the label of art. Today, in the more generous light of retrospect, Rockwell is widely considered an American original.

Whether you love it or hate it, Kinkade’s work seems to have the same sort of mainstream appeal that Rockwell’s art once did, and his status may someday be equally enhanced by time. Whether this bodes a coming generation of candyland cottages, their windows all aglow, we can only imagine.

STYLE SLEUTHING

2011-09-26T17:08:00.000-07:00

When it comes to identifying home styles, most people know generic terms such as Victorian, Bungalow, and Spanish. Really pegging the thing is a little tougher, though. Although more precise terms like Tudor, Mission, and Craftsman are often casually thrown about--especially by real estate agents, who ought to know better--they’re used wrongly more often than not. Herewith are some of the most common points of confusion.

For starters, calling a house “Victorian” is like calling a car “postwar”--it only describes what era the thing was built in. Luckily, the four major styles of Victorians are easy to tell apart: If the house has horizontal siding, false cornerstones, and windows with segmental arches, it’s an Italianate. If it looks like an Italianate but also has a steep mansard roof, it’s a Mansard. If it has a square bay window, skinny proportions, and a porch with lots of linear wooden gingerbread, it’s a Stick (also called Eastlake). If it has windows with colored glass borders, a few curved walls or a turret, and a porch with lots of decorative spindles, you can bet it’s a Queen Anne. Next category, please.

Bungalow is ageneric term describing any home that’s built close to the ground and has a low-pitched roof. More precisely, if a bungalow has wood siding or shingle (often with stone or clinker brick trim), it’s a Craftsman Bungalow. If it has stucco on the outside, it’s a California Bungalow.

The gaggle of labels hung on Spanish-style homes--Mission, Spanish Colonial, Churrigueresque, Moorish, Mediterranean--are another endless source of confusion. Strictly speaking, Mission refers only to architecture modeled on the West’s Spanish Colonial missions, and would suggest a rather plain house with thick stucco walls, an Alamo-like scrolled gable, and a few decorative barrel tiles, if not a whole roof full of them (for practical purposes, the term Spanish Colonial is essentially synonymous with Mission).

On the other hand, tile-roofed houses with more ornate features such as spiral columns and elaborate door and window surrounds are called Churriguersque, after the 17th-century Spanish Renaissance architect Jose Churriguera. Pointed or parabolic arches, ceramic tile accents, and perhaps castle-like crennelation would be clues that you were looking at a Moorish-style home. Of course, when in doubt, you’re always safe using the term Mediterranean, which has come to include pretty much anything with red tile on the roof.

The terms Tudor, Elizabethan, or Half-Timbered are often used interchangeably to describe English-inspired homes, but these terms don’t mean the same thing. A Tudor-style house usually has brickwork combined with restrained half-timbering, steep gables, a massive and prominent chimney, and relatively small windows sometimes topped by a pointed Tudor arch. By contrast, an Elizabethan-style home would have large areas of leaded windows divided into grids or into the familiar “Olde English” diamond pattern, along with lots of florid half-timbering in repeating motifs.

While both of the above examples might also be called “Half-Timbered”, that term more properly refers to a building technique and not a style.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t mentioned any postwar home styles, it’s because it takes quite a bit of time for style names to stabilize. Case in point: During the Sixties, California Ranchers and split levels were routinely called “Contemporaries”, as if they were going to stay in fashion forever. Today that term is all but forgotten.

Likewise, today’s gewgaw-laden tract houses are often referred to as “neo-traditionals”, but that term is so vague that it’s unlikely to survive. Hence, it’ll be a while before we know what posterity deems to call them.

WEIRD,WACKY, AND WONDERFUL

2011-09-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

Most architectural writing deals with what you might call “legitimate” styles: mass-produced, popular and relatively buttoned-down stuff. But some of the most fascinating architecture of the twentieth century came neither from architects nor builders, and can’t be fit any stylistic cubbyhole.

Such works, sometimes classed as “naive” or “visionary” design, are the product of singular personalities refreshingly free of academic influences. Here are a sampling:

• In 1921 Simon Rodia, an uneducated Italian immigrant laborer, began building the first of a group of towers around his house in Los Angeles’ Watts district. Fashioned out of cement-covered steel bars and encrusted with fantastic arrays of shells, bottles, and bits of tile and glass, the tallest of the structures eventually soared nearly a hundred feet. After laboring on the towers for thirty-three years Rodia, then 79, laid down his tools, deeded the property to his neighbor for nothing, and disappeared. Of the now-famous Watts Towers he said simply, “I had in mind to do something big and I did.”

• In the mid-50s, “Grandma” Tressa Prisbrey found that her collection of 2000 pencils had outgrown her house trailer in Santa Susana, California. So she began building a small structure to display them, using a material that was cheap and plentiful--discarded bottles. Over the next twenty years, this humble beginning evolved into the Bottle Village, a 40-by-300 foot compound of 13 buildings and nine other structures, all built out of some one million bottles laid up in cement.

Prisbrey, who liked to sport a floppy sun hat ringed with old television vacuum tubes, also made daily trips to the dump, where she collected bits of broken tile, old headlights, and a cavalcade of other discards. These she lovingly inlaid into every square inch of paving between the structures, as well as into numerous free-form planters which she built on the site. Prisbrey filled these planters with cactus, explaining:

“I don’t care much for cactus myself, but I don’t have a green thumb and if I forget to water the cactus they just grow anyhow. . .they remind me of myself. They are independent, prickly, and ask nothing from anybody.”

• And of course, no account of wacky architecture would be complete without mention of Sara Winchester, diminutive heiress to the Winchester arms fortune. Supposedly plagued by the spirits of the untold men who had died at the business end of Winchester rifles, Sara consulted a fortune teller and learned that as long as she kept adding onto her modest San Jose farmhouse, she would not only escape their wrath, but would never die to boot.

Psychics having a good deal more credibility in the late-19th century, she immediately embarked on the remodel to end all remodels--a project that would last several decades and ultimately yield a spectacularly rambling Victorian/Edwardian house with 160 rooms. Among its idiosyncrasies: A seance room, a bell tower for summoning the spirits, and the repeated use of design motifs with 13 elements. Tourguide puffery aside, the Winchester House remains a fine place to view the transition of architectural style from the late-nineteenth to the twentieth century-- a wacky enough subject in itself.

YOUR FAVORITE COLOR

2011-09-06T12:46:00.000-07:00

The other day I was driving down a local street lined with carefully inoffensive white, beige, or tan bungalows when something remarkable caught my peripheral vision: Jumping out from among the oatmealy shades was an electric blue cottage with lavender trim. While no doubt a few of the neighbors were dismayed by this violation of Waspish color preferences, the effect was both unexpected and charming.

Colors are a mysterious thing. We all see them a little differently, and when you get right down to it, they exist as much in the mind as in the objects we perceive. Few reasonable people would argue that one color is better than another. Still, there are always folks out there who think they know best which colors are “tasteful” and which aren’t, and are anxious to let people know about it.

In fact, color preferences are an intensely individual choice that varies from person to person and from culture to culture. Consequently, it’s nobody’s business but our own to decide which colors we like best.

A glance at the previous century’s changing color fashions shows both the human craving for variation and the relentlessly cyclical nature of taste, which has swung from reticent colors to vibrant ones and back again.

In the United States, the opening of the twentieth century gave rise to the Craftsman era, a reaction to the kaleidoscopic palette of Victorian architecture. Artifice was out, and natural simplicity was in. In keeping with these naturalistic aspirations, pristine whites once again returned to architecture, set off by deep, muted browns, greens, and golds.

By the late 1920s, however, the arrival of Art Deco, with its electrifying jags-and-curves motifs, brought with it an equally dramatic shift in color tastes. Art Deco designers daringly allied black with celadon greens, icy blues, and a whole range of red and yellow ochres--a trend that lasted until the eve of World War II.

The drab, camoflauge-like colors of the early postwar era--gray-greens, gray-blues, or ruddy browns--were surely inspired by the inescapable military imagery of the war years. A rebuke to this trend arrived in the 1950s, when light, airy pastels in pink, blue, yellow and turquoise dominated residential design. This gradual return to strong, clear colors lasted well into the 60s, culminating in the vivid psychedelic palette of the late decade.

The pendulum of taste began its reversal during the Seventies, when the ecology movement helped foster a trend toward “earth tones”--a muted, naturalistic palette of beiges, tans, and browns. Despite a brief Postmodernist digression into happy neopolitan ice cream shades in the early 80s, the trend away from strong colors continued, culminating in the late-century fixation on whites, grays, and gunmetal blues.

When the history of the new millenium’s first decade is written, poisonous greens, bilious yellows, and muddy browns will likely come to represent its taste in architectural colors--no doubt a sort of rebellion against the resolutely bland palette of the 80s and 90s. Personally, colors with such insistently unpleasant associations aren’t my cup of tea. But would I dream of telling my neighbors that their color choices weren’t “tasteful”--whatever that means?

If the guy in the electric blue house can’t make me do it, neither can they.

WHAT GOES AROUND

2011-08-29T11:13:00.000-07:00

Channel surfing a while back, I happened across an old Joan Crawford movie called Mildred Pierce. I won’t summarize the plot here--I couldn’t do it in the length of this blog anyway--but suffice it to say there were adequate histrionics to win Crawford an Oscar for best actress in 1945. What really caught my attention, though, was a scene in which her social-climbing character is about to buy a spectacular though long-empty half-timbered mansion. As she surveys the ornate interior, she sighs resignedly and declares: “It’s not so bad, really...just tear down some of this gingerbread--”.

I puzzled over this line for a moment before realizing that, from the vantage point of 1945, the home’s design was supposed to be revolting.

How far we’ve come--or rather, how far we’ve come around. Like everything else in history, architectural styles are cyclical: every half-century or so, our idea of what constitutes good taste does a flip-flop. In Mildred Pierce’s time, “gingerbread” was practically an epithet, and people tore it down if they had it. Today, people put up gingerbread if they haven’t got any, and it’s Modernism that’s down for the count.

The lesson is that, in architecture as in art, there are no hard and fast rules, no right answers, and ultimately, no such thing as good taste. I’m always amused at the astonished reactions I get when I make this statement. Some people bristle as if they’ve been personally insulted. All of us think we know what good taste is, and--surprise surprise--it’s usually pretty close to our own. But like beauty, good taste is in the eye of the beholder. What passes for exquisite refinement in Dallas would draw yawns in Bombay or Manila. Moreover, there’s no reason to assume that our own ideas of good taste are any more valid than those of other cultures--they’re just more familiar, that’s all.

What’s more, even within a particular culture, good taste is a prisoner of its own time. In 1889, a Swiss engineer constructed an enormous, riveted wrought-iron tower to serve as the centerpiece of the Paris Exhibition. The French considered it an abomination and demanded its prompt demolition after the fair closed. Rather than being destroyed, of course, the Eiffel Tower eventually became the very symbol of Paris.

Likewise, at the dawn of the twentieth century, residents of the tony Chicago suburb of Oak Park were repeatedly outraged by the construction of a series of new homes which most of them considered monstrous. They were referring to Frank Lloyd Wright’s epoch-making Prairie houses.

Some might argue that, apart from the temporal biases most of us are constrained by, there are still some absolutes of good taste that remain valid in any era or setting--rules based on classical proportions, color theory, respect for context, and the like. But even this notion doesn’t hold water. Over the centuries, dozens of architects have changed the course of design history by flouting accepted “rules” of good taste, not the least of them Michaelangelo, Bernini, Richardson, Wright, and Venturi.

All this leads to a rather unsettling question. If there are no absolutes of taste--or, to put it more precisely, if our ideas of good taste are always prisoners of our own zeitgeist--how do we decide what our buildings should look like?

Why, we rely on the infallible judgement of our local design review board, of course.

Just kidding.

THE MOMENT FROZEN IN TIME

2011-08-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

Halfway up one of the brick walls of my office, part of an old factory building dating from 1907, there’s a single brick that’s twisted slightly out of position. Beneath it, a solidified ribbon of mortar hangs frozen in a drooping arc, attesting to the fact that the brick was bumped within a few minutes of the time it was placed, while the mortar was still wet.

All told, there are about six thousand exposed bricks in the walls of my office and some half-million in the building altogether, most of them laid with ordinary accuracy. That single brick, however, stands out both literally and figuratively.

Why? Because it gives an almost eerily direct temporal connection to the moment in 1907 when a mason, now long dead, placed--and then accidentally displaced--that single brick. Perhaps he nudged it with his foot as he moved along the scaffold; perhaps he had a few nips of whiskey with his lunch; or perhaps it was just close to quitting time, and he was tired. The possibilities are as vast as the likelihood of ever really knowing is small. The brick can’t tell the story; it can only record the outcome of that moment over a century ago.

It may seem odd that imperfections are often the very things we find intriguing in our surroundings, but so it is. Imperfections, which are the inevitable traces of human effort, are what put a premium on handcrafted objects over machine-made ones. They tell us that someone--perhaps someone much like us--put heart and soul into making them.

