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a purportedly Socialist state in which the images of Chairman Mao that used to gaze down from buildings have largely been replaced by an equally paternal-looking Colonel Sanders.  It's also 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.

OLD-FASHIONED EXPERIENCE: Part Two

Last time, we saw how many well-known brands in the American building industry got their start through innovation and invention . It’s a credential that many of today’s reverse-engineered, flash-in-the-pan competitors can’t lay claim to—something to bear in mind next time you’re tempted by a slickly-advertised brand you’ve never heard of.

Ironically, many old American companies tend to play downplay their long experience, perhaps for fear of seeming fuddy-duddy in today’s high-tech world.  Since I have no such compunctions, however, I’ll single out a few more of our most venerable brands, some of them now well past the century mark.  

Way back in 1901, for example, Chicagoan Albert C. Brown opened a small shop that made plumbing fixtures and other hardware. In 1913, Brown invented a replaceable and virtually drip-free faucet cartridge which he called the Quaturn, because a mere quarter-turn of the handle could turn the water on or off.  Brown’s invention soon became the mainstay of his Chicago Faucet Company. His cartridge has been refined over the years, but amazingly, it’s still interchangeable with any Quaturn faucet manufactured since 1913. 

Some American firms not only go back a long way, but also practically created their own industries. Willis Haviland Carrier, for instance, invented the basics of modern air conditioning in 1902, which helps explain why the Carrier name has been keeping people cool ever since.

Perhaps less of a household name--unless you’re in the habit of reading your door latches--is that of German immigrant Walter Reinhold Schlage.  A master mechanic and inventor, Schlage’s first patent, granted in 1909, was for a door lock with a built-in button that turned the room lights on and off.  The idea didn’t catch on, but around 1920, Schlage came up with the now-familiar lockset with a push-button lock centered in the door knob.  

What’s more, he designed the new lock to fit in a simple round hole bored in the door, eliminating the need for expensive mortising.  This so-called “cylindrical lock” created a minor revolution in the building industry, since it could be installed in minutes using ordinary hand tools.  These two innovations remain the basis of all interior locksets today.

A more familiar household brand traces its lineage back to 1911, when two brothers in St. Joseph, Michigan founded the Upton Machine Company to produce electric motor-driven wringer washers. Eventually, retail giant Sears, Roebuck and Co. began marketing Upton-manufactured washers under their house brand of Kenmore. Today, the little company founded by the Uptons is Whirlpool Corporation, the world’s largest appliance manufacturer.

More recent domestic products are just as likely to have sprung from innovation by American firms.  A classic example: Around 1946, Dr. Percy Spencer, an engineer with Raytheon Corporation, was surprised to find that the candy bar in his pocket had melted while he was working on a device that generated microwaves. The following year, Raytheon demonstrated the world's first microwave oven, calling it the Radarange. In 1967, having acquired Amana Refrigeration, Raytheon introduced the first countertop Amana Radarange oven.  By 1975, microwave ovens were outselling gas ranges.

Today, of course, you’d be hard pressed to find any microwave ovens--including Amana’s--that are actually made in the U.S.A.  Still, it’s worth giving credit where it’s due.

OLD-FASHIONED EXPERIENCE: Part One

Aside from my usual grumbling over Hewlett Packard products, I seldom mention brand names in this blog.  Today, however, I’m going to mention a whole raft of them.  Before I’m accused of selling out, though, let me say that none of the firms I mention have paid me to drop their names, nor so much as taken me out to lunch.  Just for future reference, however, I could probably be bought off with a nice fresh rhubarb pie.  

Today’s building materials market is flooded with newcomer brands.  While choice and competition are generally a good thing, the current galaxy of choices in the building field is largely among a whole raft of Johnny-Come-Lately manufacturers, many based overseas, whose main objective is simply to cash in on America’s vast home-improvement market.  This unpleasant fact ought to make consumers think twice before purchasing brands they’ve never heard of before, no matter how slickly advertised.

Quite a few American brands, by comparison, have histories dating back a century or more. While a distinguished past doesn’t necessarily guarantee modern worth--as General Motors can amply attest--there’s nevertheless no substitute for long experience. And there are plenty of experienced old brands to go around.  

