DESIGN FOR ITS OWN SAKE

Thanks to the old stereotype of the architect hunched over a drafting board, tee square in hand, many people still think that an architect’s main purpose is to draw “blueprints” (nowadays more properly called working drawings).  The trouble with this romantic notion is that it suggests that architects are paid to draw, when in fact they’re paid to think.

In truth, producing working drawings is a tedious but relatively incidental aspect of the architect’s charge.  It’s roughly analogous to taking a novel that’s been written in shorthand and typing it into a computer.  The essential creative work--if it’s been done properly--is all but finished, and only the mechanics of formatting remain. 

Alas, this preliminary thinking, which is the real kernel of the design process, takes a lot of time and effort and yet may not yield much of a tangible product until much later.  Considering this dearth of physical results, it’s gratifying that many people nevertheless perceive why spending fifteen percent or so of their building budget on architecture might be a worthwhile investment.  

Still, there are also lots of perfectly intelligent people who are mystified, annoyed, or even angered that a few sheets of drawings should take months to complete, cost them many thousands of dollars, and further delay them from getting their project under construction.  These people quite reasonably reckon that all that money spent on mere paper could buy them a bigger Jacuzzi or a fancier front door.  

I can only counter such reasoning by pointing out that architects provide a service, not a commodity.  To say that your architectural investment only buys you a few sheets of paper is like saying that the cost of a Harvard education only gets you a lousy little diploma.

There are plenty of familiar arguments for hiring a licensed architect, most of them having to do with the technical side of the process. For one thing, the high level of detail found in a good set of working drawings--far from scaring off contractors as some people fear--actually makes the bidding and construction process easier and more accurate.  For another, an experienced architect can help circumvent building code booby traps that can make for nasty (and costly) surprises during construction.  These services alone can save thousands of dollars in lost time and change orders.  Hence, that seemingly extravagant fifteen percent fee can repay itself quite rapidly.

Beyond these cut-and-dry reasons for hiring a professional, however, there’s one more--perhaps the only one that architects care passionately about--and that is the pursuit of good design for its own sake.  Obviously, there are cheaper ways to get plans drawn than by hiring an architect, and no doubt there are times when a design that’s merely “good enough” would probably suffice.  But from this architect’s perspective, at least, there can’t be much magic in this kind of undertaking.  After all, humanity’s rise over the millenia has come, not from doing things well enough, but from doing them as well as we knew how. 

WALKING THE WALK

We Americans are a puzzling bunch.  We travel to Italy, France or Spain and come back smitten with the charmingly walkable streets, close-knit houses, and humanly-scaled public spaces we find there.  Yet we seldom stop to wonder why our own built environment is so utterly lacking in those traits.  

It’s no mystery:  In spite of rising population and dwindling resources, America remains saddled with long outdated planning ideals that are the furthest thing from the European examples we admire so much.

America is a vast nation, and perhaps in consequence, our planners and engineers have historically been trained to think big.  This tendency has produced some magnificent civil engineering projects such as railways, dams and bridges.  Yet it hasn’t  been nearly so successful at the scale of human habitation.  

Thanks to the megalomania of our traffic engineers, for example, American cities are among the least pedestrian-friendly in the world. Each year, larger and larger swaths of urban and suburban land are paved over with ubiquitous six-lane thoroughfares bristling with redundant arrays of traffic signals.  Aside from creating barren, monotonous and alienating cityscapes, such roads are also daunting barriers to people on foot, no matter how many kinds of whizbang pedestrian signals we install.  Rather than drawing our cities together, our roads tear them apart, providing one more incentive for Americans to drive instead of walking.    

Ironically, in the dwindling number of places where human-scaled roads still remain, city engineers are even now scrambling to widen them, always with the specious objective of easing congestion.  Yet as both traffic studies and common sense can easily confirm, this so-called improvement is pure bunk.  The only thing America’s incessant street widening programs really do--aside from keeping paving contractors in clover--is to invite even more automobile traffic.    