For this reason, architects have long admired brick, stone, carved wood, wrought iron, and other building materials that provide an obvious record of human effort. If flaws seem like a strange thing to admire, the alternative is much worse. Pursuing visual perfection, as some architects are wont to do, is a sure ticket to failure. This is the inevitable flaw in the sort of frigid Minimalist work that appears ad nauseum in chic design magazines. While such projects always look smashing in glossy photo spreads, the real test comes later, when time has inevitably begun to affect those “perfect” details and they start showing wear or simply fall to pieces.

For a time following the Industrial Revolution, machine-made objects were regarded as superior to handmade ones. Yet eventually, social critics such as England’s John Ruskin managed to reawaken the public to the beauty of items fashioned by hand, whose innate sense of life no machine could ever match.

The resulting counterreaction ushered in the Arts and Crafts movement in England, as well as its American counterpart, the Craftsman style. Craftsman architecture showcased coarse materials such as rough stone, clinker brick, and carved wood that were pointedly worked by hand, directly refuting the Victorian machine aesthetic. Later on in the early 20th century, Spanish, Tudor, and other period revival styles provided an even bigger canvas for hand craftsmanship.

“Every time a man puts his hand down to cut or carve or chisel or build a house,” wrote the architect William R. Yelland during the period revival era, “he must express his own self.” It is this self-expression, a record of human passing forever condensed out of evanescent time, that is architecture’s greatest gift.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: The Invisible Answer, Part Three

2011-08-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, prior to the late 1930s, people who lived in travel trailers full-time were hailed as adventurous, modern-day nomads, and were widely admired by the public. By the tail end of the Depression, however, vast numbers of impoverished families had resorted to living in broken-down homemade trailers, and the public perception of trailer dwellers completely reversed. Cities and towns passed laws barring them from entering city limits, or else imposed heavy fees to discourage them from staying overnight.

Today, this sad legacy persists in the unkind treatment of mobile home dwellers as second-class citizens--people whom zoning laws still relegate to living beside tank farms or beneath runway approaches. Little wonder that even the most mortgage-enslaved Americans still recoil at the thought of dwelling in such places.

Yet if and when America ever develops a true mass-produced form of housing--one that does for the cost of homes what the Model T did for the cost of cars--it will most likely be an outgrowth of the mobile home. For decades, and without the fanfare accompanying the many “affordable” housing solutions proposed by architects and visionaries, mobile homes (or, as the industry prefers to call them, “manufactured homes”) have been providing decent, mass-produced lodging for a fraction of the cost of site-built houses.

The main reason for this difference is simple. While conventional homes use a few factory-built components such as roof trusses, doors, windows, and cabinets, the lion’s share of the structure remains entirely hand-built. By contrast, the manufactured home industry literally grew up with mass production, thanks to its prewar origins in building travel trailers. From a modest start--few early trailers exceeded 160 square feet or so--the industry inexorably progressed to larger and more sophisticated units. By the late Sixties, huge, factory-built “doublewides” routinely enclosed areas of around a thousand square feet, which is about the size of an average bungalow home of the 1920s. Along the way, manufactured home builders quietly acquired the sort of mass production techniques that the site-built housing industry still considers revolutionary.

Why all the fuss about mass production? What’s wrong with the way we build traditional houses? The answer is that, of America’s innumerable consumer products, homes are among the last that are predominantly handmade. This implies the same thing for houses that it does for any other handmade product: High cost. It’s one of several admittedly complex reasons that fewer and fewer middle-class Americans--let alone the poor--can achieve the dream of home ownership these days.

Still, despite the thrashing we’ve gotten from five years of the Great Recession, many Americans still believe that a “real” house, whether affordable or otherwise, should be built onsite and not in a factory--a perception heartily supported by the building industry, whose livelihood depends upon it. Hence, it’s doubtful that manufactured homes will be accepted by mainstream home buyers until they can unflinchingly compete with site-built homes in appearance, construction quality, amenities, and safety.

Up to now, the manufactured home industry hasn’t been up to this challenge. For the most part, it remains satisfied with often-haphazard planning and a dubious, two-dimensional aesthetic. Yet an industry that’s ridden out wildly changing fortunes, regulatory discrimination, and decades of public ridicule might still be counted on to provide a few surprises.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: The Invisible Answer, Part Two

2011-08-08T10:41:00.000-07:00

Architects love to start from a clean slate. It’s inherent in our training, and often, it’s for the best--after all, clean-slate thinking has given us Falling Water, Ronchamps, and countless other architectural triumphs.

Yet sometimes, incremental improvements on a humble concept are more useful than the grandest plans made from scratch. This is the case with affordable housing. Consider what architects have done to make homes more affordable during the past eighty years--in practical terms, next to nothing--and compare this with the erstwhile trailer industry, that paragon of gauche design, which has stumbled along unceremoniously only to arrive at affordable housing that really works.

The trailer story begins in the late Teens, when Americans first piled into their flivvers to go “autocamping” along the nation’s scenic new roads. At first, campers simply carried tents, but by the early Twenties, many were towing tiny trailers that cleverly unfolded into roomy canvas cabins. Meanwhile, towns throughout the country opened auto camps--later known as trailer parks--to attract tourist dollars.

In 1929, a Michigan man named Arthur Sherman got tired of wrestling with his tent trailer and built himself a solid-walled masonite version that didn’t need setting up. The idea caught on, and Sherman wound up in the trailer business, with hundreds of others soon following. By the mid-Thirties, trailering and trailer parks were such a huge phenomenon that one expert foresaw half of all Americans living in trailers by 1955.

Yet by 1937 the trailer boom had collapsed, the victim of a saturated market and its own overheated rhetoric. Meanwhile, broken-down trailers became the only homes many Depression-bound Americans could afford, changing the public’s original perception of trailer dwellers as wholesome, fun-living nomads to the more familiar stereotype presuming shiftlessness and poverty.

World War II briefly redeemed the trailer’s image. Faced with an urgent need to house defense workers, the government ordered some one hundred thousand trailers during the course of the war, and in the process helped demonstrate the lowly trailer’s value as a year-round dwelling.

The postwar housing shortage brought many novel ideas for affordable, mass-produced housing, from the all-steel Lustron home to Buckminster Fuller’s aircraft-based Wichita House. Once again, however, the clean-slate approach created spiraling costs that premempted any chance of affordability.

The trailer industry, on the other hand, simply picked up where it left off, adding homey touches and increasing size, until by the early 1950s some models were over 25 feet long. These units were now clearly designed for year-round living, though in light of the trailer dweller’s shady reputation, the industry remained loathe to concede this.

Only in 1954, when a Wisconsin firm introduced a trailer so large it required a special permit to transport, did the industry finally begin to acknowledge that year-round trailer dwellers were its real market. Twelve-foot-wide, fourteen-foot-wide, and double-twelve-foot wide trailers eventually followed, at prices that nevertheless were a fraction of conventional site-built homes.

Today, the travel trailer’s descendants--now known as manufactured homes--have quietly fulfilled the whole gamut of affordable housing requirements, and have done so through evolution and not revolution. They are mass-produced and hence affordable; they can be easily customized and rapidly deployed, and they provide the familiar domestic imagery so many homeowners take comfort in.

Yet despite these attributes, manufactured homes remain largely invisible to the architectural profession. Hence, the question is not whether such homes can provide an affordable housing solution--they already have, and for decades. The real question is why architects, and much of the public, still seem to wish they hadn’t.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: The Invisibile Answer

2011-08-01T19:46:00.001-07:00

A while back, I wrote a column on why architects have so often failed at designing affordable housing. It drew a flurry of responses from my colleagues--some thoughtful, some merely huffy and self-righteous. A few architects who’ve spent a good portion of their careers developing affordable housing were understandably offended at being lumped in with the rest of us. Many others missed the point altogether, which was that traditional architectural schooling all but guarantees an architect who’ll design expensive buildings, not affordable ones.

Many respondents cited examples of successful, high-profile affordable housing projects aimed at low income groups. Few acknowledged that the need for affordable housing is no longer limited to the poor--increasingly, it applies to the middle class as well. Over the past ten years, aspiring middle-class home owners have been doubly hammered--early in the decade by the ballooning cost of single family homes, and now, in the midst of the Recession, by declining income.

In fact, through feast and famine, the median price of homes has continued to rise ahead of any increase in family earnings, despite the increasing reliance today’s families place on dual incomes. Simple arithmetic will reveal the result: More people than ever are now deprived of the American dream of home ownership.

How can any nation expect to provide affordable housing for its poor when, increasingly, it can’t even house its middle class? And can any place really be called a “community” when its own teachers, firefighters, cops, and librarians can’t afford to live there?

The reasons behind the rising cost of homes are manifold, as many correspondents pointed out. By heavily favoring loans for conventional housing types, conservative lending institutions help enforce formulaic, cookie-cutter development, while quashing promising housing ideas that fall outside the usual bounds.

Our nation’s moribund zoning laws have had a similar effect, though they do it by segregating usages and doggedly insisting on low densities and land-squandering building setbacks. Developers--the few that still dare to build in this economic climate--respond to these limitations by sticking to well-tried formulas, concentrating on the sort of huge, overblown tract homes that used to yield the highest profits.

Architects have bills to pay too, and perhaps that’s why so many of us in the profession seem unwilling to raise our voices against the idiocies of hyperrestrictive zoning, meddlesome design review boards, and the national appetite for pointlessly oversized home designs.

Strangely, though, despite the many architects who voiced an opinion on the subject of affordable housing, not one cited the most successful and ubiquitous form of affordable housing there is--possibly because architects have had virtually nothing to do with its development.

I’m talking, of course, about manufactured homes, those boxy, prefabricated units that used to be known as mobile homes and, before that, as trailers. Despite garnering little more than contempt from the architectural profession during their fifty-plus years of existence, manufactured homes are among the few housing types that actually deliver on the promise of affordability, every day, and in every state of the union.

Scourge or solution? We’ll take a closer look next time around.

MY OLD SCHOOL

2011-07-25T12:53:00.000-07:00

Change the name, and any Baby Boomer would recognize my old grade school, Crawford Village Elementary. It was one of those flat-roofed, single-story jobs with parallel rows of classroom wings, all linked together by covered outdoor halls edged with pipe columns. At the main entrance was a barren, concrete-paved quadrangle with a flagpole; beyond was an auditorium known--as it was in all such schools--as the Multi-Purpose Room. Inside it were ranks of long lunch tables that folded neatly into the walls, a wardrobe filled with Traffic Patrol uniforms, and an elevated stage. In this vast, asphalt-tiled room, redolent with the smell of countless cafeteria lunches, we were gathered to watch the Bell Labs epic “Our Mr. Sun” at least once a year.

Thousands of schools just like Crawford Village were built across America from the late Forties through the mid-Sixties to handle the postwar baby boom. Known as “finger plan” schools because of their parallel rows of classrooms, their design was pioneered by the noted architect Ernest Kump (1912-1999). Kump’s first finger plan design, Acalanes High School in Lafayette, California, was enormously influential, and served as a prototype for public schools of all levels well into the Sixties.

Kump’s basic finger plan scheme could be easily adjusted to a variety of sites--a fact that delighted architects scrambling to keep up with the era’s boom in school-building. As it happened, I eventually served my internship with Reynolds & Chamberlain, one of the four associated firms that designed Crawford Village and dozens of California schools like it during the 1950s. One of the principals used to joke that when he received another school commission, he’d simply take out the same old drawings and change the name of the school on the title sheet. Although it wasn’t quite that simple, there was more than a passing resemblance among these designs.

Typical of finger plan schools, the classrooms at Crawford Village had a whole wall of windows facing north and a high clearstory that peeked over the hallway roof on the south. The entirety of the room’s artificial light came from six curious ceiling lamps with Saturn-like rings surrounding a silvered bulb. The ceilings and the upper part of the walls were covered in perforated acoustical tile whose holes made a challenging target for pencil-stub projectiles.

Only in retrospect have I come to appreciate the ingenuity of these schools, whose ubiquitous traits grew out of the need to accomodate a rising flood of schoolkids as quickly and efficiently as possible. The buildings were built on inexpensive concrete slab foundations, with wood-framed walls rendered in stucco; their outdoor corridors obviated walls altogether. The width of those long, narrow “fingers” of classrooms was quite simply determined by the distance a 2x12 roof joist could span.

Hot water pipes for radiant heating were embedded in the floor slabs, avoiding attics full of ductwork, while still keeping students toasty in winter. The tall walls of north-facing glass gave diffuse daylighting, while those peculiar lamps served to bounce light onto the ceiling, from whence it was evenly reflected to the desktops.

Today, with the Baby Boom just a fading playground echo, large numbers of the old finger plan schools have been closed, demolished, or converted to other uses. In a sign of the times, Crawford Village Elementary has become a retraining school for adults. Although the paint scheme has changed and the classrooms are now jammed with computers, somehow I suspect these new students still feel right at home, waiting for that clock up in the corner to tick oh-so-loudly to the school day’s end.

