SIDEWALK CITIES

In China, single-family homes are rare, and the vast majority of people live in what Americans would charitably call highrise apartment blocks or, put less delicately, projects.  As dismal as these may sound (and as dismal as they sometimes appear), the neighborhoods that form around these Chinese projects really work.  They’re far from tidy and seldom beautiful, but on the whole they’re livelier, safer, and more inviting at all hours of the day than any American equivalent.  They are as successful as most American housing projects have been catastrophic.  

Why?  For one, the Chinese are not hamstrung by the sort of fanatically segregated zoning that has made so much of America a vacant no man’s land after hours. In China, the street levels of residential buildings (not to mention office buildings and sometimes even factories) are customarily lined with a whole panoply of stores and workshops, a tradition handed down from millenia of mercantile culture.  

A few minutes walk from my Chinese home-away-from-home in Suzhou, for example, a road leads right through the heart of several large housing projects. Under American single-use zoning, this would likely be a desolate--perhaps even threatening--place. Yet in China, it’s a bustling social center.  Jammed into the span of a few short blocks are grocery and dry goods stores, at least five bakeries, a fresh meat and vegetable market, three or four fruit vendors, a couple of  pharmacies, two banks, a custom tailor, eight or nine barber shops, and perhaps sixty other shops variously selling toys, shoes, dresses, hardware, paint, baby clothes, and what have you, along with a couple of dozen eateries ranging from street vendors to large sit-down venues.  

Improbably mixed in among these are also three metal fabricators, a bicycle repair shop, a motorcycle repair shop, and two shops that build windows.  The range of goods and services is so comprehensive that it’s easier to list what the street doesn’t have:  There’s no cafe, and no Japanese restaurant--they’re a few blocks away on another street.

Many of these shops are no bigger than a one-car garage, so nearly all of them borrow a chunk of real estate from the great swath of sidewalk that runs from one end of the project to the other.  Perhaps thirty feet wide, it flanks a gratifyingly narrow street that discourages through traffic.  And although China can hardly be described as a pedestrian-friendly nation, neighborhoods like this one are clearly meant for people and cyclists, and not for cars.  The result is that neighborhood life, day or night, takes place outdoors, in front of the shops.  People eat, nap, bake, cook, cobble, weld, grind, build, and dismantle things on the sidewalk--a prospect that would horrify American planners--and wonder of wonders, no one seems the worse for it. 

This kind of sidewalk city, which is utterly typical of urban China, is already bustling at sunrise, and it’s still crowded late into the evening, when the restaurants and karaoke bars are going full tilt.  Yet there’s never a compulsion to look nervously over your shoulder, no matter how late the hour.  There are just too many people around living normal lives to feel unsafe.

“Chaotic” is a word many order-loving westerners have used to describe Chinese cities, whether the twisting old longtangs or back alleys of yore, or today’s less romantic but equally ebullient neighborhoods.  If this is chaos, it’s the kind that American cities could use more of.

DIS-INTEGRATIONS

A while back, I stopped at a locally-owned burger emporium for one of my periodic hits of cholesterol. The giant cheeseburger was stupendous, but the decor was something else again.  

In architecture, there are few things as tawdry as yesterday’s red-hot fashion.  Judging by its unsettling paint job, this restaurant had apparently been redone during the 1980s, when a television series called Miami Vice, of all things, inspired any number of hack architects and decorators to run around purportedly “updating” buildings with appliques of glass block, neon, and stucco, lastly topping them off with the color scheme then approvingly known as dusty rose and teal.   

It’s clear enough why fashion trends exist.  For marketers, it’s a diabolically clever way to ensure that people never remain satisfied with what they have, and instead will eternally crave a newer car, a different cut of clothing, or what have you.  What’s harder to understand is exactly what makes the rest of us--including design professionals--so willing to be swept up in the fashion industry’s calculated tidal pull.

