PAINTING PAINS

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

“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

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

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

Union Station, Washington DC: In the heyday of
rail travel, you really know you were going someplace.
(Architects: Daniel Burnham and. Ernest. R. Graham, 1907)

Flying isn’t what it used to be. While the coronavirus and stay-at-home orders may become the proverbial nail in the coffin for the romance of travel, things were on the decline long before that. By the 1990s, air travel had already become overly familiar, even routine; but that was before 911 made many Americans equate airplanes with doom and destruction. But there's another, literally 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. 

Exterior of the main terminal at Atlanta's Hartfield-Jackson
International Airport. It's the busiest airport in the US—
and perhaps one of the least attractive.

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.

Santa Barbara, California's municipal airport, circa
(Architects: William Edwards and Joseph Plunkett, 1942)

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. 

Architect Eero Saarinen's TWA terminal at New York's
JFK airport really got the "architecture inspired by flight"
design theme a standard, not to say trite, theme for airports.

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.

Wichita, Kansa is a city long associated with aircraft
manufacture, and its airport features the usual airdraft-like
interior. But would you build your garage to look
like a Toyota? 

Today, with the growing despair over security, overcrowding of terminals and airplanes, and the now even-shakier 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

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

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.