GET WITH THE PROGRAM

2011-07-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

Not to lord it over computer geeks, but us architects were programming since long before Wozniac, Univac, Eniac, and even Babbage. Of course, we’ve been doing it with buildings, not computers: “Programming” is architectspeak for the process of determining and organizing a project’s requirements. There’s no high-tech gear necessary—a pencil, paper, and some careful thought about your lifestyle is all it takes.

Why should someone pondering a new home or an addition bother with programming? Because, in a sense, the architectural program is the blueprint for the blueprints. Without it, you’ll be floundering in a million possibilities, with no starting point and nothing to guide your design.

Ergo, some programming basics:

• First, determine what kind of rooms you need. Make an honest analysis of the way you actually live, without allowing architectural fads or one-upmanship to color your thinking. For instance, if you’re not in the habit of hanging around in your bedroom a lot, it would be a colossal waste to have the sort of gigantic master suite found in most new homes these days. If you’ll actually use the space, fine; otherwise, forget it.

• Next, decide how big each room should be. Don’t pull sizes out of the air; instead, measure some similar rooms you’re already familiar with, and then adjust their size up or down to suit your needs. Always allow a little extra for errors, oversights, and just plain generosity--especially in kitchens, bathrooms, and staircases, whose space requirements are chronically underestimated by amateur planners.

On the other hand, don’t make rooms pointlessly oversized; huge spaces can be just as awkward and difficult to furnish as small ones, and they’re more expensive to boot.

• Finally, assign a hierarchy of importance to the rooms on your program, so that when you run into the inevitable planning conflicts, you’ll know which room has the better claim to space, views, sunlight, or your budget dollars.

Customarily, the largest rooms--living room, family room, master bedroom--get top billing. The kitchen, bathrooms, and secondary bedrooms are usually on the next tier, with the laundry, closets, and the garage bringing up the rear. However, your lifestyle may demand adjustments in these rankings. If you’re mad about cooking, for example, the kitchen should rightly go to the top of the list.

The only fairly inviolable rankings in this hierarchy pertain to solar orientation. In general, living areas that are occupied throughout the day should face south or nearly so. The kitchen can face east, south, or west, depending on when you use it most, although if it tends to serve as your family’s main gathering place, a southern exposure is probably best. A breakfast room should ideally face east for morning sun, and a dining room west for afternoon light.

Bedrooms should face either east, for those who like being awakened by direct sun, or west for those who don’t. North-facing bedrooms, and in fact any north-facing living area, will generally be gloomy, cold, and uninviting. Hence, the north side of the houseis best reserved for the garage--if street access allows it--and for storage, mechanical, and other rooms that aren’t inhabited.

Simple, no? End program.

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

2011-07-12T14:46:00.000-07:00

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, Royal Barry Wills, 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.

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

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.

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.

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 rythmically 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.

SAY WHAT?

2011-07-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

In Hana, Hawaii a while 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.”

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.”

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.”

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.

GETTING DECKED

2011-06-27T12:27:00.000-07:00

It’s been well over half a century since magazines such as Sunset popularized the, like, very California concept of the redwood deck. Although decks were originally used to create outdoor living space on sloping sites, they’ve become a default standard for flat sites as well. From the jutting, rakish decks of the 1950s, to the blobby contours of the ‘70s, to the Craftsman-style motifs popular today, decks have provided countless homeowners with a creative yet manageably-scaled do-it-yourself project.

Should you design or build your own deck? If your needs are straightforward and you’re reasonably handy, why not? In these trying financial times, adding a deck is a simple and cost-effective way to increase your home’s living area as well as its resale value. And as do-it-yourself projects go, it can be lots of fun. Here are some tips:

• Since a deck is really an outdoor extension of your home’s floor plan, it should be laid out just as carefully. First, make sure you provide generous access to the deck from the major living areas. If necessary, add a sliding door or a pair of French doors, depending on your budget and the style of your home.Determine the most likely use of the various deck areas or “rooms”, and then give each their own identity using level changes, screens, planters, or overhead structures.

• Be creative with decking patterns. Judging by what’s out there, you’d think using 2x6 decking was one of the Ten Commandments. It isn’t, so consider 2x2 or 2x4 decking instead, or experiment with combinations of different sizes--one of the most pleasing patterns uses alternating 2x6s and 2x2s.

Generally, the deck planks are run in the long direction of the deck to save labor. However, on a very long, narrow deck it may better to lay the decking perpendicular to the long direction to give an illusion of added width. Changes in direction can also be pleasing, but be careful that the pattern doesn’t become too busy. Level changes provide the most logical place to change the decking direction.

• Redwood decking offers beauty, workability, and resistance to decay, but a dwindling redwood supply and rising prices have made alternatives such as Trex more popular. Tropical hardwoods such as Ipe are another alternative if you prefer the look of genuine wood. After the decking is installed, you can simply let it weather naturally, or you can stain it or apply a transparent water-repellent finish, thought the latter will probably require renewal every one to three years. Painting is a definite no-no; the finish won’t hold up to foot traffic, and wood decking will rot more quickly since it can’t “breathe”.

• Don’t scrimp on the steps. Even the most stunning deck will be ruined by a steep, miserly 3-foot-wide stair. The large scale of the outdoors demands generous proportions, so make deck steps at least six feet wide, and even wider if possible. Make the risers no higher than 6 1/2”, and the treads at least 10 1/2” deep. In addition to looking more substantial, broad, gentle stairs also provide an inviting place to sit.

• Make sure the deck railing matches the style of your home. If there’s an existing porch rail someplace, use it as a protoype, but beware: current building codes specify that a 4” sphere should not be able to pass through the railing. If the existing design doesn’t meet this requirement, you may be able to satisfy your building department by adding 4x6 welded wire to the inside of the railing.

• Lastly, if you’d like planters or screens to add privacy or to create smaller areas, spend a few moments to integrate them into the design. Build planters of the same type of lumber, and try to echo motifs such as baluster spacing and the like. It’s little details like these that can turn a ho-hum wooden platform into a genuine outdoor living space.

REMODELS: Avoiding the Road to Ruin

2011-06-13T12:22:00.000-07:00

Reams have been written about the glamorous part of remodeling--the architect’s (often incomprehensible) commentary; the client’s bubbling enthusiasm; the glossy magazine spreads. A lot less is said about the bumpy road most remodelers travel to arrive at a great project. In this most challenging of economies, it's even more important that you use your building budget intelligently.

While problems and surprises are endemic to the remodeling process, they can be minimized by careful planning and a healthy dose of pragmatism. Herewith are seven rules of survival:

• Educate yourself. Discover remodeling pitfalls the painless way--by taking a class or seminar--not by living through a disastrous project. Learning from a pro is easier and a lot less expensive than enrolling in the school of hard knocks. Look for homeowner education organizations in your area, or check the architecture department of your local junior college; many have a wide variety of classes on design and remodeling topics.

• Set a realistic budget. The days of $80 per square foot construction costs are just a distant memory now; realistically, you should allow from $200 to $300 per square foot, depending on the size, complexity, and quality of your remodel. Extensive kitchen or bath remodels will cost even more. If you plan to hire an architect, add an additional 12-15% fee to the total.

• Know where to save and where to spend. It’s easy to be seduced by trendy design, but high-fashion items are notoriously bad investments. Spend your money where it counts: on top-quality doors, windows, doors, roofing, and exterior finishes. The frou-frou can be easily upgraded later.

• Do as much of the work yourself as you can, but be realistic about how much you can do and how well you can do it. Finish work, especially, is not the place for on-the-job training--novice work can ruin an otherwise first-rate job. And be forewarned: Many contractors dislike sharing construction responsibilities with owners, since any tardiness on owner’s part can raise havoc with the contractor’s schedule. If you’re confident of your time and abilities, fine; otherwise, forget it.

• Choose a contractor (or an architect) by what he builds, not by what he says. Always ask for references, and then follow up on them. Most contractors and architects are dedicated, competent, and take great pride in their work--and they’ll be glad to let their references prove it.

• Be prepared for more of everything--more expense, more time, more disruption, more problems than you planned on. Surprises of one kind or another are endemic to working with existing buildings--expect them.

• If you need design help, get it. That 12-15% architect’s fee may sound like a waste of money until you find yourself spending $30,000 to correct errors or add items you’ve forgotten. If I do say so myself, investing in a professional’s experience will usually repay itself many times over. In any case, a well-detailed set of plans is an absolute must if you plan to bid the job out, since vague plans will invite many costly “extras” later on.

All of the foregoing adds up to two remodeling fundamentals: Be informed, and expect the unexpected. A little mental preparation will go a long way toward smoothing out the road to a remodel.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING: What Do Architects Know About It?

2011-06-06T11:01:00.000-07:00

If there’s one building type that architects seem ill-equipped to design, it’s so-called affordable housing. Aside from getting in a few years of honest-to-goodness construction experience—which is rare in the profession—very little in an architect’s training enables him to understand what makes for an affordable, easily-constructed building.

While many factors outside an architect’s control interfere with the production of housing for ordinary incomes--including obsolete zoning ordinances, anxious lenders, and developers who naturally prefer the fat profit margin of upscale markets--the architect’s share of the problem is rooted in an educational system that encourages unique solutions when obvious ones might do better.

Many brilliant architects have taken a crack at producing affordable housing over the years. Not the least of them was Frank Lloyd Wright, who in 1937 erected the first of his “Usonian” houses—an attempt to deliver his highly personal brand of architecture in an inexpensive form. Well, okay—not that inexpensive.

Le Corbusier and a host of other Modernists brought their affordable-housing ideas to the United States and, unfortunately, some of them got built. Minoru Yamasaki’s ultra-rational Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, celebrated as a shining example of urban renewal when it was constructed in the Fifties, ended its short life as little more than a highrise drug den. Its demolition by dynamite in 1972, a slow-motion image seared into the conscience of many an architect, vividly signaled the failures of Modernism.

One problem with attempts such as these lies in the architect’s characteristic compulsion to begin from a clean slate. Wright invented what amounted to a whole new construction system for his Usonian houses but, being unfamiliar to contractors, it could hardly have gained rapid acceptance. And in his Broadacre City model town project of the ‘30s, he proposed that each house be placed on a full acre of land, at a time when most Americans were already gravitating toward big cities.

While Wright dallied with such bucolic notions, the International Style Modernists instead seemed convinced that rationalism and technology held the key. In his “Ville Radieuse” project—mercifully unbuilt—Le Corbusier placed a phalanx of numbingly identical living towers on a site that resembled nothing so much as a sheet of graph paper. It was the spiritual ancestor of Pruitt-Igoe, based on the strange idea that equality was somehow linked to mindless anonymity.

Moshe Safdie’s innovative Habitat housing scheme, built in Montreal in 1967, attempted to stack a standardized concrete housing unit into a sort of multistoried modular sculpture. Alas, the need to design much of the details from scratch once again derailed the project’s practical potential for mass construction.

Since that time, there have been any number of attempts to provide decent housing at a reasonable cost. Many have been laudable, and some have actually been affordable. Few have been both.

In recent years, one of the most promising forms of affordable housing has been the concept of industrial loft housing (often called live-work), in which obsolete industrial and commercial buildings were adapted to residential use. Artists, musicians, and craftspeople found generous areas of low-cost living space in these buildings, and could pursue their avocations there at the same time.

As soon as architects eager for show-stopping projects entered the picture, however, the industrial loft became just another trendoid living style. I know—I helped it happen. The result, I’m sorry to say, is a gentrification so rapid that industrial lofts are now essentially the domain of attorneys, stockbrokers, and techies.

Once again, the virtual absence of practical training in architecture serves us badly, leaving most architects unable to judge what’s affordable and what isn’t.

SKYLIGHT MYTHS

2011-05-31T12:23:00.000-07:00

“Won’t it leak?” Those are the first three words I hear from clients when I propose using a skylight.

Not to worry. Today’s skylights are all but leak-proof when they’re properly installed and flashed. Least troublesome of all are the self-curbing variety, which feature a one-piece welded aluminum curb in place of the old-fashioned wooden curb and its associated waterproofing headaches. Even interior condensation problems have been eased with the use of built-in gutters which either drain away condensate or hold it until it evaporates naturally.

But while skylights may give you fewer technical worries these days, their aesthetics still demand careful thought. Here are a few tips:

• Choose the skylight’s location carefully. First, determine its solar orientation, so you’ll know how much light you’ll be getting. Too little light won’t justify the installation cost, while too much can make a room intolerably hot. South-facing skylights in sloping roofs are especially liable to overheat rooms; north-facing skylights will admit a soft, diffuse light all day long, though they won’t give that sun-splashed effect.

Most manufacturers offer a range of glazing tints, from clear to gray- or bronze-tinted to translucent white, to suit the skylight’s orientation. The gray and bronze tints help reduce overheating but still allow direct light, while the translucent white diffuses the light as well. However, you should also plan on some additional form of shading, whether an old-style roller shade or a pleated fabric one on tracks.

• Consider the skylight’s appearance both indoors and out. Inside, try to align the skylight opening with a door, window, or some other existing feature, so that it doesn’t look haphazard.