Would any architect or decorator, for example, sincerely believe that a color scheme inspired by a momentary television series would be just the thing to make a lasting contribution to their client’s project?  And for that matter, could any reasonably intelligent client really overlook the stunning shortsightedness of such a concept?

Apparently, they could, and they did.   There are countless moldering examples of this particular fashion cliche still hanging on across the country, ranging from relatively forgiveable examples like my hamburger joint, all the way to egregious revamps of entire hotels, shopping centers, hospitals and even banks--all of them still ridiculously decked out in fading shades of turquoise and pink, and looking more like colossal ice cream parlors than serious institutions.

But of course it’s not fair to pick on weak-willed architects of the Eighties for such dismaying transgressions. Every decade, every era has its equivalent of glass block and neon, and of teal and dusty rose.  Today’s faddish architecture--those buildings bristling with nonfunctional sunshades and outriggers, short-lived varnished wood exteriors, and harlequin paint schemes of olive drab, dried blood, and mustard--are destined to look just as embarassingly dated in a few years. 

The saving grace here, however, is that qualifier “new”.  However trendoid they may be, these buildings were at least conceived with details, finishes, and color schemes that were integral to the whole.  On the other hand, cosmetic updates superficially pasted onto buildings for the sake of chasing one fad or another are by definition dis-integrations.  These kinds of “improvements” are invariably short-lived, and just as invariably diminish any building that is subjected to them.  

Practically every historic structure we cherish today, from New York’s Grand Central Station to San Francisco’s Ferry Building, has had to be rescued from at least one and sometimes multiple “modernizations” perpetrated by architects and decorators, who most assuredly touted them as improvements in their day.  With friends like these, old buildings don’t need enemies.  

THREE TOUGH NUTS

There are three project ideas I hear from homeowners again and again--probably because, at first glance, they seem like dirt cheap ways to add space.  Alas, all three are far from being the slam-dunks people think they are.  They go something like this:

•  “We just want to move this wall out a couple feet.”  This idea usually reflects the hope that a modest addition will translate into modest cost.  Actually, the opposite is true.  Expanding a room by two feet or ten feet hardly changes the labor involved, since all the complications found in the larger addition--tying into existing roofs, extending utilities, matching existing finishes, and the like--are found in the small one as well.  The actual savings due to the reduced area of floor, walls, and roof is trivial.  What’s more, since you gain only a pitiful number of square feet for all this trouble, your cost per square foot goes sky high.  

Moral:  If you’re going to bother adding on, add the maximum area that circumstances, budget and reason will allow.  Small additions do not make for small costs.

•  “We want to go up a story.”  On the face of it, adding upward instead of outward seems to make sense.  The foundation is already done, right?

Not necessarily.  In most cases, foundations built to support a one story house are not adequate to support two stories.  In the past, building departments have let this problem slide--which is why you see so many older additions of this kind--but not anymore.  Nowadays, adding a second story often requires foundation reinforcement or even total replacement, neither of which are minor propositions.  

Adding a story also means you’ll need to carve out an area of at least three feet by eleven feet (but probably more) for a staircase, hopefully in a spot that makes sense in terms of circulation.  Often, this requires sacrificing a downstairs bedroom, which instantly wipes out the gain of one of the bedrooms you’re presumably adding upstairs.  Lastly, depending on the character (and the characters) of your neighborhood, you may risk riling up your neighbors by adding a looming second floor and potentially cutting off their views or sunlight or both.  In the past, this was their tough luck, but today, it’s more likely to be yours.  

The upshot:  If you’ve got nowhere else to go but up, so be it, but adding outward is generally an easier, cheaper, and less disruptive way to gain space.

•  “We want to raise the house and put a story underneath.”  Usually, folks with this idea are already planning to replace their foundation for one reason or another, so they figure it’s a great chance to double the size of their house in one fell swoop.  As you might guess, though, this project has all the headaches of adding a second story and then some.  The same staircase problem applies, but now there’s also the additional yet frequently overlooked challenge of getting from the sidewalk up to your front door--which, you’ll recall, is now way, way up in the air.  If you’re concerned about resale value, it’s also worth noting that houses with bedrooms beneath the main living area are less popular with buyers than those with more conventional arrangements.

