OCTOGENARIAN ARCHITECTURE (Part 1 of 2 Parts)

“The four stages of man,” Art Linkletter once observed, “are infancy, childhood, adolescence, and obsolescence.” 

While this bromide may well describe the lives of media stars and child prodigies, I’m happy to report that it seldom applies to architects. While many may grow old, few, it seems, grow irrelevant. In fact, most great architects hadn’t even hit their stride until midlife, and many kept going strong into their nineties.

Frank Lloyd Wright, still dapper at 91

Frank Lloyd Wright is of course the poster child for architectural longevity, yet there were surely times in Wright’s life when he doubted his own relevance. He’d begun his career with a bang, devising his brilliant Prairie Houses during the first decade of the 1900s, while he was still in his thirties. But by the time he completed Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel in 1923, his commissions had tapered off considerably. By normal career standards Wright, by then in his late fifties, should have been contemplating retirement. In any case, by the mid-1930s, his organic architecture was already being eclipsed by a younger generation of modernists, whose sleek International Style creations seemed even more advanced than Wright’s work had been. 

Yet it was just at this seeming twilight in his career that Wright staged a spectacular comeback. In 1937 he completed  the Edgar Kaufmann house (Fallingwater), a lyrical conception seemingly meant to outdo the International Style modernists at their own game. It was Bauhaus modernism with a heart and soul. Acclaimed worldwide, Fallingwater relaunched Wright’s career in the seventh decade of his life, unleashing a creative flurry that continued unabated until his death at 91.

Wright’s late-life renaissance isn’t at all unusual among architects, however. The first generation of International Style architects also had lengthy careers marked by equally late triumphs. After his famous stint as director of the Bauhaus, for example, Walter Gropius (1883-1969) came to the United States and, in 1945, when he was already in his sixties, founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC). It was soon to become one of the world’s most successful and respected architecture firms. Moreover, Gropius was nearly eighty when he completed New York’s Pan Am building with Pietro Belluschi (he lived to be 86). 

Le Corbusier's astonishing chapel at Ronchamp,
one of his latest and greatest works...

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969) completed New York’s Seagram Building--a work often ranked among the pinnacle achievements of modern architecture--when he was in his early seventies. 

Le Corbusier (Charles-Edouard Jeanneret-Gris, 18887-1965) had a long and influential career, but arguably his greatest work--the lyrical chapel he designed at Ronchamp--was completed only when he was in his late sixties.  No doubt Le Corbusier, too, might have remained productive into his eighties, had he not ignored his doctor’s orders and gone for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea, where he apparently suffered a heart attack and drowned at age 77.

---and the architect in his seventies: We wish he'd listened
to his doctor.

Curiously, while the first-generation modernists recounted above held fast to their convictions for the duration of their long and distinguished careers, some of their equally venerable successors renounced modernism in their later years--refuting the idea that old age breeds inflexibility. We’ll look at some of those long careers next time, as well as a few others that were cut tragically short.

CRACKING THE CODE (Part 3 of 3 Parts)

Last time, we looked at some building code requirements that routinely trip up do-it-yourselfers. As arcane as some of the code’s provisions might seem, practically every one of them exists to ensure health and safety, and many were gleaned from over a century of knowledge hard won from real-life incidents, many of them both tragic and unnecessary.  

Because building codes--and this includes plumbing, mechanical, electrical, and fire codes--are primarily concerned with health and safety, they’re by nature conservative and slow to change. There’s little incentive for the councils who collectively author the various codes to adopt new technologies that make construction cheaper, faster or more efficient, since these things aren’t directly related to safety. Hence, the code generally ignores technical innovations until there’s overwhelming pressure from the trades, the design professions, or manufacturers to incorporate them. 

It took building codes years to approve using this...

There’s no doubt that this conservatism sometimes impedes the adoption of worthwhile new products. For example, plumbing codes were slow to approve ABS plastic drain piping even though its advantages--low cost, light weight, excellent durability, and ease of assembly--clearly outweighed its shortcomings (noisiness and susceptibility to fire). In fairness, plastic plumbing also encountered some resistance from plumbers, many of whom were not keen on seeing a do-it-yourself friendly material infringe on their business. The various metallic pipe industries, who saw a fair share of their markets about to go down the drain, were not too keen on plastic either. Still, the overwhelming advantages of ABS  eventually forced the code to make room for it, and later on for other plastic plumbing materials as well.

...instead of this.