Outside, avoid installing the skylight on any roof surface that faces the street. Front-facing skylights look jarringly out of place on traditional home styles, since they were seldom used in the original designs, and often yield a cluttered-looking roof even on Modernist homes. Discreet concealment is the safest course.

• Choose a skylight that’s as large as orientation and aesthetics will allow. A large skylight is cheaper than small one per unit area, and the premium in labor is often marginal. Frequently, a single large skylight is also preferable to an equivalent group of smaller ones, even if it requires minor reframing. Multiple units admit less light due to the intervening mullions, require proportionately more labor to install, and have a greater likelihood of leaks due to improper flashing.

Why complicate things? Single skylights are widely available in sizes up to five by eight feet, and at least one manufacturer offer standard units up to ten by twelve feet.

• Take advantage of special skylight options. If you’re not keen on conventional “bubble” skylights--and if you have a traditional style home, you shouldn’t be--some manufacturers offer special low-profile models. Some firms will furnish some of their standard skylights with flat glass in place of the usual acrylic plastic bubble.However, make sure the glass versions will meet your local building and fire codes.

Unusual shapes such as circles, octagons, and pyramids are also available. Many rectangular skylights can be ordered “operable” (hinged to open a few inches for ventilation). They can also be fitted with an electric operator controlled by a wall switch--probably a waste of money if the skylight is easy to reach, but a great convenience if it isn’t.

THE KITCHEN DEBATES

2011-05-16T15:56:00.001-07:00

Over the years I’ve learned that it’s very difficult to design a great kitchen, but fairly easy to design a good one--in fact, a basic kitchen will usually just about design itself.

This assertion may have my kitchen designer colleagues whipping out their Dreizack knives, but no matter.

First, on the question of size: big kitchens aren’t necessarily better. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of palatial, 400-square-foot kitchens that are perfectly awful, with pointlessly convoluted counter shapes and appliances separated by marathon stretches. These kitchens are like old Cadillacs: their size serves merely to impress; it doesn’t make for efficiency. In fact, functionally, a well-designed small kitchen can be in every way equal to a large one except for all those scads of extra storage space.

Regarding appliance locations, the hoary old rule of the “work triangle” remains a useful one. If you draw lines connecting the three major work centers in your kitchen--sink, stove, and refrigerator--the sum of the sides of the resulting triangle should equal at least thirteen feet, yet not exceed twenty-two feet. Ideally, circulation paths should not cross this triangle, though in real life it’s often unavoidable.

There are only four basic kitchen arrangements: U-shaped, Corridor, L-Shaped, and One Wall, and your choice is dictated mainly by the number of doors or other circulation paths that enter the kitchen space. More openings usually mean less uninterrupted counter space, though not necessarily a less usable kitchen.

Because the U-shaped kitchen is entirely removed from through traffic, it ensures both the maximum continuous counter space and the least disruption of the cook. One arm of the U can also serve to divide the kitchen from an adjoining room, such as a family room or great room, in place of a solid wall.

Alas, many older kitchens have multiple doors entering the room, which demands a different arrangement. When the room is long and narrow and has a door at either end, the Corridor (or “Pullman”) kitchen is the ticket. It’s extremely efficient in narrow confines--hence its use on railroad cars--and also simple to plan: The sink goes on the outside wall beneath a window, the range is placed more or less at the center of the counter opposite, and the refrigerator can go at either end on whichever side suits you best.

If the existing room is interrupted by doors entering on two adjoining walls, an L-shaped kitchen usually fills the bill. In this case, the sink once again goes on an outside wall under a window, and the range takes the approximate center of the counter space on the adjoining side. Depending on space constraints, the refrigerator can be located at the extreme ends of the “L” on either wall, depending both on your preference and the space available.

The humble one-wall kitchen, which is most often found in efficiency apartments, doesn’t really have a work triangle at all, since the work centers are all in a row. As long as there’s enough counter space between the sink, stove, and refrigerator, this arrangement will serve perfectly well. In fact, it’s ideal for all those single guys who dine on Pop-Tarts over the kitchen sink.

TRASHIN’ FASHION

2011-05-09T11:34:00.000-07:00

If I’ve ranted and raved about any architectural subject over the years, it has to be the idea of fashion-driven “modernization”. With today’s renewed appreciation of historic residential designs such as the California Bungalow, you’d think that designers would finally get the message that every architectural period has its finer points. We’ve seen the pattern umpteen times: After five or so decades of neglect and abuse, older styles are suddenly rediscovered and cooed over by designer types, while other, more recent styles are patronizingly judged to be in need of “improvement” by superimposing today’s fashion biases upon them. I still routinely hear interior designers advising homeowners on “getting an updated look” and “contemporizing”--words that instantly set my teeth on edge.

Architectural styles have always followed a cycle of initial popularity, decline, disgrace, and rediscovery. Victorian homes, you’ll recall, were held in contempt for the first half of the 20th century, during which time countless examples were either demolished or just as irrevocably destroyed in the process of being “modernized”. Today one wouldn’t dream of stripping the ornament from a Victorian house and slathering it in stucco, but during the Forties, that’s precisely what many architects and designers urged their clients to do in order to get an “updated look”.

Sounds ridiculous now, doesn’t it? Yet apparently, we’ve learned nothing from such mistakes. Regardless of the quality or thought that went into their design, examples of past styles that are currently out of favor--for instance, the spare and unadorned Modernist homes of the Sixties--are deemed unworthy of the same appreciation we’d give a Craftsmen Bungalow or some other style that’s currently chic. Design elements that are integral to Modernist architecture--slender window frames; plain, ornament-free walls and ceilings, and flush doors--are blythely replaced because the don’t happen to fit in with the current mania for plasticky, frou-frou-laden design.

A basic truth of aesthetics is that the more fashionable something is now, the more unfashionable it will be later--and not very much later, mind you. Yet, driven by the relentless juggernaut of advertising and fashion industry hype, both designers and homeowners continue to buy into the bogus idea that a thirty-year-old house needs modernizing, while a sixty-year-old house needs restoring.

This is an exquisite bit of pretzel logic. First, we’re encourouraged to remove everything that makes the original house belong to its era; then, a few decades later, we’re supposed to wring our hands in regret and try to put it all back. Why not cut out the middleman, and simply keep your house in its original style?

Improving a house by revamping it with momentarily trendy features is about as valid as improving Ishi by putting him in a three-piece suit. I invite any architect, designer, or decorator to cite a single example of a fashion-driven residential makeover done ten or fifteen years ago that can still be considered an improvement in light of changing tastes. No kidding--I’d really like to hear about it.

On the other side of the argument, I can cite any number of homes that have commanded higher sale prices for being in fine original condition. Am I missing something?

(This post was reprinted from a recent entry in my blog Red Tile Style, official site of the like-titled book on Spanish Revival architecture that I co-authored with Doug Keister. To view, please go to redtilestyle.blogspot.com).

HERE’S THE INFO YOU DIDN’T ASK FOR. . .

2011-05-05T14:25:00.000-07:00

I had a brainstorm the other day as I was leafing through a catalog of office machines. On one page, I found copiers of every description--ones that reduced, enlarged, collated, you name it. On the facing page was an array of shredders—the Wall Street banker’s variety--that would slice documents into strips 7/32” of an inch wide and then, as if that weren’t enough, chew each strand into tiny bits as well.

Now, since statistics show that the majority of photocopies end up in the trash unread, why not combine a copier and shredder in one? It would shred documents as soon as they emerged from the copier, without the bother of distributing them to people who’d just throw them out anyway. Now that would be a timesaver.

And speaking of gratuitous information: Every month I receive a barrage of media kits featuring 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:

• Contrary to the truism that most households live in their kitchens, over 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.

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.

• 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—while in the West, people overwhelmingly prefer continuous-feed models. Apparently, Westerners still like to live dangerously. Interesting, no?

Hey, get away from that shredder!

A TOUCHING TALE OF ARCHITECTURE

2011-04-25T16:58:00.000-07:00

“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.

Whereas great works of painting and sculpture are almost invariably off limits, even the greatest works of architecture seldom carry such restrictions. Notre Dame de Paris doesn’t have a sign saying, “Please don’t touch the flying buttresses.” 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?

Touch--the opportunity for tactile exploration of form and texture--is one of 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 any other fine work of architecture--such combinations work subliminal magic on your psyche. You come away tingling without quite knowing why.

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.

Is there an alternative? Consider the work of an architect such as Carr Jones, who built lovely, personal homes of reinforced 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 texures of life has slipped a little.

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

CUT THE BULL

2011-04-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

Calvin Coolidge, the thirtieth president of the United States, 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. And while politicians might be the first to learn from Coolidge’s reticence, designers could take a few hints too.

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:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

ENERGY CONSERVATION: Penny Wise, Pound Foolish

2011-04-11T17:21:00.000-07:00

“Spare at the spigot,” admonishes an old proverb, “and let out the bunghole.” That rather tidily sums up America’s schizophrenic attitude toward energy conservation. We gladly rally to trim our energy use by a few percent, whether at home, at work, or in our cars, but we ultimately feel little urgency to change the overwhelming wastefulness of our built environment.

During the past thirty years, we’ve done plenty of “sparing at the spigot”, and that can only be applauded. We’ve passed minimal building energy standards such as California’s Title 24, but then wiped out much of the savings by building the sort of needlessly bloated, energy-guzzling homes that now sprawl across acre after acre of once pastoral landscape. We’ve enacted minimum standards for gas mileage--for some vehicles, at any rate-- yet we’ve made little headway in curbing our reliance on the automobile itself.

How did we get into this jam? A fair share of the blame for our disastrous land-use policies belongs at the feet of the very people who insisted they knew better: the postwar city planners. They’ve left us our current legacy of hyperorganized zoning ordinances which encourage--and in fact practically mandate--urban sprawl. These in turn have produced a national reliance upon the automobile that has only increased. After a disastrous 2009 sales year, 2010 car sales were up by almost twelve percent. So were people taking the opportunity to buy more efficient vehicles? Not quite. Leading the 2010 recovery was the gas-guzzling Ford F series pickup truck, whose sales increased by almost 25%.

And no wonder Americans remain auto-centered. Too many planners and state transportation departments still consider freeway expansion programs the solution to our mass transportation woes, even though it’s been demonstrated time and again that bigger highways merely invite more traffic instead of reducing it.

We consumers are to blame as well, for buying into the idea that a snowballing trend of consumption is the very embodiment of success. Even in the teeth of a nasty recession, we remain hooked on huge houses, and we're still willing to move out to the boondocks so we can afford them. Many people now routinely drive an hour or even two to get to work--a commute that would have been considered perfectly absurd even twenty years ago. Pretty soon, of course, the new community is as choked with cars and asphalt as the old one.

The real pity is that we’ve recognized the folly of these trends for decades, and we’ve done next to nothing to even protest them, let alone change them. And thanks to the hidebound attitudes of so many civic planning departments, little of substance has changed in our land use policy since the 1950s: Our hyperorganized zoning ordinances still jealously guard the outdated postwar ideal of the single family home surrounded by largely useless strips of “setback” land, and continue to frown on more intelligent arrangements such as zero-lot-line construction, courtyard homes, and mixed commercial and residential planning.

By all means, save all the energy you can. But while any move toward conservation is commendable, it’s America’s fundamental building practices that really need changing, not the position of the light switch in your hallway.

THE TRIANGLE FIRE: A Tragic Centennial

2011-03-28T11:14:00.000-07:00

THIS DOOR TO REMAIN UNLOCKED DURING BUSINESS HOURS. Ever notice this puzzling placard above the door as you’re leaving a commercial building? There’s a story behind it dating back almost exactly a century to this day, though it’s not a very happy one.

In the early twentieth century, health and safety codes were casually enforced where they existed at all. Building owners were under scant obligation to ensure public safety on their own premises, and in large cities, buildings were routinely overcrowded and unsanitary. But the widespread lack of even the most basic fire safety measures would soon prove the deadliest bane of all.

In New York City, on March 25, 1911, a fire started just before quitting time on the eighth floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist factory, an overcrowded sewing loft mainly employing young immigrant women. Fed by cutting scraps littering the floor, the blaze quickly spread to the stories above, with nothing more than 27 fire pails available to fight it with. Most of the workers on the eighth and tenth floors managed to escape, but those on the ninth floor, finding one exit blocked by fire, rushed to the other only to find it locked from outside.

In desperation, a few people made it onto the fire escape before it collapsed under their weight. With the entire ninth floor now in flames, the majority of women were driven to the windows where, one by one, they jumped to their deaths before horrified onlookers on the sidewalk. In the span of twenty minutes, 146 people perished, most of them immigrant girls in their teens and early twenties.

The public’s anguish at this needless tragedy quickly turned to outrage. It was alleged that the factory owners, Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, had intentionally locked the exit door to keep the women at their sewing machines, though this was never proven. But there was no doubt that the ninth floor was overcrowded, with as little as 18 inches of aisle leading between the sewing tables to the unmarked exits. In any case, the exit doors opened inward, making them impossible to open once the force of a panicked crowd had pushed against them.