One well-known American plumbing fixture maker, for example, traces its lineage back to 1872, when John B. Pierce opened a tinware shop in Ware, Massachusetts. Pierce later founded one of three firms that merged in 1892 to form the American Radiator Company.  In 1929, American Radiator in turn merged with The Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company. By the eve of World War II, products from this unwieldy new combine--it was not called American-Standard until 1948--could be found in about half the homes in the U.S.. 

Just as venerable a name in plumbing is the company founded by 29-year-old Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler in 1873 to produce cast iron and steel farm implements. In 1883 Kohler applied a baked enamel coating to one of his company’s horse trough/hog scalders, thus creating the first Kohler bathtub. 

Other old hands in the building industry include the window manufacturer Anderson, founded in 1903 by Danish immigrant Hans Andersen and his family in Hudson, Wisconsin.  In 1932, in the very depths of the Depression, Anderson introduced the first fully assembled window unit in the industry.  This was a revolutionary idea in a day when windows were either shipped in pieces, or else were locally built from scratch.  

Another familiar name in windows got its start in 1925, when Pete and Lucille Kuyper founded a small Des Moines company to manufacture a novel type of window screen that retracted onto a roller.  The Kuypers’s Rolscreen Company moved to Pella, Iowa, the following year, began manufacturing wood windows, and the rest is history.

Innovations, whether large or small, have been central to the rise of the companies recounted above.  Next time we’ll look at a few more such stalward American brands, some of whom essentially invented their own industries.  So take note, industry reps--there’s still time to get me that rhubarb pie.

BATHROOM BASICS

People do lots of thinking when they remodel a bathroom.  They agonize over colors, countertop materials, and choosing the latest lavatory sink, but too often, they overlook the kind of improvements that would matter most. 

Simply upgrading your bathroom with fancy fixtures and materials won’t do a thing to improve its function.  You’ll just be trading a lousy old bathroom for a lousy new one.  So make sure you don’t miss these basics:

•  Don’t rule out relocating a toilet, a sink, or even a bathtub if doing so would definitely improve the room’s layout.  The old notion that moving plumbing fixtures will break the bank simply isn’t true in most cases--in a major bathroom remodel, the biggest expense is in finishes, not in rough plumbing. 

A common example:  Building codes allow a toilet to be centered in a space as little as thirty inches wide.  Yet many older bathrooms have much more space than that between the toilet and adjoining cabinets or walls.  In a case like this, moving the toilet to the modern minimum may gain you a nice chunk of counter space. 

•  Stay away from hard-to-clean fixtures, no matter how fashionable.  The usual suspects include topmount lavatory sinks, whose raised rims prevent puddled water from being wiped directly into the sink.  And the cleaning headaches inherent in those oh-so-trendy free-standing-bowl style sinks hardly need pointing out.

Likewise, while sparkling glass shower enclosures look great in designer magazines, in real life they’re a drudge to keep clean.  For my money, a shower curtain--which won’t obstruct the room when not in use, and which can be easily replaced--is a more practical choice.

•  In the shower, provide a niche for storing shampoo bottles and the like. Make sure the soap dish is high enough to avoid the need to stoop down, and provide a hook or bar for hanging a washcloth.  A small built-in bench or at least a ledge will be welcome, too.

•  Set aside some wall space for both 18-inch wide face towel bars and 24-inch bath towels. Ideally, the bath towels should be within arm’s length of the tub or shower, and the face towels should be right beside the lavatory sink.  If space is tight, either can be mounted on the inside of the bathroom door, or you can use towel rings instead.

•  Building codes require an exhaust fan only if the bathroom doesn’t have an openable window, but you should plan to include one regardless.  Insist on a top-quality, super-quiet model--not one of those howling bargain-basement jobs.  Better yet, consider a remote-mounted fan, which will be even quieter. 

•  If the bathroom feels cramped but there’s no way to physically enlarge it, try an optical illusion:  Use a large sheet mirror on the wall behind the lavatory, extending from corner to corner and from countertop to ceiling, to visually double the room’s volume.  Although it takes a little extra effort to incorporate a mirror this big, the result is far more dramatic than the usual scrap of mirror screwed to the wall.

•  Lastly, don’t forget storage for bulky items like toilet paper.  To this end, a vanity cabinet is more practical than a pedestal sink, though it may not necessarily suit the style of your house.  Here again, you might wish to trade fashion for function.

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.