More recently, a simple plumbing device called an “air admittance  valve”, or AAV, has made it possible to greatly simplify the venting portion of drainage systems, eliminating perhaps one-third of the drain piping in a typical house. AAVs have been used in Europe since 1979, and with several million installed, they’re well proven. Yet until very recently, plumbing codes in the US continued to insist that plumbing fixtures be vented through the roof, just as they have been since Victorian times--a needless waste of expensive labor and material, and a common source of roof leaks. Only in the last few years have most plumbing codes finally approved AAVs, and even at that, a few individual state codes still stubbornly outlaw them.

On another front, building codes have shown a sometimes overzealous tendency toward protecting people from themselves, often at a significant cost to comfort and aesthetics. A clear example is found in the code’s ever more stringent requirements for residential railings. The allowable open space between rail balusters, for example, has progressively shrunken from nine inches to six inches to four inches, while the minimum height of exterior railings has recently increased from the longtime standard of 36 inches to a towering, view-obscuring 42 inches. 

Still, these are minor quibbles about a document that do-it-yourselfers ought to welcome as more help than hindrance. The building code is like a crotchety old neighbor who’s seen it all during his lifetime--his advice might grate on us now and then, but we’re still glad he’s around when we need him.

CRACKING THE CODE (Part Two of Three Parts)

Last time, we talked about building code provisions that variously baffle or irritate do-it-yourself builders (and occasionally, seasoned builders as well). While code requirements may seem arcane at first glance, most have a very simple purpose--to keep you reasonably safe day to day, and possibly to save your life in a real emergency. There are still a number of different codes in use, along with regional variations (always check with your local jurisdiction), but most of them more or less agree on basic safety provisions. By way of example, here are some typical code provisions on just one narrow topic--windows--and what they’re meant to accomplish:

•  In general, codes require every habitable space to have a net window area equal to at least 8 percent of the room’s floor area (a “habitable space” is defined as one intended for living, sleeping, eating, or cooking). This is a direct way of ensuring that the major rooms in a house have adequate natural light. 

On the other hand, a bathroom could have a much smaller window, because the code doesn’t consider it a habitable space. In fact, as long as a bathroom has a means of mechanical ventilation (that is, an exhaust fan), it doesn’t need a window at all. Still with me? These kinds of building code “gotchas!” are what can drive uninitiated remodelers crazy.

Do you think that this firefighter....

• The equivalent of half the required glass area has to be openable for ventilation--again, a simple way to ensure minimum access to fresh air. This provision, too, can cause do-it-yourselfers trouble, since a fixed window (or a window less than half of which opens) may well satisfy the code’s requirements for natural light, but may not make the grade in terms of natural ventilation.

is going to fit through THIS window?

• As we noted last time, many code provisions are meant to ensure multiple means of escape--”egress” in code parlance--in case of fire or other emergency. This brings us to yet another set of requirements for windows that are routinely overlooked by do-it-yourselfers. Most codes require that every ground floor bedroom have at least one “egress window” with an opening of 5 square feet, with a minimum net opening at least 24 inches high and at least 20 inches wide. 

Furthermore, the sill of this egress window can’t be more than 44 inches above the floor, so that in an emergency, a small person can still climb out the window by standing on furniture. Bedrooms on upper floors need to have slightly larger egress openings of 5.7 square feet. For obvious reasons, codes also prohibits security bars from being installed over egress windows unless they’re easily openable from inside. 

Mind you, these minimum size requirements aren’t just to allow able-bodied occupants to get out of a burning house. They’re also intended to let firefighters wearing bulky breathing apparatus get inside--to rescue, for example, an elderly person or a sleeping child. 

Seen in this light--and considering the untold tragedy that building codes have probably averted over the past century--code compliance shouldn’t seem quite such a burden.

Next time: A few genuine building code downsides.

CRACKING THE CODE (Part One of Three Parts)

“When I built my addition, the building inspector made me tear out the bedroom window and put in a bigger one! Personally, I don’t think it’s any of his (deleted) business how big my bedroom window is!” 

I hear these kinds of gripes from disgruntled do-it-yourselfers all the time. Not to rub salt in the wound, but in most such cases, a passing acquaintance with the building code--and even more important, an understanding of its intent--would have saved these folks an awful lot of frustration.

Though it may seem like it at times, building codes weren’t formulated to harass do-it-yourselfers. In fact, they arose to protect public health and safety during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time when a population explosion in American cities was leading to ever more squalid and unsafe living conditions. This was an era in which tenement apartments variously lacked heating, natural light, access to fresh air, or a means of escape in case of fire.

The Triangle Fire.

On a larger scale, poor separation between closely packed buildings meant that a small fire in one structure could quickly spread to adjoining ones. Too often, the result was raging urban conflagrations such as the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904, which destroyed 1,500 buildings over an area of 140 acres.