Perhaps most frightening of all, there was nothing unusual about the Triangle Shirtwaist factory. There were countless workplaces just like it across the nation.

The following year, a report on the fire by the New York Factory Investigating Commission finally spurred regulations setting occupancy limits in commercial buildings, and requiring basic fire safety features such as adequate fire escapes and clearly-marked exits. The report further noted, “The necessity for clear and unobstructed passageways to exits should be absolutely insisted upon...”

Blanck and Harris were tried for manslaughter and acquitted, largely because the prosecution could not prove they had knowledge of the locked exit. In twenty-three subsequent civil suits, they were ordered to pay the families of the victims an average of 75 dollars each.

The heartbreaking lessons of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and, alas, a number of even deadlier fires since, have formed the hard-won foundations of our modern fire safety codes. Today, when we go to a mall or to the movies, we take it for granted that we’ll find unobstructed, clearly marked exits and outward-opening doors with panic bars. We know we’ll find emergency lighting, diagrams showing us where the exits are, and signs stating just how many people the owners can pack in there with us.

And, yes, we’ll find that cryptic message posted just inside the entrance: THIS DOOR TO REMAIN UNLOCKED DURING BUSINESS HOURS.

It’s just a flimsy little sign, but it came at a terrible price.

SOME GRAVE OBSERVATIONS

2011-03-21T14:04:00.000-07:00

Suppose I told you about a marvelous outdoor museum of architecture with full-scale examples of every major building style of the past hundred years? And suppose I told you it’s in a beautiful park-like setting that’s great for picnicking, and that there’s no admission fee, and that thousands of people can be found there every day of the year?

Would it matter to you if just about all of those people were dead?

If so, proceed to the Wall Street Journal. Otherwise, read on.

Cemeteries contain some of the most splendid--and overlooked--collections of architecture to be found anywhere. And heaven knows, there are plenty of them around. Every metropolitan area has some venerable and important cemeteries nearby. Near my own home outside San Francisco, for example, is Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery, laid out, as it were, by the famed landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted of Central Park fame. Here, a series of hillside mausoleums known as Millionaire’s Row boast the last architectural efforts made on behalf of Charles Crocker of transcontinental railroad fame, F. M. “Borax” Smith, chocolatier Domingo Ghirardelli, and numerous other 19th-century high rollers. Just down the street is a 1926-vintage columbarium designed by architect Julia Morgan, of Hearst Castle fame.

The caliber of structures in this relatively obscure cemetery should give you some inkling of the architectural jewels you’re likely to come across in your own town. The crypts, monuments, mausoleums, and other structures found in large cemeteries nationwide represent a microcosm of American architectural fashions, including not only the expected Gothic Revival, but also Egyptian and Greek Revival, Romanesque (Richardsonian and otherwise), Victorian, Craftsman, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and Modern. Here, cheek by jowl, you’ll find pyramids, obelisks, temples, domes, and cathedrals, as well as a more than a few architectural creations that defy description. Since the main purpose of all these designs is simply to look impressive, they’re about as close to pure architecture as anything you’re likely to encounter.

Should you decide to take a Sunday drive to your local cemetery/architecture museum, here’s some basic terminology:

A crypt is a chamber for storing bodies, while a mausoleum is a large tomb containing crypts and entered through a doorway. A vault is an underground tomb, or a tomb tunneled into the side of a hill, though it can also refer to a mausoleum whose decoration is limited to the facade only. A columbarium is a building containing niches for the display of cremated remains. The last is a fairly recent development in funerary architecture, since the practice of cremation did not gain acceptance in America until the late 19th century.

One highly unusual thing about cemetery structures is that, since their occupants aren’t too concerned about planning for the future, they’re practically never remodeled or modernized. Standing row upon row, sheathed in slabs of marble and granite, they stand essentially as they did on the day they were built.

And despite the thousands of people who occupy these miniature cities of stone, crowds are not a problem. If you love old buildings but can’t stand the hustle and bustle of the usual tourist traps, this is the place for you. Temporarily, I mean.

BIG-BOX BUNGLING

2011-03-14T14:33:00.000-07:00

A while back, I stopped off at my local “big-box” home-improvement emporium to buy a coupling, a common electrical fitting that costs less than a dollar. As usual, I found myself rooting through a disorganized jumble of products on the shelf, and when I finally tracked down the bin that was supposed to contain the fittings, it was of course empty. Coming away sad and empty-handed once again, I paid a visit to the customer service window to ask when the coupling might be restocked. The clerk peered into his omniscient monitor and informed me:

“The computer says we have eight of them.”

Only after leading him to the scene in real time was I able to convince him that, regardless of what the inventory software might indicate, there were in fact precisely zero couplings in stock. Whether the eight virtual ones in his computer were misplaced, stolen, or had entered another dimension, I didn’t know or care. I just wanted to find out when more real ones would arrive.

“The truck’s coming in tomorrow,” he said, his tone betraying more wishful thinking than certainty. Predictably enough, the parts weren’t there the next day, nor the following day, nor the day after that. In fact, I went back two weeks later and the bin was still empty.

Alas, this experience is par for the course at the big-box home improvement centers. Admittedly, it’s too easy to bash these places, with their perpetually baffled-looking young clerks and inevitable shortfall of exactly the item you’re looking for. And I’ll freely admit that the big-boxes do have redeeming qualities. Their attractive pricing has undoubtedly helped fuel America’s recent home-improvement mania. They’ve also helped acclimate many novice do-it-yourselfers to the often intimidating world of construction by exposing them to a huge range of building products.

But in many equally important ways, the big-box centers have utterly failed the consumer. They’ve dragged both customer service and inventory control down to a new low in the history of retailing, while simultaneously flooding the home-improvement market with second-rate brands from manufacturers especially geared to supply their voracious demand for merchandise. Consumers--myself included--generally seem willing to put up with such shortcomings for the perceived reward of convenience and low prices, but then again, everyone has a limit. I’ve reached mine.

Since the big-boxes are so profitable (the chain I’m referring to reported a 72% increase in profit for the last quarter of 2010), one would think that hiring a few more knowledgeable clerks for a few more dollars an hour might be in the realm of possibility. So would keeping better tabs on the inventory. Instead, these stores seem to be moving in the opposite direction, with increasing confusion of both employees and inventory.

While local Mom-and-Pop hardware stores claim they can no longer compete with the vast big-box chains, that’s not quite so: In that old-fashioned realm called service, they blow the doors off the big-boxes, and always have. While it’s a rare thrill to glean useful information from big-box clerks, those august folks in your local hardware store routinely diplay an almost supernaturally comprehensive knowledge of the field.

The Mom-and-Pops have one more uncanny trump card I’ve never been able to fathom: The big-boxes, despite their vast inventories, frequently either don’t carry the item you need, or else have run out of it. Yet more than once, I’ve walked into some musty, twenty-foot-wide old hardware store, asked for a ridiculously esoteric pipe fitting, and had the clerk nonchalantly reply: “Over there by the window.”

Big-boxes, take heed: Cheap stuff will get you just so far.

THE HOWARD ROARKE SYNDROME

2011-03-07T15:09:00.000-08:00

Ayn Rand’s famed novel “The Fountainhead” is the amusingly overwrought tale of an egocentric architect named Howard Roarke. On finding that one of his brilliant designs has been tampered with, Roarke becomes so incensed that he blows up the finished building. The novel was eventually made into an even more preachy and melodramatic film—no small task, mind you—with the genius architect portrayed by a chronically pained-looking Gary Cooper.

The Roarke character, a thinly disguised version of Frank Lloyd Wright, was a mouthpiece for Rand’s belief that arrogance and egocentrism are integral components of genius. Given Rand’s fevered devotion to this unlikeable idea, it’s no wonder the pious Roark was so insufferable.

Alas, fiction isn’t the only place you’ll find architects like Howard Roarke. The arrogance of many real-life architects is just as legendary. It’s become sort of an endearing character flaw, to be taken with a wink and a nudge: Oh well—you know those architects.

Frank Lloyd Wright remains the undisputed mogul of architectural arrogance, a stature borne out by numberless anecdotes. My personal favorite involves an enraged client who called Wright to complain that the roof was leaking onto her dinner guest. Wright’s response: “Tell him to move his chair.”

Old age did not mellow Wright’s acerbic with, much less his high opinion of himself. In the 1940s, he gave a talk at a noted school of architecture and declared:

“There are two kinds of architects in the world. There is every other architect, and there is me.”

In his later years, Wright frequently engaged in sniping contests with a younger rival named Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, who styled himself Le Corbusier, and who was no slouch in the area of self-importance either. Le Corbusier espoused radical changes in architecture and planning, based on copious theorizing but only a smattering of actual buildings.

“I propose one single building for all nations and climates,” he proclaimed in 1937. Wright, with a half century of brilliant work already behind him, dismissed the young architect with the observation, “Well, now that he's finished one building, he'll go write four books about it.”

Geniuses can get away with saying such things--perhaps deservedly so. But unfortunately, arrogance isn’t confined to geniuses. It can be found in mediocre architects as well, and too often, the results have been less than humorous. For the better part of the Modernist era, it was this know-it-all attitude that gave us sterile public buildings, look-alike downtowns, and inhumane urban renewal projects.

These well-publicized failures have helped form the unfortunate modern-day image of the architect: equal parts prima donna and buffoon, fussing over minuscule points of aesthetics while bungling vast portions of the client’s program.

Reality, of course, lies somewhere in between. Yet, as we enter the 21st century, it’s clear that we architects are beginning to stagger under the mantle of “master builder”--the literal meaning of “architect”--because it’s now quite impossible for us to know everything there is to know about building in this ever-more complex world.

That’s a problem, because genius is tough to come by, and arrogance won’t get us where it used to.

NO O-FENCE...

2011-02-28T10:42:00.000-08:00

Some folks just aren’t happy with their fronts yards until they’ve erected a miniature stockade around them. I couldn’t count how many 3-foot-high chain-link fences I’ve seen placed right up against the sidewalk--occasionally protecting a lovely garden, but more often surrounding a stone-dead lawn.

I’m not sure about the psychology of front-yard fences--one could go on and on about it, I suppose--but I’m quite sure about the aesthetic result: Bad.

Such dinky little fences could hardly be for security, since anyone with a faint pulse could vault over one. More likely, it’s a territorial thing. You know--stay off my dead grass, or else. Rather than keeping the bad guys out, however, fencing off the front yard more often just prevents the homeowner himself from enjoying it.

Although a fenced-in yard or two is probably inevitable on the average neighborhood street, there’s no rational cause for a whole row of front yards to be partitioned off into desolate little pens--there are plenty of more attractive alternatives. In my book, the best front-yard fence is no fence at all. But if a barrier of some sort is de rigeur, here are some things to think about:

• Before you build, identify your objective. Fences--and every other form of barrier--have only three basic purposes: To keep things in; to keep things out; or to sit there and look pretty. Things to be kept out could include people, pets, noise, prying eyes--whatever. Decide which of these is your main motivation, and choose the least obtrusive barrier that’ll do the job.

• If you’re just trying to discourage casual trespassers--whether the two-legged or the four-legged kind--consider some other form of barrier before you resort to a fence. A row of dense, low shrubs with nasty thorns or spiky leaves, for example, will keep out the majority of mischievous kids. If you want to keep pets in or out, an appropriate-sized wire-mesh fence concealed behind the shrubs will handle any animal short of a mad dog.

• If your aim is to keep out criminal types--forget it. No fence of any description is going to keep out someone who’s determined to get into your yard. Moreover, a solid fence is worse than none at all--a burglar will probably thank you for hiding him from the neighbors while he’s breaking into your house.

As security measures go, it would probably be more cost-effective to connect your existing outdoor lights to a motion detector, which can be had for a reasonable price at any hardware store.

• If it’s noise or prying eyes you want to exclude, landscaping again offers an alternative to a privacy fence, which would have to have solid planks at least five feet high to be effective. Tall shrubs such as privet give a much friendlier look from the street, and their dense leaves actually absorb sound better than fence boards do.

• Lastly, if your fence is meant mainly for decoration, don’t settle for a run-of-the-mill chain-link fence. Chain-link is excellent for many applications, but thanks to its institutional look, it’s probably the last thing you’d want surrounding your front yard. While options such as plastic privacy slats and cute little finials can help, it’s still just putting perfume on a pig. A fence with conventional wood posts will have a much warmer look, and can be finished with wire mesh, planks, lattice, or any number of interesting materials.

JUST WHAT DO YOU DO?

2011-02-14T16:59:00.000-08:00

Turn on the television any evening, and chances are you’ll come across some TV lawyers engaged in brilliant verbal sparring in court or in some shadowy back hall. The law--at least as it’s portrayed on television--is pretty compelling stuff. It must be, considering the parade of lawyer shows we’ve seen since the Fifties.

Lord knows we’ve also had enough medical melodramas during that time, from Ben Casey to E.R. to all those oogie crime scene/inquest/autopsy shows.

And then we have architecture.

Chances are you’ve probably never seen a show or a movie about architects, and there’s a good reason: the preposterous histrionics of “The Fountainhead” aside, seeing an architect in action is about as thrilling as watching ivy grow.