Europeans are notably less obsessed with road widening.  Unlike us, they recognize that the difficulty of negotiating their picturesque streets in a car is a blessing in disguise: It makes people prefer to take public transit, or to simply live within walking distance of their jobs. In short, Europeans design their cars to suit their cities, whereas we design our cities to suit our cars. 

As for our homes, the much-adored human scale of European villages is all but unheard of in suburban America.  This is no accident, either--our neighborhoods can’t help but be coarsely scaled, since our moribund zoning regulations typcially still insist that houses be surrounded by useless strips of setback land. 

The custom of spacing buildings far apart may have made sense a hundred years ago, when America was an agricultural nation and land was cheap and plentiful.  Yet that day is long past.  With today’s usual practice of shoehorning huge tract homes into postage-stamp building lots, the resulting sunless, ten-foot-wide gap left between houses has only one function: to let developers fetch higher prices by continuing to sell their units as “single-family detached”.

In older European towns, by contrast, even houses in wide-open rural areas are often clustered together in villages, their walls adjoining.  The cumulative savings in otherwise useless setback land can then be devoted to public space that actually has some purpose.  

The need to prize every little scrap of land has been central to Europe’s way of building for centuries. But it’s a lesson we Americans have yet to learn.  When it comes to our professed admiration for Europe’s charms, we talk the talk, but we sure don’t walk the walk.

SUPER DUPER MARKETS

If you’re of Baby Boom vintage or younger, you probably take your local supermarket for granted.  You walk in, round up Mr. Clean, Mrs. Butterworth, and Captain Crunch, mince your way through the checkstand, and you’re done. But grocery shopping wasn’t always like that.  The modern supermarket—technically known as a “self-service food store”—is a fairly recent invention.

Prior to World War II, grocery stores were usually very small, narrow affairs, and going shopping amounted to telling a clerk behind a counter exactly what you needed.  Since most of the merchandise was also behind the counter, out of reach, the clerk had to personally assemble your order item by item.  Often, he or she had to weigh and package items from bulk, whether coffee or flour or pickles, which didn’t speed things up any.  

But slow service wasn’t the reason traditional full-service grocery stores began to die out in the late 1930s.  Rather, rising labor costs and a boom in mass-produced packaged foods drove the rapid changeover to self-service supermarkets.  Allowing customers to select their own prepacked items meant less labor and higher volume, which meant more profit for the grocer.

As quaint as it seems today, the boom in packaged foods stemmed largely from the widespread introduction of a product we now consider totally mundane: cellophane.  Compared to paper, the new transparent packaging kept food fresher while allowing self-service customers to see exactly what they were buying.  Cellophane wrappers first appeared on dry goods, but quickly spread to baked goods, meats, and vegetables.

The quintessential supermarket layout--a central area devoted to dry goods, a produce section along the right side, and a meat counter at the rear—also gradually took shape during the early postwar years. Beginning with the fact that people naturally tend to circulate toward the right rather than the left, the various grocery sections were laid out in a deliberate sequence designed to increase sales, with staple foods first, then discretionary goodies with higher profit margins.  

For the first time, the grocery industry also strove to understand what was going on in a housewife’s mind when she went shopping--and mind you, in those days supermarket customers were almost invariably assumed to be women. 

“The housewife, her habits, her thinking processes, her frame of mind as she enters the store should always be given careful consideration,” advised one trade reference of the era.  “If the staple groceries are located well back, she will be drawn to the rear of the store...if the housewife can complete her “must” shopping list (there), so much the better.  As the housewife winds her way back to the front door, we want her to see our extras, specials, fancies, and high-margin goods, for now she is in a good mood to consider them.”

This carefully planned path of travel thus exposed the unwitting shopper to “silent salesmanship” of the kind we still find today: Mass displays (items stacked in huge quantity to suggest exceptional value), associated displays (for instance, packaged shortcakes placed alongside fresh strawberries); sale items with two-for-one pricing; and of course those checkstand displays designed to encourage the purchase of treats for nagging youngsters. 

