SKYLIGHT MYTHS

“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

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

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).     

SOME MORE MEANINGLESS YEAR-END STATISTICS

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

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

•  Contrary to the 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.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

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

Oh, never mind. Happy 2020.

A TOUCHING TALE OF ARCHITECTURE

“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

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

“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.