That, unfortunately, is one of the architectural profession’s biggest image problems. It seems reasonable to pay your lawyer big bucks for slaying the enemy with a well-honed courtroom phrase. And it certainly seems worthwhile to pay a hefty doctor’s fee when your gall bladder is at stake. But it’s harder for many people to see the return on paying an architect thousands of dollars for a) talking in dreamy generalities about your project, b) sitting on his or her butt for three months waiting for inspiration to strike, and c) sending you a thumping invoice for the mysterious services rendered.

You haven’t been spared from six months in the slammer, nor has your gall bladder been restored to making first-rate gall, or whatever it’s supposed to do. Instead, all you’ve got to show for your hard-earned money is a few lousy sheets of paper.

I’d love to remedy this public-relations shortcoming with a long, comprehensive list of all the nitty-gritty things an architect does for his commission. Unfortunately, I can’t. The truth is that designing a building is in fact a vague and amorphous business, because the most valuable part of an architect’s service is purely intellectual. But that doesn’t make the work any less valid--just less visible.

Architecture, alone among the professions, is a schizophrenic mixture of art and science—a lot more of the former, if you ask me. And while an Einstein might be methodical in documenting his work, no one expects a Picasso to explain how he goes about producing great art. What’s more, it would be utterly unthinkable to ask an artist, brilliant or otherwise, to justify the cost of his work.

Yet it’s seldom that an architect, upon presenting his bill, doesn’t get a certain look from his client that says: Exactly what the blank did I get for all this money?

It’s perfectly reasonable that people want value for their design dollar. In architecture, however, value doesn’t consist of objects or even accomplishments, but simply of ideas. That’s a pretty tough sell, and it can lead to bad feelings on both sides. Still, buildings last a long, long time, and I’d like to think that anyone who cares enough to hire an architect can also appreciate that the road to good design is bumpy and not well charted. One hopes that, ultimately, the client will find it worth all the effort and expense.

We’re not prime time stuff, but we try.

HOME IS WHERE MY CARS LIVE

2011-02-07T14:28:00.000-08:00

America is a car-centered culture, and its homes reflect that fact. Since World War II, garage doors have been a dominant feature of suburban streetscapes--and with the widespread adoption of triple garages, they’ve become pretty much the only feature. True, developers perform all kinds of design contortions in an effort to make their garages less overbearing--whether breaking the doors up into single bays, stepping them backward or forward, or giving them happy little roofs. Yet, even in these troubled times, the garage is still king on most new homes.

I thought this situation couldn’t get much worse until a few days ago, when I came across an advertisement for some new tract homes ostensibly aimed at middle-class buyers. I could hardly believe my eyes: The entire first floor of the home’s L-shaped street elevation consisted of garage doors. On one side of the L was a double garage; on the other was an additional single door. In between, looking like the mousehole in a Warner Brothers cartoon, was the home’s entrance. The one meant for people, that is.

After so many years, it’s finally happened: The human resident has become an incidental accessory for the support and maintenance of the home’s real occupants--a family of automobiles.

Most thoughtful people would concede that, in these times, using 30% of a home’s area to store cars is pretty silly--much as we now have the sense to eschew gas-guzzling automobiles. Yet while our battered auto industry has finally throttled back on building gas guzzlers in the face of ever-rising gas prices, developers are still cranking out plenty of houses with three and even four-car garages.

Who is responsible? Those developers, for doing whatever they can to make a buck? Buyers, for preaching one thing and practicing another? Or the governement, for building all those suburb-generating superhighways in the first place?

The fact is, we’re all to blame for the increasingly corpulent form American homes have taken since World War II. For their part, developers claim they’ve only been reacting to what buyers want. Yet their usual reaction time to new ideas--such as the need for more energy efficient homes--has been measured in decades, not months. Developers are the last people one could expect to set the pace for a changing world.

On the other hand, the majority of homebuyers still have to drive to everywhere despite their best intentions, thanks to the infrastructure of auto-dependent suburbs we continue to create to this day. What's more, local government still indirectly encourages driving through their stubborn retention of obsolete, auto-centric zoning laws that encourage suburban sprawl.

Yet there are ways to break this vicious cycle:

• Zoning laws should be revamped to allow more intelligent land use such as courtyard homes and zero-lot-line development for lower-density housing, along with expanded live-work and mixed-use zoning for higher density areas.

• Developers should weigh the potential value of innovation and leadership, not just their short-term risk. To follow an automotive example: In the 1960s, the tiny, strange-looking Volkswagen Beetle hijacked a huge share of U.S. auto sales while Detroit was busy insisting that lumbering, chrome-plated dinosaurs were what people really wanted. So--who has the guts to be the Volkswagen of developers?

• Lastly, consumers who are currently shut out of the housing market should loudly demand smaller and more practical homes that they can afford, rather than pining for overblown, gimmick-laden ones they can’t. Ultimately, it’s homebuyers who’ll dictate what course American housing takes.

And while we all hope to prosper again soon, let's hope we no longer gauge that prosperity by counting garage doors.

SAFETY TO DIE FOR

2011-02-01T16:20:00.000-08:00

When do building codes meant to insure safety actually hinder it?

When they’re administered rigidly, reflexively, and without regard for common sense. In too many instances, building codes--which were originally intended to promote public health and safety--instead end up punishing homeowners who attempt to make voluntary safety improvements.

Case in point: A client of mine in a city to remain nameless (but which has cable cars and a pointy skyscraper) recently proposed to replace a rot-damaged exterior stair in her 1920s-era rowhouse. The dilapidated stair, which stood in a lightwell shared with the adjoining house, was built with “winders”--precipitous, pie-shaped steps radiating from a center post--which are so hazardous that the building code outlawed them many years ago.

Accordingly, we proposed to build a new stair with generously-sized landings in place of the winders. Mind you, all of this was being done voluntarily in the interest of safety.

The building official’s response? She informed us that altering the stair configuration in any way would, among other things, require us to construct a two-and-a-half-story-tall firewall, complete with foundation, along the property line--a sort of spite fence that would run right down the middle of the shared lightwell. In her interpretation, the new stairs constituted an addition, which in turn obliged my client to bring the entire lightwell area up to modern codes. If we wanted to avoid this requirement, we were told, we should keep the stairs exactly as they were, treacherous winders and all, and instead replace the rotted portions piecemeal.

So much for meeting the spirit of the Code.

Nor is this an isolated example. In another large city nearby, a client owned a turn-of-the-century house that was perched precariously atop tall, unbraced basement walls. Having read numerous accounts of such houses collapsing in earthquakes, he voluntarily decided to replace his crumbling foundation and provide some seismic bracing as well.

The building official’s response to his plans was to demand that the entire house be upgraded--not just the basement story.

Nice incentive, huh? Rather than encouraging my client’s voluntary seismic improvements, the official’s idiotically intractable demands penalized him instead.

Such requirements pervert the historical intent of the building code. They are a twisted product of bureaucratic rigidity and fear of litigation, a mixture which produces frantic adherance to the letter of the code rather than to its broader intent, even in the face of absurdly counterproductive outcomes.

Which serves the homeowner better, a safe staircase which doesn’t conform to the letter of the code, or a dangerous one which conforms by dint of a technicality? Which is preferable, a draconian seismic upgrade that’s too costly to implement, or one that’s as effective as possible within the homeowner’s means? Isn’t something still better than nothing at all?

Such bizarre perversions of the code’s intent are both unfair and unnecessary. Building officials are explicitly empowered to interpret code requirements in the manner they feel will best serve the interests of public health and safety. The building code, after all, was not handed down to them by Moses. From its inception, it was meant to be a living, growing, and above all adaptable instrument. Like any set of rules, however, it requires a modicum of thoughtfulness, reason, and common sense.

WHY ROOFS LEAK

2011-01-26T13:54:00.000-08:00

The root purpose of every dwelling—one that dates back millennia—is to provide shelter from the elements. Hence, an architect’s most fundamental charge is to design a weathertight building. Unhappily, it doesn’t always work out that way. One of the most common complaints I hear is, “Why can’t architects design homes that don’t leak?”

The embarrassing fact is that leaky roofs are endemic to architecture, whether modern or traditional, and the caliber of the architect makes little difference. The occupants of Frank Lloyd Wright’s most celebrated houses have been obliged to drag out buckets, bowls, and soup cans in many a rainstorm. Or as a colleague of mine once put it: “They don’t call it ‘Fallingwater’ for nothing”.

For their part, architects are notoriously adept at brushing off the leak problem. Wright once received a call from an irate client who complained that the roof was leaking all over her dinner guest.

“Tell him to move his chair,” he responded. To the complaint of another waterlogged client, he calmly declared: “If it didn’t leak, it wouldn’t be a roof.”

At least Wright fessed up to these shortcomings, however nonchalantly; the same can’t be said for the famed International Style architect Le Corbusier. Early in his career, he designed a building with a conventional pitched roof. At the first snowfall, it leaked like a sieve—due, it seems, to his own inexperience. In a classic piece of Modernist logic, however, Corbu concluded that the whole concept of pitched roofs must be flawed, and thereafter espoused flat roofs instead.

Ah, poor posterity!

Given that architects have such a hard time designing watertight roofs, what chance does a lay person have? You’d be surprised. Here are a few simple, common-sense suggestions that can help minimize the likelihood of leaks:

• Keep the roof design as simple as possible. Leaks seldom occur out in the middle of a roof’s flat surfaces—or “field”, in roofing parlance. Rather, they tend to develop in the many nooks and crannies formed where roof planes intersect, or where roofs abut walls. Hence, the simpler the design, the fewer the intersections, and the less the likelihood of leaks.

Be especially wary of those craggy alpine roofscape favored by current architectural fashion. All those cute little peaks and dormers can become a major leakage headache a few years down the road.

• Minimize “penetrations”. In roofspeak, this term refers to pipes, vents, chimneys, skylights, and any other openings that interrupt the roof’s membrane. Like intersections, they’re far more likely to develop leaks than the field of the roof. Minimize the number of vents and flues penetrating the roof surface, and use a few large skylights rather than a lot of little ones. And don’t locate skylights in roof valleys, where it’s difficult to seal or “flash” them properly.

• Avoid built-up (“flat”) roofs whenever possible. Granted, built-up roofs are cheap, easy to construct, and great for covering oddly-shaped floor plans. However, without conscientious maintenance—which they seldom get—built-up roofs simply won’t stay watertight. A half-century of painful experience has borne this fact out, suggesting that our pitch-roof loving forebears were probably right after all.

Sorry, Le Corbusier.

WHERE NOT TO BUILD

2011-01-17T19:10:00.000-08:00

Travel down any residential street, and here and there you’re bound to find a few homes that scream, Addition! Ironically, if you design an addition well enough, no one will ever notice it. That may seem like a pretty sad reward for a job well done, but it’s a lot better than the alternative.

How to decide where to build your addition? Here are some guidelines to the fundamental decisions:

• First, check your local zoning code to find out how high your addition can be and how close you can come to the property line. Just because your house is built to within a certain distance from the property line doesn’t mean the new work can do the same. Zoning codes change, and your addition will have to comply with the new ones, not the ones in force when the house was built.

• As a rule, don’t add on to the front of your house. Chances are its facade--literally, “face” --was carefully composed by the original architect. Messing with it can end up turning the Mona Lisa into Mr. Potatohead. Take the sort of addition that’s commonly seen on California Ranchers, in which a couple of extra bedrooms are expediently packed into the crook of the “L” beside the projecting garage. The resulting U-shaped plan gives the facade a pug-nosed profile and also reduces the entry approach to a dark tunnel. In most cases, adding onto the front or side of the house is a better alternative.

• Take care to locate the new portion so it won’t cut off light to other parts of the house. Consider where and at what time the sun currently enters the windows, and make sure the new work won’t throw crucial areas into permanent shadow. An extra bedroom or bath is no bargain if it makes other parts of the house unlivable.

• If you can’t avoid covering up an existing window, make sure it can be regained on another wall. Don’t figure on replacing windows with skylights--they won’t provide the same quality of light, and building codes may not allow it. And don’t resort to trading away east, west, or south-facing windows for north-facing ones--you won’t get the sunlight or comfort level you had before.

• Lastly, beware the old myth that adding a second story is the cheapest and easiest way to add space. It’s hogwash. On constricted sites where no reasonable alternatives exist, second-story additions can provide a fine solution. In most cases, though, it’s preferable to build at ground level. Here’s why:

Second-story additions often require reinforcement of the existing foundation, making them no less expensive and frequently even costlier than ground-level additions. They’re also inherently less space-efficient, since both levels lose appreciable floor area to the staircase.

But wait, there’s more: It’s also much more difficult to integrate the towering bulk of a second-story addition into the design of the existing house, especially a quintessentially single-story design such as a Rancher or Bungalow. Last but not least, second-story additions are far more disruptive, since they involve the temporary loss of a rather crucial part of your house--its roof.