This isn’t to say that these three approaches aren’t worth considering.  If the inherent problems are anticipated and properly dealt with, any one of them can yield a perfectly good project.  Still, if there’s space available, building a right-sized addition at ground level is usually cheaper and easier.

THE MIRACLE MINERAL

Over a century ago, American builders began using a remarkable mineral product.  Mined from a type of serpentine rock, it was natural, abundant and easy to produce, yet its unique properties made it almost limitlessly useful.  It was resistant to chemicals and intense heat. It was an excellent electrical and thermal insulator.  Out of its fibers, you could weave a cloth that wouldn’t burn.  You could even mix it with other materials to make them stronger and more fireproof. 

Over the course of the twentieth century, American industry--with the government’s blessing--found thousands of uses for this miraculous mineral.  Woven into a cloth, it was used to insulate electrical wires.  Mixed with a binder, it made a fireproof insulation for pipes and ducts.  Mixed with cement, it made a host of practically indestructible building materials such as corrugated siding, shingles, and flue pipe. Mixed with vinyl, it made an incredibly durable floor tile.  

Nor was its usefulness limited to construction. This same amazing mineral allowed the brakes on your car to survive blistering temperatures. Inside your home, you could find it in stoves, heaters, ovens, toasters, hair dryers, and ironing board covers--pretty much any product that had to resist high heat.  And if you happen to have an older example of any of these items--or perhaps an old furnace down in your basement--that miraculous mineral may still be there, silently doing its job.

The miraculous mineral is asbestos, a substance whose modern reputation is considerably more sinister than when it was found in countless industrial products.  Long-term occupational exposure to asbestos is now known to cause a number of terrible lung diseases, one more ghastly than the next.  The risk of exposure to the amounts of asbestos found in a typical older home is less clear, but on the premise of being better safe than sorry, asbestos is no longer manufactured in the United States.  Nevertheless, since it was used in thousands of long-lived domestic products, and because its peak period of use stretched from World War II well into the 1970s--in fact, the last U.S. asbestos mine closed only in 2002--its complete removal from the environment is a virtual impossibility.  

Millions of older American homes contain significant amounts of asbestos, found mostly in the form of insulation on steam pipes or heating ducts, in resilient floor tiles, acoustic ceiling tiles, and sprayed acoustic ceilings, and in asbestos-cement shingles, building panels and flue pipes.  Although removal was once widely considered the preferred remedy, today many authorities believe that the safest approach is to leave asbestos-containing building materials in place so long as they’re in good condition and not subject to disturbance. For the official policy in your own area, contact your local hazardous materials authority.

So it is that, after a century of vast commercial use, the miraculous mineral has now become the malevolent mineral.  If there’s a lesson here, perhaps it’s that sometimes, things that seem too good to be true--whether X-rays, atomic power, DDT or asbestos--are in fact exactly that. 

GASOLINE AUTOS: RUNNING OUT OF STEAM

Cars can’t help but affect the built environment, since they constrain so much of how we design and how we live.  We devote a big chunk of our homes to them, and build shopping centers in which a quarter of the space is for people, and the rest is for parked cars.  Add up all this area given over to cars, whether moving or standing still, and you’ll find that around forty percent of our cities belong to our four-wheeled friends.  

Of more pressing concern to humankind, however, is the fact that cars consume vast amounts of petroleum while pumping out vast amounts of pollution.  Here, at least, there’s a ray of hope:  Americans can now buy not only hybrid vehicles (which use small, efficient gasoline engines to produce electricity onboard), but straight electric vehicles as well.  