Today, despite sixty-odd years of refinement—most of it having to do with pricing, inventory control, and payment—the supermarket remains a distinctly mid-century invention, one which any time-warped GI might recognize.  The tough part would be explaining why we now have ten different kinds of orange juice.

QUALITY PROBLEMS “MADE IN CHINA”

In the twenty years that followed World War II, the phrase “Made In Japan” was transformed from a synonym for worthlessness into a mark of exceptional quality.  More recently, Korea’s reputation for quality has likewise turned around:  The automaker Hyundai, for example, whose early U.S. offerings were memorably panned by one reviewer as “supremely shoddy,” today ranks near the top in quality worldwide.

Alas, Asia’s real powerhouse, China, has not made similar gains in its culture of quality, despite the three-plus decades that have passed since the Opening in 1978.  In the area of building products, most of the quality problems I noticed on my first visit in 1994 still persist.  Items such as cabinet hardware, faucets, and bathroom accessories--many of them destined for your local home improvement center--are beautifully finished and packaged, yet after installation quickly corrode or fall apart.  

The locksets I chose for my second home in China looked impressive in the box, but after three months of light use, five out of six had broken.  Likewise, our Chinese-made toilet was the height of style, but due to a basic design flaw, didn’t flush properly and had to be replaced--ironically, with a U.S.-designed model also manufactured in China. Especially vexing is that these problems seem to occur regardless of a domestic brand’s price or alleged reputation.

One reason for these wide-ranging quality problems is that, in the mad scramble to cash in on China’s construction boom, building products are rushed to market with scant regard for performance testing, let alone time for evolutionary improvement.  But an even more fundamental problem is that the Chinese continue to equate intrinsic quality with superficial appearance.  Products don’t actually have to be good, as long as they look good.  

Somewhat more alarmingly, this attitude carries over to the quality of whole buildings as well.  Commercial facades carry elegant finishes of granite, glass, or stainless steel, yet the workmanship beneath--even in important public works such as airports and stadiums--often remains breathtakingly slapdash.  In the city of Suzhou, where I spend my summers, a gleaming new sports arena that opened to great fanfare six years ago is already streaked with rust. 

Given the great strides made by other Asian countries, one would think that such quality issues would have been addressed long ago.  Yet not even problems that could be easily rectified--such as China’s famously garbled English translations--have improved much.  A flashy Powerpoint presentation I was shown this year boasted of a government agency’s ISO 9001 certification, but was itself riddled with gross translation and typographic errors.  In another example of the kind one sees every day, I came across a purportedly “Tournament Grade”sporting product that was boldly labeled BADMINON SHUTTLECOKS.  Still, the prize for this year’s worst translation must go to the eyebrow-raising brand name I found on a set of bath towels:  Kingshore.

Seemingly, the cavalier attitude of China’s old command economy--an era in which quality truly didn’t matter--continues to dog much of the present generation’s owners and workers alike.  It may remain for yet another post-Opening generation to fully implement a culture of quality, but rest assured, it will happen eventually.  There is, after all, a limit to how far a low price can get you.

CHINA'S IRONIES

China is a nation filled with ironies.  It’s a purportedly Socialist state in which the images of Chairman Mao that used to gaze down from buildings have  been largely replaced by an equally paternal-looking Colonel Sanders.  And it’s an enormously proud culture, but one whose ideals of beauty--whether smiling women on shampoo bottles, virile men on packs of underwear, or googooing babies on diaper boxes--are more often than not depicted as Caucasian.

As for everyday Chinese life, forget those romantic images of rural schoolhouses, peasants tending rice paddies, and ancient villages in the clouds.  Such scenes do exist, of course, and though they cater to our lovely perception of China, they’re roughly as accurate as having modern America represented by the shootout street in  “High Noon”.  