Even nominally fireproof masonry buildings--whose entire safety equipment might consist of a red-painted pail of water labeled FIRE placed on each floor--were far from invulnerable. Such buildings commonly housed overcrowded sweatshops with inadequate means of escape in emergencies, and inevitably, there were a number of horrific fires. The worst was New York City’s Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, in which 146 garment workers, most of them immigrant girls and young women, either were overcome by the fire or leapt to their deaths from the building’s ninth floor. The subsequent investigation determined that one exit one the ninth floor had been blocked by fire, and that the other had been locked from the outside. The building’s exterior fire escape, the last possible means of egress, was flimsily built and poorly attached. It collapsed when the panicked workers swarmed over it. 

The fire escape that was no escape.

Building codes arose in an effort to prevent such needless tragedies from recurring. In one way or another, every code provision--including the one that raised that do-it-yourselfer’s hackles--trace back to this source. Ensuring an escape route in case of emergency is a primary function of building code provisions, and in residential buildings, this usually means providing more than one way out in case the primary egress is blocked by fire. In a bedroom, that emergency escape route is the window. 

Once we understand the code’s intent, requirements that may seem arcane or burdensome suddenly make sense. Most are meant to ensure that buildings will stand up safely, that habitable spaces have at least minimal access to natural light and fresh air, and that there’s always a way out in case of emergency.  Next time, we’ll look at a few  basic building code requirements, and what they’re meant to accomplish.

THE NICK OF TIME

In architecture, the surest way to achieve a timeless design is to use materials that are familiar, durable, and that become more beautiful the older they get. Not surprisingly, most of the materials that qualify have been around for ages.

Brick is a classic example. It’s among the most ancient building materials--the oldest known bricks, found in the upper Tigris region of what is now Turkey, date back to around 7500 BC. In all the intervening millenia, not much about brick has changed, either: Even here in twenty-first century America, where nothing happens fast enough, genuine brick is still installed at a relative snail’s pace, one little piece at a time. 

Other common examples of timeless materials include stone, heavy timber, and metals with so-called “living finishes”, such as copper, brass, and bronze. All of these can shrug off decades and sometimes even centuries of abuse without losing any of their visual appeal. In fact, most people find them more beautiful when they’re old and weathered--”patinated”, in the parlance of the trade--than when they’re brand new:  

The value of a patina shouldn’t be underestimated, either: we’ve all seen episodes of Antiques Road Show in which an expert tells the hopeful owner something like: “Well, if you hadn’t polished this 17th century bronze door knocker, I’d have valued it at six thousand dollars, but all shined up like this it’s worth about $17.50.” That’ll teach a guy to keep his hands off the Brasso. 

The funny thing is that, while almost everybody finds the greenish patina of an old copper gutter beautiful, almost nobody feels that way about a weathered plastic gutter. The reason, I think, is that no matter how old the copper gutter gets, we know that it will still serves its purpose perfectly. On the other hand, we can also presume that a weathered plastic gutter has already bought a one-way ticket to the Dumpster. We’ve learned to associate visual cues of aging with intrinsic durability. We see beauty in the aging of certain materials, and just plain failure in others.

At the larger scale of architecture, though, there’s more to a timeless finishe than just aging gracefully. The appeal of a brick wall, for example, has just as much to do with its ability to reflect the human being who created it. Flaws and all, the wall becomes a compelling record of the mason’s skill and personality, frozen in time right before our eyes.

Other largely handcrafted finishes such as wrought iron, stucco, shingle, shake, and tile, all of which have been around for thousands of years, can also provide this sort of snapshot in time, precisely because they’re never perfect. The telltale flaws of hand workmanship are so integral to a timeless finish, in fact, that the manufacturers of mass produced wannabe products such as artificial brick and imitation slate routinely design in fake defects, straining mightily to evoke the charm of the real thing. 

Well, just keep at it. You’ll get it wrong enough eventually.

HOW RIGHT WAS WRIGHT?

More than a half-century after his death in 1959, Frank Lloyd Wright is still considered the greatest architect America has produced, and all but indisputably the greatest architect of the twentieth century. But how well have Wright’s ideas stood the test of time?

Wright has long been faulted for placing aesthetics above practicality. Such carping has died down over the years, since in retrospect uncomfortable furniture or a cramped kitchen seems a minor price to pay for an architectural masterpiece. But it’s also worth noting that Wright was the product of a time in which the most practical spaces in an upper-class home--kitchens, bathrooms, and the like--remained the domain of servants. Nor did his almost uniformly wealthy clientele give him much cause to change this view.