BLOWING THE BUDGET

2011-01-10T17:33:00.000-08:00

“We had an architect draw an addition for us, and the bids came in at twice the budget!”

That’s a complaint I hear all the time. When you look at how architects are trained, and how they go about seeking a reputation, it’s no surprise that we’re so lousy at pinching pennies. The truth is that the very meaning of life for most architects is rooted in self-expression: we want our work to stand out from everyone else’s. Alas, since a unique design costs more than a generic one, that self-expression comes at the client’s expense.

Why are architects so motivated to be different? One reason is intrinsic to humankind, not just to architects. For many of us, shaping a building in the intellect and then placing it in the physical world is our way of saying, “I was here. This building is part of my legacy. It’s one reason my life mattered.” And obviously, we’d like our legacies to be memorable, not mundane.

But there are some less spiritual reasons that architects feel compelled to be different. One of them has to do with the way we’re educated. Many architecture schools simply amplify the student’s egocentric motivations, rather than balancing them with an equal sense of responsibility to the client.

From their first day in school, students are praised for coming up with the unique, the extraordinary, even the bizarre. Minimal emphasis is placed on budgets and other real-life encumbrances, on the theory that they might impinge on the student’s budding creativity.

“You’ll have enough worries about budget when you get into practice,” one professor told me. “This is the time to let go of all that.” Imagine a medical school operating on the same principle: “Never mind the diagnosis—this is college. Go in there and have some fun with that scalpel!”

In the face of this relentless urging to be creative, most architecture students naturally come away with a sneaking guilt that any design that’s less than stunningly original isn’t worthy of the name architecture. The result is that, for the rest of their careers, many architects aren’t satisfied with a simple solution when a complex one will do. In other words, schooling teaches architects how to make buildings expensive, not how to make them affordable.

Architectural education isn’t the only culprit, however. We architects are also dupes to popular and trade publications that award extravagant architecture with the holy grail of publication, while work that’s more responsible to budget and function frequently goes unnoticed. Since few architects are anxious to labor in obscurity, extravagant design becomes the norm even when it’s uncalled for.

Hence, a simple addition or even a garage is trumped up into the architect’s personal manifesto, driving up the client’s cost to no practical gain.

It’s not hard to understand why architects overbuild, when publication provides the only real way to achieve a measure of notoriety. After all, it’s a rare architect who gets acclaim for designing something simple and inexpensive.

Picture the screaming headline: “Nice Little House Comes In On Budget.”

POSITIVE, NEGATIVE

2011-01-03T16:26:00.000-08:00

One of the simplest yet least understood concepts in architecture is that of positive versus negative space. However esoteric it may sound, its applications to home and landscape design are immediate and tangible.

The basic idea is simple. Imagine a rolled-out sheet of cookie dough. Think of positive space as being the cookies cut out from the dough, and negative space as the pointy scraps left behind.

In planning, just as in cookie-cutting, the name of the game is to minimize the sharp-angled or unusable scraps of negative space that are left over. Alas, unlike baking, you can’t just gather them up and knead them into more dough--you have to figure out what to do with them ahead of time.

The desirability of positive space is rooted in the fact that nature’s fundamental closed shape is the circle, or at least some approximation thereof. And regardless of how far man removes himself from his primitive beginnings, circular shapes remain the most psychologically comforting for human habitation--a fact borne out by the widespread persistence of circular dwellings, from the mud huts to yurts to igloos, despite the fact that they are not necessarily the simplest shapes to construct.

We in the industrialized nations, however, live in a rectilinear world that’s chock full of negative space. Outdoors, common examples would include those useless slivers of side yard that zoning ordinances insist on having between houses--the house, in this case, being the “cookie”. Inside, negative could include that dust-catching wedge of space under a stair, or that inaccessible corner of the living room that always seems to gather dust bunnies.

There are a few simple ways to avoid negative space in architecture:

• Avoid shapes having acute angles, both in plan and elevation. Modern architects were (some still are) smitten with acute angles precisely because they’re rare in traditional architecture. But while razor-sharp angles make for cheap drama, they don’t make for comfortable living--a fact vernacular builders have recognized for centuries. Psychologically, converging surfaces are disconcerting, whether they’re in a sharp cornered room or a single-slope vaulted ceiling. Physically, they’re just plain impractical. Take a lesson from the past, and keep interior angles at ninety degrees or more.

• Strive for areas with a circular sense of enclosure. The closer a room arrangement approaches a circular shape, the more comfortable it’ll be. This doesn’t mean the room itself should be rounded--just that the arrangement of the objects within it should be reasonably equidistant from a central focal point. In a long, narrow living room, for example, a couple of more-or-less circular furniture arrangements would prove more comfortable for conversation than one long, stretched-out grouping.

• Apply these concepts to exterior design as well. Take a typical rectangular plot of land with an ell-shaped house in the middle: the structure’s presence necessarily subdivides the outdoor area into smaller rectangular pieces, many of them awkwardly proportioned. What to do with these negative leftovers?

The best solution is to break down awkward negative spaces into a series of organically-shaped positive spaces--as many as are useful--and fill the leftover negative space with planting. Note that size doesn’t determine whether the space is positive or negative; even a triangular scrap of land a few yards on a side could be transformed into positive space by adding, say, a garden bench comfortably surrounded by a cloak of plants.

NOT WHAT THEY USED TO BE--AND IT'S A GOOD THING

2010-12-21T13:52:00.000-08:00

It’s no secret that the quality of many building products has declined over the past fifty years. Lots of items aren’t expected to do much more than make a brief stop at your house on their way to the landfill. Yet, miracle of miracles, a few products are actually better today than they’ve ever been. Here are a sampling:

• Heating systems. Few things in the home have improved as much as heating systems. As late as the 1970s, the typical furnace still had a dismal thermal efficiency of around seventy percent--in other words, thirty cents of every energy dollar went to waste up the chimney flue.

Then came the nationwide energy crisis of 1978. Beginning with California, a number of state governments wisely responded with legislation requiring all new homes and additions to meet a minimal standard of energy efficiency. Faced with this mandate, moribund furnace manufacturers had the choice of finally getting off their duffs or losing sales to more innovative competitors. They got off their duffs.

Hence, today’s furnaces are available with efficiencies of 96% and better, and many burn so efficiently they don’t require a conventional flue at all. Add to that programmable thermostats and better duct insulation, and you’ve got a spectacular reduction in the energy it takes to heat your home.

• Windows. Mainly because they were cheap and easy to install, aluminum windows had become the standard of the building industry by the late 1950s. Some standard: they were flimsy, drafty, and had insulating value that was little better than a hole in the wall. The new energy efficiency standards worked their coercive magic on window manufacturers as well. In a mad scramble to meet the legislative mandates appearing in more and more states, first came double-pane glass, then better weatherstripping, thermal breaks, and many other measures meant to reduce heat loss..

In fairness, window manufacturers have run with the ball on their own since then. They’ve introduced new energy-efficient windows of clad wood, vinyl, and fiber glass, not to mention a huge range of design and finish choices. The result is that U.S.-made windows can, for the first time, go head to head with any on the world market.

• Cabinetwork. The widespread adoption of factory-made modular cabinets during the 1980s finally signalled the arrival of mass production to a trade that’s been a longtime bastion of custom craftsmanship. But whereas the production line often makes for sloppier products, in this case it’s actually proved beneficial to consumers, and not just in lowering prices. Modular cabinets can also be mixed and matched like a kit of parts, allowing homeowners to design their own kitchens and baths--although given some of the results I’ve seen, that isn’t always a good thing.

Mass production has also brought a dramatic improvement in finish quality. Today’s better modular cabinets have more uniform and durable finishes than many reasonably-priced cabinet shops can offer for the same price. This is not to minimize the value of custom cabinets, which will always hold the premium place on the market, but rather to point out that the mid-priced lines of modular cabinets now offer many of the benefits of high-quality custom work.

THE MASTER BUILDER

2010-12-13T11:17:00.000-08:00

The word “architect” is rooted in the Greek arkhi-tekton, meaning “master builder”. And once upon a time, that’s exactly what an architect was--a person whose comprehensive knowledge of construction made him the leader of a building project. It was the architect in the role of master builder, not merely designer, that gave the world the Parthenon, Gothic cathedrals, and countless other creative triumphs.

Even as recently as the 1920s, architects such as Bernard Maybeck and Julia Morgan still spent a considerable amount of time on the construction site. Maybeck, the son of a woodcarver, delighted in working with his hands--he could often be found on his building sites gleefully experimenting with weird and wonderful new methods of construction.

Morgan, the architect of William Randolph Hearst’s vast California estate, San Simeon, was the first woman to graduate from the prestigious Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris. Conquering that male bastian no doubt demanded both determination and impeccable knowledge on her part. Hence the diminutive Morgan was especially well-versed in the nitty-gritty of construction--on building sites she was known to correct an errant worker by taking the tool from his hand and gently advising him, “Do it this way, friend.”

Well, things have changed, and not for the better. Today’s architects have an abundance of theoretical and aesthetic knowledge, but little practical understanding of how buildings are actually put together. Most of an architect’s time is now spent in an office, well-insulated from the people who construct the buildings he’s designed. For most architects, in fact, their closest encounter with the building process comes when construction problems—which are practically inevitable under this arrangement—compel him to visit the site.

There are a few maverick architects today who have tried to mend this estrangement of architects from their architecture. Perhaps the best known is Paolo Soleri, whose Arcosanti project in Arizona has for decades struggled to offer architecture students a hands-on education integrating design and construction. Yet such practical learning opportunities remain rare.

One reason for this is that few modern-day architecture schools seem willing to acknowledge the historical connection between the design of a building and its construction. Hence, the separation of design and construction processes has been institutionalized.

The problems resulting from this policy are legion. The success of any object, whether a vase, a violin or a building, depends on its designer’s intimate familiarity with the process of its creation. Separate the two, and both are diminished.

Can the architect ever return to his historic role as arkhi-tekton? In the strict sense, perhaps not. A cathedral, for all its aesthetic sophistication, is really just an artfully-arranged pile of stones: it’s well within human comprehension. A modern-day building, however, with its complex structural, mechanical, and electronic systems, is all but beyond the grasp of a single mind.

That’s not to say that architects can’t learn by doing, however. Divorcing the design process from the building process, as so many architecture schools continue to do, can only further undermine the historic role of architect as master builder.

THE COLOR COPS

2010-12-06T12:45:00.000-08:00

What could be more personal than a favorite color? Yet more and more frequently, people choosing exterior colors for their homes are finding this most individual of choices being restricted by their local design review board. It’s an imposition that’s no less outrageous than having some stranger dictate what colors you can choose for your clothes or your car.

All this is justified in the name of that contemptible concept, “good taste”, which at any given time is nothing more than the sum average taste of the status quo. Despite what history teaches us about the transitory nature of taste, design review boards profess to have some inside track on what's tasteful and what isn't--wisdom that they self-righteously deem to impose on the rest of us. To their great dismay, not everyone’s color preferences are as sedate as those of central Europeans like me. And thank God for that, or America would be a pretty boring place.

Vivid colors are an integral part of many cultures, and always have been. The deep burnish of Chinese red bespeaks the whole rich history of that ancient culture, while the sherbet-toned facades of Moroccan hill towns evoke the warmth and humor of the Mediterranean. The Swedes have a delightful tradition of painting their rural houses a blazing red--not, as I’d always thought, to furnish some winter color, but because the historically high cost of red paint long ago made it a status symbol.

Even the pristinely white temples of Greece, long held by highbrows to represent the apex of good taste, turn out to have been originally tarted up in an eye-popping array of primary shades. So much for aesthetic pronouncements.

Colors have played such a large role in design history that some have lent their names to historical periods. In the United States, the proliferation of brownstone architecture during the 1870s earned that era the name Brown Decade, while the 1890s were dubbed the Mauve Decade for their love of that royal shade.

Times change, however. Since Modernism swept the U.S. after World War II, mainstream architectural colors have seldom wandered too far from off-whites or mild pastels. Unfortunately, this fashion--and make no mistake, that’s all it is--has been institutionalized by civic officials who now feel entitled to nix any colors outside the tonal range of Butter-Mints.

Consequently, cultured people who deserve the freedom to make their own color choices must instead submit to having “acceptable” colors dictated to them on the grounds of good taste.

But whose good taste? Tastes vary the world over, and America is an ethnic microcosm of the globe. It’s no coincidence that the colors often frowned upon by design review boards are the same vivid hues favored by many people of African, Hispanic, Asian, or Pacific Islander heritage. It’s nothing short of veiled racism to discourage such colors on the basis of some arbitrary standard of taste most likely established by a bunch of Wasps decades ago.

When confronted with this obvious bias, defenders of color restrictions hide behind the same tired hypothetical question: “Well, how would you like it if your neighbor painted his house purple with green trim?”

I’d much rather live beside a purple and green house than deprive any person (including myself) of the right to make such a personal choice. It’s nobody’s business what color I paint my house, nor is it any of my busines what color you paint yours.