In fact, most of China’s people are packed into a narrow band hugging the East Coast, and most of them in turn live in relatively modern housing projects.  This trend is likely to continue, as more and more people leave the countryside for the comparative wealth of the urban centers.

What’s more, despite the bucolic images so dear to Westerners, few Chinese regret trading a rural lifestyle for an urban one.  For many, farmhouse life meant hauling the day’s water supply from the local well in buckets, using a covered wooden pail for a toilet, and heating bath water by the kettleful on a charcoal fire.  South of the Yangtze River, the climate was not considered harsh enough to require heating, so living in these warmer regions ironically meant occasional freezing temperatures indoors.  My wife, who grew up in this region, vividly recalls waking up on cold mornings to find the household towels frozen solid.

Farmhouse living in summertime brought stifling heat and humidity, along with flies, mosquitoes, and various other unwelcome critters in abundance--conditions that can make a clean, air-conditioned apartment with hot and cold running water seem more than a small step up..

While China’s highrise housing blocks may appear impersonal to Westerners, their design has improved dramatically in the past few years.  Most are equal to our own, and the fancier ones have all the conveniences you’d find in an American dwelling and then some:  One well-to-do government official I visited proudly showed off his Japanese-made toilet, an improbable looking device bristling with electronic controls whose various functions I’d rather not guess at.

Curiously, many rural customs persist in this dazzling new urban setting.  The Chinese still prefer to buy their meats and vegetables daily from local farmers, who set up stalls in the local market hall each morning.  This points up another of China’s ironies: While vast portions of the nation are too arid to grow crops, it’s precisely China’s richest farmland--that of the coastal regions--that’s being consumed by development.  Already, vast areas of prime farmland have been paved over with endless ranks of housing projects. 

If building continues at this pace, where will the nation’s food supply come from?   And who will grow it after farmers have abandoned the land or been forced from it by development?  America faced these same questions at the end of the nineteenth century, when fully half of us still lived on farms.  Today, only two percent of us do, and we’ve not only survived but prospered under this trend.  Given its ingenuity and determination, China may well do the same.

THE CIVIC TASTE BRIGADE: Part Three of Three Parts

Suppose you wanted to go out and buy yourself a new suit of clothes, or perhaps a new car.  Now suppose that, after you’d chosen the one you liked, you had to appear before a board who would rule on whether they found your choice acceptible.  If they didn’t, you had to change your ideas until they were satisfied.  Sound Orwellian?  It isn’t.  This is essentially what a civic design review board is empowered to do.  The only difference is that the taste being dictated is that of your own home.

As we saw in the last two columns, design review is an increasingly common civic institution under which building plans are evaluated, not just for adherence to health and safety codes as in the past, but also for aesthetic merit.  Alas, in far too many jurisdictions, this arguably well-intentioned idea has mushroomed into a disgracefully intrusive process that throws roadblock after roadblock before anyone wishing to build a home or addition, never mind how simple or invisible.  In at least one metropolitan city, for instance, hapless homeowners are now required to submit photographs of the homes of their twenty nearest neighbors before their plans can even be evaluated.

The pity is that, in return for such draconian burdens on citizens, the design review process has brought no quantifiable improvement to the built environment.  In fact, by allowing momentary aesthetic vogues to masquerade as building regulations, it has probably done just the opposite.

However dissatisfied we may be with the state of our cities and suburbs--and we ought to be--civic design review is a cure that’s far worse than the disease.  If the history of architecture has taught us anything, it’s that aesthetic ideals are fluid and cannot be distilled into commandments. Nor does judging building plans against a slew of totally subjective aesthetic regulations--essentially, legislating taste--lead to more sensitive or more appropriate design. On the contrary, cities with stringent design review guidelines are often among the worst transgressors in the cultivation of gross and overblown pastiche architecture.