Hybrids are far more efficient than the gas-guzzling, mechanical-drive dinosaurs most of us still drive, not to mention being being quieter and more powerful to boot. Straight electric vehicles are an even greater advance, as they do away completely with the inherently inefficient internal-combustion engine.

Still, industry analysts, bureaucrats, and other fonts of conventional wisdom would have us believe that, because hybrids and electrics still account for only a small fraction of vehicles sold, old-style cars will be with us for a long, long time. 

They may be in for a big surprise, and steam locomotives, of all things, can help us see why.

For over a hundred years after U.S. railroad service began in 1831, steam locomotives ruled the American rails.  What’s more, by the 1920s, only three companies were building all of the nation’s locomotives.  Sound familiar?  The largest of these was the mighty Baldwin Locomotive Works of Philadelphia, whose vast Eddystone Works once ranked among the world’s largest industrial complexes.  Baldwin was, in many ways, the General Motors of its field. 

During the 1930s, a seemingly puny threat to this dynasty appeared.  It was the diesel-electric locomotive, an innovative product built by a complete outsider to the world of steam. The sleek, clean-running diesel-electrics cost a lot more than steam locomotives, but they were also about three times as efficient.  

The Big Three locomotive builders hardly took notice of this innovation.  They devoted trifling resources to developing their own versions, and instead kept right on doing what they’d always done--building bigger and more powerful steam locomotives.  After all, steam had been king for over a century, and that wasn’t going to change anytime soon.

But it did change, and fast.  The railroads quickly saw the potential savings in this new technology. To the astonishment of Baldwin and its brethren, they began rapidly replacing their huge fleets of steam locomotives with diesel-electrics.  How rapidly?  In 1936, steam locomotives still outsold diesel-electrics by about four to one. In 1948, by contrast, the railroads bought 2,800 diesel-electrics--and exactly thirteen steam locomotives. 

The last American steam locomotive chuffed out of Baldwin’s Eddystone Works the following year.  While the steam engine builders had been snoring at the throttle, demand for their once-invincible product had vanished.   

Not surprisingly, all of the Big Three locomotive builders quickly succumbed in the diesel-electric era, since they’d done next to nothing to prepare for it.

The moral of the story is that the gasoline-engined, mechanical-drive automobile--the kind we’ve driven for over a century now--is far from invincible.  No one should know this better than General Motors. Why? Because they were the upstart firm whose shiny, efficient diesel-electric locomotives put the steam engine out of business.

TWENTIES TECH

Every so often, there’s a brief span of years in which innovation comes thick and fast.  In the area of building technology, the Roaring Twenties was such an age.  The houses of this decade were chock full of new ideas that, quaint as they seem to us now, let Americans live more comfortably than ever before.

The homes of the 1920s were, for one, the first to truly integrate electricity.  In prior years, clumsy surface installations of switches and wiring were still common, along with lighting fixtures that often consisted of little more than a naked bulb at the end of a cord.  The Twenties brought the wide use of two-button switches flush-mounted in brass plates, with the  “on” button elegantly marked by a circle of mother-of-pearl.  Electric wall sconces became the lighting fashion of the day, while electrical outlets moved from jury-rigged affairs screwed to the wall to being inconspicuously flush-mounted in the baseboard.  Granted, few rooms had more than one or two receptacles, but then this was an era of few electrical gadgets besides floor lamps and radios.

Another high-tech feature unique to the era was a built-in aerial serving that entertainment mainstay of the day, the console radio.  Rather than mounting an ugly mast on the roof as was later done for television, builders of the Twenties cleverly looped wire through the attic to form a giant hidden antenna. 

A simpler but equally useful convenience was the pass-through mailbox, in which letters dropped through a slot beside the front door slid into a small inside compartment behind a grillework door.  Alas, this charming device could never accomodate today’s huge quantities of junk mail. 

The 1920s also brought the wide use of speaking tubes, the low-tech ancestor of those garbled intercoms we’ve all learned to hate. Used mainly in upscale apartment buildings, speaking tubes were simply a network of tin pipes leading from a central panel at the front door into each apartment. Each end of the tube had a trumpet-like opening, allowing visitor and occupant to communicate without need for electronics. 