THE FUNCTION COMPUNCTION

2010-11-29T14:20:00.000-08:00

Form Follows Function. So wrote the renowned architect Louis Sullivan over a century ago. But oh, how he might regret coining that phrase today. Time and again, it’s been invoked to justify design that’s the furthest thing from functional.

Despite his role as a founding father of Modernism, Sullivan lovingly adorned his buildings with great swaths of the most sinuous and delicate ornament. He’d be aghast at the bristly, hard-edged stuff so many designers call “functional” these days.

To see the dishonesty in passing off haphazard design under the rubric of functionality, we need only consider the beauty and simplicity of a truly functional object. Take an ordinary, dime-store bottle opener: Stamped out of a mere scrap of steel, it could hardly be simpler or cheaper to make. And as if opening bottles flawlessly weren’t enough for such a humble tool, the other end opens cans as well.

Other examples of truly functional design spring easily to mind: a pencil; a violin; a pair of blue jeans; a spoon. What makes these objects paragons of functionality is that they’re as simple as they can be while still perfectly fulfilling their tasks.

But what architects and designers term “functional” is often something else again. For instance, I recently received a brochure for ultra-high-end bathroom fixtures designed by an artisan with truly impeccable taste. As works of art, they’re stunning. As usable objects, however, they sorely flunk the test.

The lavatory sink, for example, resembles a kitchen funnel, and is in fact hardly bigger than one. It would require utmost caution to keep water inside it instead of all over the floor. This funnel is in turn is supported by an elaborate network of rods and braces that, for all their complexity, don’t look terribly sturdy. The whole assemblage is executed in high-polish stainless steel, a material that sounds easy to keep clean, but most assuredly isn’t. In short, this “functional” lavatory isn’t the kind you’d buy to brush your teeth at. It’s the kind you’d buy to stun the neighbors.

A genuinely functional sink, on the other hand, would probably look pretty much like the one you’ve got in your bathroom: a generous surface area to catch splashes, an absence of exposed pipes or brackets, and a finish that’s durable and easy to keep clean. Yeah, I know—that’s the way sinks have looked for the past hundred years. Boring? Maybe. Functional? Definitely.

Functionality is a quality that evolves over decades--and sometimes centuries--of continual refinement, not during some overnight design catharsis. This evolutionary process eventually brings an object asymptotically close to its ideal form, after which it doesn’t have to change much any more. Would a spoon be improved by adding some “functional” rivets? Would that bottle opener be better if it had a digital readout showing how many beers you’ve drunk?

Okay, maybe.

Domestic designs evolve toward ideal forms, just as other objects do. Functionalism has more to do with history, evolution and a timeless way of building, than it does with trendoid malarkey.

RENOVATION OBLIVION

2010-11-22T11:29:00.000-08:00

A while back, a client of mine asked me to give the once-over to a house he was hoping to buy. It was a charming, well-kept little cottage with all the hallmarks of a history—some gouges here, some settlement there, perhaps a few cracks in the plasterwork. It wasn’t dilapidated by any means; rather, it had a nice warm patina of long use.

Happily, he did end up buying it. But when I came back a few months later to see what improvements he’d wrought, I was dismayed. He’d systematically gone through the house and replaced anything that showed the slightest trace of wear with brand-new stuff from the local hardware emporium. Hefty old doorknobs with the burnish of fifty years had been swapped in favor of tinny, glitzy brass ones; ditto the old lighting fixtures and bath fittings. The varnished wood trim (which had a few nicks and scratches, to be sure) had been smothered in a bland coat of bright white latex. And the wood floor—whose dents and imperfections bespoke the foibles of who knows how many sets of grandchildren—had been sanded glassy smooth and coated with a hi-tech sealer.

So much for a warm patina.

Still, I can hardly blame my client for wanting to make his little cottage sparkle. Us Yanks want everything to look like new. Maybe it’s because the U.S. is a relatively young country, and newness is practically all we know. But just as likely, it’s because advertising relentlessly conditions us to believe that new things--whether cars, clothes, or trendy toys for the kids--are always better than old ones. That goes for houses, too. Those of us who can’t afford brand new ones opt for the next best thing: We buy old ones and then “renovate” them into oblivion.

The point, as you’ve no doubt guessed by now, is that new isn’t necessarily better. So here are a few thoughts to consider before you wield that screwdriver or paintbrush at your defenseless old house:

• Think twice before consigning any part of your home to the junk heap. The quality of the building materials in most prewar homes—whether hardware, flooring, or light fixtures—is generally higher than the stuff that’s available today. In the long run, there’s little to be gained by exchanging quality materials that show some age for rinkydink goods that’ll briefly look brand-new.

• Use that paintbrush sparingly! The nature of today’s paint formulas makes repainting an iffy improvement. Therefore, if you have a reasonably intact coat of oil-base paint on your doors, for example, you’re far better off living with it than covering it with a latex paint, which won’t have the same shine or durability.

• Learn to live with a few scratches here and there. Americans are obsessed with keeping their homes pristine; unfortunately, the nature of the universe puts them forever on the losing side of the battle. Home ownership is a lot more fun when you learn to take the odd flaw in stride. That’s not to suggest that you neglect your home, but rather that you learn to accept a reasonable level of imperfection.

Europeans, I’m loathe to admit, are way ahead of us on this count: They’re quite comfortable with buildings that are old and timeworn, because they regard age and imperfection as a badge of honor, not as a sign of decrepitude.

• Finally, remember that any idiot can make a home look new, but only time can produce one with a history.

MONEY OUT THE WINDOW?

2010-11-16T13:29:00.000-08:00

What kind of horrible person could find fault with a home improvement that saves energy?

You guessed it. Me.

The improvement I’m talking about is window replacement. Some folks do it to reduce maintenance, others to update their home’s appearance. Most people replace their windows in an effort to lower their energy bills. If that’s your main motivation, take a clear-eyed look at the benefits first. Then, if replacement still makes sense, be absolutely sure to choose new windows that’ll suit the style of your house.

First, an acknowledgement: There’s no question that replacing single-glazed windows with new double-glazed ones will substantially cut heat loss through windows--usually by around 50%. What’s more, if your old windows are poorly weatherstripped, it’ll also greatly reduce the infiltration of cold air.

Here’s the catch, however: In the average tract house, windows are not the major culprit behind heat loss--ceilings are. So if saving energy is your main objective, you’ll get more benefit from adding (or increasing) attic insulation. Even incremental improvements such as upgrading duct insulation, replacing an obsolete furnace or swapping out an inefficient refrigerator are likely to pay back your investment faster, because the modest energy savings you’ll realize from new windows will be wiped out by the initial cost for years to come.

On the other hand, if your windows have other problems--balky hardware, flimsy construction, or whatever--window replacement may be the right move. However, choose the replacements very carefully. If you have a prewar home with wood windows, and you want to replace them with new color-coated aluminum or vinyl ones, make sure the replacements have the same hefty frame thickness and a similar finish. And unless your old windows are already white, avoid the tell-tale bright-white frames that are typically seen in replacement work. Instead, choose a color that’ll complement your home’s existing color scheme, and ideally, any possible future scheme as well.

Postwar homes with aluminum windows pose a special problem. For some reason, people who wouldn’t dream of ripping the wood windows out of a Victorian think nothing of scrapping their postwar home’s aluminum windows and substituting clunky white vinyl ones with fake muntins. That’s a mistake. If the original windows are natural or bronze-anodized aluminum, insist on the same finish for the replacements. Don’t arbitrarily “upgrade” to some other window type because it happens to be in fashion at the moment.

The slender, flat, and unashamedly metallic look of aluminum windows is an integral part of many postwar homes designs. While it may not seem like it from such a close vantage point in history, these houses have a style as valid as any other, and they deserve the same respect you’d accord their more popular predecessors.

In sum, two suggestions: Ixnay on replacing your old windows solely for energy savings alone--put the money into more effective measures first. And if you’ve got some other good reason to scrap your old windows, do your home a favor and replace them with double-glazed versions in the same material, finish and frame thickness.

A STREET LIKE YOURS

2010-11-08T14:58:00.000-08:00

Picture this intersection in a middle-class residential neighborhood: On one corner stands an aging fast-food joint; on another a ramshackle grocer. On the third corner is—surprise!—an ill-kept liquor store. On the fourth corner there’s nothing at all—just a weed-choked empty lot. Ugly? You said it. Yet in the past, whenever I’d drive through this dreary crossroads, I’d excuse it with, “Well, you can’t expect to find beauty everywhere.”

But you know what? Not only should expect to find beauty everywhere--if you don’t find it, by thunder, you should demand it.

Nowadays, it’s become somehow sissified to insist that one’s built environment be beautiful--not just decent and functional, but inspiring to look at. Yet rather than being a quality that everyone can expect, beauty has become the exclusive franchise of architects, planners, and decorators—professionals who, let’s face it, are generally perceived as a bunch of wimpy prima donnas. We leave it to this lonely bunch to harp about the way things ought to look.

History tells us it wasn’t always so. The Greeks, those aesthetic rascals, sought beauty at every turn, and they weren’t embarrassed about it either—their prose alone makes that perfectly clear. Their successors, the Romans, may have lowered the hallowed Greek standards a notch or two, but they could still appreciate a well-turned arch of triumph when they saw one.

The Japanese obsession with beauty is legendary, as evidenced by that culture’s art, architecture, landscape design, and even by its ritual tea ceremony. Nor is this eye for beauty confined to the wealthy--even the humblest Japanese home shows a fastidious concern for the pleasing arrangement of furniture, flowers, and food on a plate.

In the United States of the late-19th century, concern with the declining quality of life in urban centers led to grass-roots improvement societies aimed at beautifying neighborhoods and creating public parks and amenities. By the turn of the century, such concerns were galvanized under the rubric of the City Beautiful movement, led by architects such as Daniel H. Burnham.

“Make no little plans,” said Burnham, “they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die.”

How sad, then, that we’re willing to settle for so much less today: lookalike strip malls; acres of asphalt; crackerbox housing. I believe it’s not so much a shortcoming of the American character as a general sense that, with all the troubles we have as a nation, a beautiful built environment is just too much to expect.

That’s a pity. Perhaps, like the Greeks, the Japanese, and even our own 19th-century forebears, we should consider the possibility that beauty is actually an integral part of a healthy society, and not just so much window dressing.

The search for beauty begins with the individual, however. It isn’t something to be ceded to blundering bureaucracies—the jolly folks who brought us the blight of downtown freeways, cheerless housing projects, and retrograde design review boards.

Don’t hang your hopes on a change from without. Take a look around you. A more beautiful world could begin on a street like yours.

FULL REVERSE

2010-10-25T16:18:00.000-07:00

In the field of art restoration, there’s a thing called “the principle of reversibility”. It decrees that a restorer should never make any alteration to a work of art—regardless of how well-meaning—that can’t be undone again at some later date.

The world of architecture would be better off if so-called “modernizations” followed this rule too, and for many of the same reasons. In architecture, as in art, aging is a natural process to be cherished, not frantically concealed. Just as the aged and crackled surface of a Rembrandt doesn’t detract from its beauty, we should regard the effects of time on a building as part of its charisma.

But, please, somebody pinch me—I’m dreaming.

Alas, the reality is that most homeowners eventually become bored with their homes, no matter how wonderful they are, and develop an itch for something more fashionable. Conceding that people will always yearn for such “modernizations”, the least I can do is to invoke my own Principle of Reversibility: Always be able to undo what you’ve done in the name of fashion.

Here are a few guidelines:

• Be wary of adding “quick spruce-up” materials such as acoustic ceiling tile, flimsy paneling, and the like unless you’re absolutely sure you can remove them later without damaging the original stuff underneath. Enthusiasm for such materials usually has a notoriously short lifespan, but the installations themselves often don’t. Case in point: The living room of my brother’s Colonial cottage, which was cursed with walls of ghastly 70s-era diagonal cedar planks for a decade after they’d gone out of fashion, all because the installer had affixed them with a permanent mastic that removed the plaster along with the planking.

• Don’t paint over surfaces that weren’t painted to begin with. Every few decades, decorating fads swing back toward their cyclical infatuation with paint; it wasn’t so long ago that owners were busily painting over the gleaming hardwood interiors of their Victorians in an effort to make them more “modern”. Those who resisted the incessant pull of faddism were ultimately rewarded with beautiful (and original) showplace interiors; those who didn’t became very intimate with paint remover. That, by the way, is not what I mean by reversible.

The “make-it-reversible-or-leave-it-alone” policy goes not just for wood, but for brick, tile, metal, glass, and concrete, not to mention truly irretrievable finishes such as lincrusta (a type of linoleum wainscot that was originally stained and varnished to resemble tooled leather) and—for Pete’s sake—stone and stone veneer.

For those unswayed by aesthetic arguments, here’s a cold, hard factoid: A house with its original interior finishes intact almost invariably commands a higher price at resale. Not a bad return, considering there’s less effort involved.

• Lastly, try to get to know your home. Find out when it was built, and check into a few architecture books to learn about the ancestry of its style. Knowing why your house looks the way it does, and appreciating it on its own merits, will go a long way toward relieving the incessant longing for change and “modernity”— whatever that is.