There’s no doubt that Wright pushed contemporary building technologies far beyond their usual limits (hence his unenviable reputation for leaky roofs). Witness such dramatically innovative structures such as Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, whose drilled-pier foundation famously floated it through the disastrous Tokyo earthquake of 1923, or the Johnson Wax headquarters in Racine, Wisconsin, with its internal forest of astonishingly slender lily- pad columns. Despite vast improvements in technology since Wright’s time, few architects since have been as structurally daring.  

A more frequent criticism leveled at Wright these days is his penchant for romanticizing rural life. His hypothetical Broadacre City project, for example, in which every home was to occupy an entire acre of land, seems to modern eyes a delusional retreat from urban problems. But again, Wright’s America (he was born in 1867) was a very different place from our own. Despite the inroads of the industrial revolution, the nation remained overwhelmingly agricultural, and no place more so than the quiet corner of Wisconsin where he first began shaping his architectural ideals.  

Far from constricting his world view, though, Wright’s rural sensibilities lie at the core of many of his most revolutionary ideas: his emphasis on horizontality, his concept of “organic architecture,” and even the notion of open planning, which mirrored the unencumbered spaces of the prairie. His fervent belief in the indivisibility of man and nature also led to his rejection of the slick machine aesthetic espoused by many of his European rivals. 

One overriding aspect of Wright’s philosophy--his fervent belief in the power of the individual--clearly sets him apart from the European modernists, who saw technology rather than man himself as the great democratizing force. It’s easy to fault Wright for positing individuality, given his long roster of self-made clients and the extravagant budgets they afforded him. But as Broadacre City, the various Usonian House projects, and his voluminous writings make plain, architecture’s potential to improve the life of ordinary 

Americans was never far from his mind. 

In the fifty-five years since his passing, Wright’s works have largely retained their power to move us, while many revered examples of International Style modernism have lost, quite literally, much of their original luster. And while both Wright and the Europeans were given to high-flying rhetoric, time has shown that the Wisconsin farmboy had, after all, the surer grasp on how architecture might ennoble the everyman.

SO YOU WANT TO BE AN ARCHITECT?

At least once a year, some bright-eyed young student calls me up and, either out of acdemic compulsion or actual interest, asks to interview me about the architectural profession.

I can never say no to these requests, since I had to do the same thing when I was in school. But as much as I try to put a happy face on my profession, when our little chat is over, these kids always seem to leave a bit discombobulated, their image of the architect suddenly not so much The Fountainhead as Mr. Potato Head. 

It’s certainly not my intent to disenchant them. It’s just that many people’s preconceptions about the architectural profession are pretty far from reality.

The romantic myth of the architect is that of a brilliant loner at the drawing board, conjuring poetic designs with dramatic sweeps of the pencil. And, truth be told, architects seem perfectly happy to sustain this notion: When Frank Lloyd Wright was asked where his creations came from, for example, he mischievously replied, “I just shake them out of my sleeve.” 

Yet nowadays, even among the relatively few architects in a position to design entire buildings, the artistic aspect of the profession comprises only a small fraction of the job. The rest is gobbled up in researching building codes, producing working drawings (the “blueprints” of yore), hewing to voluminous civic design restrictions, keeping clients happy, and not least scaring up enough work to pay the bills.

The majority of architects, however, don’t end up in solo practice at all, but rather go to work for larger firms where they seldom get to shake much of anything out of their sleeves. At best, they may design certain bits of buildings, while at worst they’ll be relegated to writing specifications or some other less-than-artistic pursuit. 

Money, or the lack of it, is another thing that shakes up these students. Among the professions that require  both schooling and a rigorous licensing process--medicine, law, engineering and the like--architecture is by far the least lucrative. According to U.S. U.S. News, the median salary for architects in 2012 was $73,090--actually a bit less than it was the previous year, despite the nation’s slow emergance from the Great Recession. 

Granted, this income is nothing to sneeze at, but given the academic requirements, it’s nowhere near salary league of physicians (average yearly income: $191,520) or lawyers ($113,530). It’s even quite a bit less than the $82,790 pulled down by our ostensibly lesser-trained colleagues, construction managers.

Faced with the prospect of enduring four or five years of college, three or more years of internship, and thirty-odd hours of examinations, this is not necessarily the kind of payback young people have in mind.

Given these realities, I always conclude my little lecture this way: If you’re absolutely smitten with architecture--if, like me, you’re happy spending both your working time and your free time basking in its intricacies-- and you also don’t care much about money, then there’s no more rewarding profession on the planet. But as these downcast young faces so often reveal as they’re going out the door, it takes more devotion than some people bargained for.