Also found in better apartment houses was central electric refrigeration, the forerunner of today’s home refrigerators.  In this system, a compressor in the basement furnished the cooling power for a small refrigerated cabinet in the kitchen of each apartment.  Cumbersome as it sounds, this was still a big advance over the standard cooling device of the era: A block of ice.  

No doubt the most technically sophisticated building innovation to take hold during the Twenties was air conditioning, a luxury so expensive that it was initially found only in movie palaces and in the best class of public buildings.  In those days, the machinery required to air-condition a building took up roughly the space of a four-car garage, and was deemed so impressive that at least one theater installed plate glass show windows to let passersby admire their mechanical wonder from the sidewalk.  

One innovation of the Twenties that never did catch on was a patented radio speaker hidden in a chandelier--a device that probably had more than a few startled dinner guests choking on their dumplings.  Then again, even this curiosity might have succeeded if the Great Depression hadn’t stopped it cold, along with all the other hijinks of this exuberant era. Thankfully, the greatest legacy of the Roaring Twenties--some of the most charming and livable houses in America--still largely survives.

MIXED-UP MOTIFS

Not long ago, in a pleasant, Sixties-era neighborhood of California ranchers, I came across a renovated house that looked all too familiar.  The owner had replaced the original front doors, all the windows, and the garage door in a style that could most kindly be described as Home Depot Eclectic.  To begin with, there was a huge, modernistic vinyl picture window.  A few feet away were a pair of casement windows bordered with those now-inescapable Craftsman style “simulated divided lites”.  The garage door, meanwhile, was topped with a row of little Colonial sunburst windows, while the front doors boasted an elaborate Frank Lloyd Wright pattern done in beveled glass.  Just about the only style that was absent, in fact, was that of the original California rancher.

Setting aside the wisdom of trying to transform one architectural style into another, any one of these motifs might have worked had it been used consistently and alone. Combining them all together, however, simply yielded a stylistic hodgepodge.

It’s amazing how a single motif can call up a whole architectural style. Motifs act as a kind of visual shorthand--when we see fishscale shingles, we think Victorian.  When we see zigzags, we think Deco. When we see curlicues, we think Spanish, and so on.  But this same evocative power can cause a lot of trouble when it’s not used carefully.  Few motifs, for example, could be more at odds than those New Englandish sunbursts being played against the jagged lines of Prairie School glass just a few feet away.

Probably the most clear-cut dividing line between irreconcilable motifs is the one between traditional and modern architecture.  There are always exceptions, but in general, traditional and modern styles spring from diametrically opposed philosophies, and seldom the twain shall meet.  This realization might have discouraged our exemplary renovator from mixing in a little Ben Franklin with his Frank Lloyd Wright.

Is all this just stylistic nitpicking?  Sure--but nitpicking is what makes for good design.  Nor are such clashing motifs something that would only bother an architect.  Lately, more and more homeowners come primed with an impressive grasp of architectural styles--due, no doubt, to This Old House-style TV shows and instant Google searches.  Lots of people are able to sense when things don’t seem to fit together right.

So unless you aim to be eclectic, try to limit yourself to a few favorite motifs, and apply them consistently.  If you use segmental arches, for example, don’t mix them with round ones--the first speaks Italian, while the second screams in Spanish.  For similar reasons, don’t mix double-hung windows with sliders, Art Nouveau with Art Deco, divided lites with glass block, and so on.  All of these pairings come from very different eras and sources, and they’ll get along none too happily in one facade.

If you’re not sure which motif goes with which style, consult some books on the style or period you’re interested in.  Find five or six examples of buildings you really like, and take note of the motifs they have in common.  Then, pay equally close attention to the things you don’t find, and you won’t be bedeviled by those mixed-up motifs.