Across the nation, design review boards are busy micromanaging design details, materials, and even color choices for architects and homeowners. Applicants are typically compelled toward approvable outcomes by so-called guidelines, such as one town’s none-too-subtle suggestion to use “natural materials (i.e., wood siding and fieldstone).”  Hint, hint.

Meanwhile, in contrast to this kind of tyrannical aesthetic control, obsolete zoning practices continue to encourage McMansionization, suburban sprawl, and pedestrian-hostile design.

If we’re serious about improving our built environment, the proper avenue is not through the arrogant dictation of aesthetics, but rather through the objective, specific, and above all unbiased mechanism of more intelligent zoning regulations.

Municipal governments have long held the power to enforce matters of health and safety, and rightly so.  Over time, these powers have evolved to rein in unreasonable density, bulk, energy consumption, and other quantifiable aspects of construction--again, rightly so. Yet presuming to dictate the ethereal, subjective, and ever-changing entity of architectural taste, especially on a citizen’s private property, crosses a dangerous line. Simply put, your taste is none of the government’s business.

I will be traveling for the next five weeks and will be unable to post until late August. 

THE CIVIC TASTE BRIGADE: Part Two of Three Parts

“The fallacy of contextualism,” wrote Former New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, “the masquerade of matched materials, the cosmetic coverup of architectural maquillage meant to make a building “fit” surroundings that frequently change, are a trap into which many architects jump or fall.”  

Or, I might add, are pushed. Last time we talked about how the design review process has entrenched itself in the bureacracy, so that it’s now all but accepted that your city government has the right to define “correct” architectural taste for you.  Today we’ll examine how contextualism, the sacred cow of design review boards everywhere, has come to be used to throttle architects and homeowners alike.

In architecture, “context” refers to the greater physical and social surroundings in which a building will exist.  Architect and gadfly Robert Venturi was among the first to plant this notion in the minds of architects and planners.  In his 1950 master’s thesis, Venturi argued that architectural meaning derived not by designing from the inside out, as the modernists fervently believed, but rather that it sprang from the context in which a building was placed.  This was a revolutionary idea in a time when modernist architects routinely designed buildings as precious, self-contained objects existing in a contextual vacuum.  

Alas, Venturi’s premise--among the early critical salvos that would eventually topple modernism--has now come to be tyrannically misapplied by design review boards across the country. The idea of design deriving from context has been bawdlerized to imply that new buildings should defer to and even mimic their surroundings, while the enforcement of this dogma has become a bureaucratic end in itself.  

As even the most cursory grasp of architectural history will make plain, however, there has hardly been an important work of American architecture--let alone a revolutionary one--that has kowtowed to its surroundings in the way design review boards now widely insist upon.  On the contrary, breakthrough works from Sullivan to Wright to Venturi to Gehry have invariably drawn criticism, ridicule, and public disdain for their “otherness” before ultimately advancing the cause of architecture.  

But so-called serious architecture isn’t all that suffers under this make-it-match brand of contextualism.  Few of the quirky roadside icons Americans treasure--whether dairies housed in giant milk bottles, water towers shaped like pineapples or ketchup bottles, or motel rooms in stucco teepees--could withstand the crushing conformism of today’s design review process, which invokes contextualism to throttle such unruly ideas to a uniform level of inoffensiveness. Had America’s architectural past been subjugated under this kind of leaden rule, we would now find ourselves in an infinitely more boring nation.  

As for Venturi, in his recent book with Denise Scott Brown, “Architecture as Signs and Systems,” he writes:

“My approach (to context) has been much acknowledged, but also much misunderstood and simplistically exploited, especially by bureacratic design review boards who don’t understand that contextural harmony can derive from contrast as well as from analogy.”  

Venturi further brands the reflexive insistence of design review boards to “make the new look like the old” as “perverse” and, in terms one wishes might resonate through City Halls across the country, cites the misuse of contextualism “at a time when hundreds of bureaucratic design review boards and committees pervade our Kafka-esque era, persecuting architects and stultifying architecture...”

Next time:  If not design review, then what?