THE BIG BANG

Nothing grabs people’s attention or draws crazed male wolf calls quite like the sight of some old Las Vegas highrise being imploded. While Americans may never again view such events without eerie flashbacks to 9/11, bringing down a large building predictably, and above all safely, ironically remains a calling that demands both skill and finesse.

The few seconds it takes to carry out a graceful, seemingly slow-motion building implosion makes this kind of work look simple--even effortless. In fact though, it requires weeks and often months of planning and preparatory work.  The engineering involved can be nearly as complex as that used to design the building in the first place. 

First, highrise demoliton engineers or “blasters” study the original building plans and decide how to persuade the structure to fall how and where they want it to. Nonstructural portions are often removed by conventional methods so that they won’t impede the collapse, and columns or beams may be weakened so that they’ll fail in predictable locations--something like scoring cardboard to make it fold where you want it to.

Despite the well-known use of explosives in this profession, it’s gravity that really does the job. After all, the energy it took to hoist every single beam and brick into place is locked up in the structure, waiting for Mother Nature to reclaim it. The taller the building, moreover, the more stored energy it contains. Using explosives just gives gravity a little nudge and lets it go to work.

Often, the presence of nearby structures requires a building to be brought down in a certain direction, or even within the space of its own footprint. To accomplish this, blasters use a carefully choreographed sequence of explosions, each of them relatively small, to induce a predictable and orderly collapse. For example, in a typical highrise implosion, the bottom center support columns will be blasted first, followed a few seconds later by the columns further out, so that the sinking middle portion will pull the building walls inward after it. 

In a reinforced concrete building, the blasters may choose a grade of explosive that will pulverize the concrete but leave the reinforcing bars intact, so that the steel strands will help guide the building down in the right direction.

While there are countless outfits who demolish buildings, in the realm of highrise demolition, there’s only one superstar. Controlled Demolition, Inc., is a Maryland company run by the Loizeaux family, the Flying Wallendas of building implosion.  Through three generations, the Loizeauxs have demolished skyscrapers, stadiums, smokestacks, bridges, radio towers and just about every other kind of large structure imaginable. They’re even listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for the most buildings to be imploded at the same time--seventeen--handily beating their own previous Guiness record of twelve. 

It’s a tribute to the family's skill that the public almost nonchalantly expects buildings weighing many millions of pounds to obediently crumble into a tidy little pile at the push of a button.  Making it so isn’t quite as easy as it looks.

THEY DON’T BUILD 'EM LIKE THAT ANYMORE

I often hear people say of some old house, “Wow, they don’t build ‘em like this anymore.” To which I’m often tempted to add, “And it’s a good thing, too.” There’s a lot to be said for the aesthetic of older homes--I’ve said a good deal of it myself--but on the technical side, houses are far better built today than they were just thirty years ago, let alone sixty or a hundred years.  

For one, we know a lot more about protecting houses from all the bad things that can happen to them. Take fire safety: Older houses were built with wooden lath that made perfect kindling, single-wall furnace flues that could rust out and overheat, and damage- and overload-prone knob-and-tube wiring that could smolder and start fires. Modern houses are built with flame-resistent gypsum wallboard, double-wall flues, better protected wiring systems, and perhaps the most worthwhile life safety feature of all: smoke detectors.

New houses also hold up much better in earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes.  Prewar houses typically had little or no foundation reinforcement and were sheathed with horizontal boards that gave very little lateral strength. They also had rather casually connected floors, walls, and roofs. Today’s houses, on the other hand, have well reinforced foundations, enormously strong plywood shearwalls to resist wracking, and a host of inexpensive yet very effective metal connectors, the sum of which allows new homes to survive natural catastrophes that would probably destroy an older home.

But safety isn’t the only thing that’s improved. New houses are several times more energy efficient than those of just a generation ago, thanks to mandates for better floor, wall, ceiling and duct insulation, double-glazed windows, and more efficient furnaces and lighting.

They’re also more durable. Modern copper water pipes, for example, will easily last the life of the structure, which certainly can’t be said for the rust-prone galvanized steel pipe found in most older homes.  And the “engineered lumber” used in today’s houses--much of it made from mill waste that used to be thrown out or burned--is stronger pound for pound than the solid-sawn lumber used by builders of yore. Even modern glass is better: While the french doors in old houses contain plain glass that shatters into dagger-like shards, the tempered glass required in modern doors crumbles into harmless little granules when broken.

Given that today’s homes are technically superior to yesterday’s, why do developers try so hard to make their new houses look as if they were old? And why do so many people still prefer to live in an old house with all the infirmities noted above?  No doubt it has something to do with the peculiar human tendency to idealize bygone times. Or as the writer and humorist Finley Peter Dunne put it, “The past always looks better than it was; it’s only pleasant because it isn’t here.”

That can’t be the whole story, though. To my mind, when people say they don’t build houses like they used to, they’re not really talking about lumber, pipes, and wiring. They’re talking about the one elusive quality you can’t build into any new house, no matter what the price:  The inimitable dignity of a genuine past.

WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

American traffic laws tell us pedestrians have the right of way.  If you believe that, try walking across your city sometime.  The way we lay out our roads, our shopping centers, and even our houses makes it clear who’s really boss.  It’s good old Otto Mobile.

Given that the car is king--for the time being, anyway--it’s up to us lowly bipeds to demand at least a token of respect from our planners, most of whom are fixated on catering to motor vehicles, and who treat pedestrians as an incidental annoyance.  To that end, I offer a pedestrian’s Bill of Rights:

1.  When traffic laws say pedestrians have the right of way, that shouldn’t just mean that if you’re hit by a car, it’s not your fault.  People on foot shouldn’t have to fear, evade, negotiate, or maneuver around cars, whether moving or parked, just because planners routinely put the convenience of people inside vehicles far above that of people using their own two feet.

2.  No pedestrian should ever find that the only way to reach that store or office on foot is to cross a huge desert of asphalt, with moving cars threatening on all sides. Any parking area with more than two rows of stalls should be required to have a pedestrian walkway running down the strip where cars usually face off nose-to-nose.  If these walkways reduce the space available for parking cars, well, boo-hoo--cars already take up twenty times as much space a person does.  Enough is enough.

3. No pedestrian should ever be expected to cross more than four lanes of traffic, whether or not there are crossing signals present.  The vast six and even eight-lane-wide boulevards that are being imposed on more and more of our suburbs tear neighborhoods apart and form virtual Grand Canyons to people on foot. 

Once and for all, planners should shake the wrongheaded belief that the way to fix traffic congestion is to make roads wider. This is like telling a four hundred pound man with a heart condition that what he really needs is some bigger pants. The wider we make our roads, the more traffic will arrive to fill them up, and the more impassable our cities will become to people on foot. 

4. In dense urban areas, pedestrians should be free to shop, stroll, or sight see without constant threat of assault by cars, buses, or taxis.  Hence, planners should provide centralized public parking at the fringe of city cores, offer a shuttle service, and make downtown blocks pedestrian-only zones. Sedentary car jockeys would only benefit from having to walk a few steps to get where they’re going, and the rest of us would be blessed with a quieter, greener, and less polluted city.

5. Lastly, American planners should recognize that, in relative terms, cars are a mere fleeting speck of technology on planet Earth, like the chariot, the man-of-war, and the steam locomotive.  We bipeds, on the other hand, are hopefully here for the long run. It’s just plain dumb to continue building an entire nation around a machine that’ll likely be obsolete in fifty years--especially considering that, no matter what takes its place, we’ll always want get around on our own two feet.

LAST OF THE DINOSAURS

The U.S. Department of Transportation tells us that, according to its latest figures, there are some 254 million passenger vehicles registered in the United States.  That’s pretty close to one car for every man, woman, and child in the nation. In fact, it’s some 58 million more cars than there are licensed drivers to drive them.

Thanks to such mind-numbing figures, historians will someday regard the twentieth century--though hopefully not much of the twenty-first--as an absurdly auto-infatuated era. After all, ours is a time in which cars are at the very core of American identity. They’re central to our coming of age and integral to our self-image and social status-- not to mention being all but mandatory to get around in the asphalt-paved, commute-saddled world we’ve created for ourselves.  

Still, future historians may have quite a bit of trouble understanding the supposed romance of a machine whose thirst for petroleum led us to befoul our own skies and oceans, and made us tailor our foreign policy in large part to keeping our gas tanks cheaply filled.  They’ll be even more mystified at how we Americans could panic over the supposed health risks of asbestos, electromagnetic fields, and radon gas, while over forty thousand of us died every year in the comfort and perceived safety of our own automobiles.

We shake our heads at our ancestors, who fought long, brutal wars over water, salt, or patches of worthless land.  But once oil-powered vehicles join the paddle wheeler and the steam locomotive as stone-dead technology--a moment that’s coming much sooner than we might think--future generations, too, will shake their heads over our own century-long addiction to automobiles, oil, and the troubles that went with them.

The fact that cars have also taken over our built environment may be a less immediate threat, but it’s equally dismaying.  Among city planners, not to speak of traffic engineers, the logistics of accommodating motor vehicles long ago took precedence over the needs of mere humans on foot.  And since a car takes up about twenty times more space than a person does, making room for those two hundred million-plus motor vehicles has led us to pave over some forty percent of our cities (in Los Angeles, this figure is said to be closer to sixty percent).  Inside our own homes, about one-fifth of our hard-earned living space is given over to keeping our four-wheeled friends warm and dry.  A century ago, not even 

Henry Ford could have dreamed that our automobile obsession would lead us to this state of affairs. 

So there you have it:  Another tract decrying those awful automobiles, written by a tree-hugging car hater, right?  Not quite. I’ve been a hardcore gearhead my whole life. I own four cars, three of them being what car nuts rather amusingly call “classics.” I’d stay up all night talking about spread-bore carbs and roller cams if I got half a chance.  But even this degree of motor mania can’t overcome an obvious fact: We’ll all be better off when petroleum-powered cars have putt-putted off into history.  

MONEY FOR NOTHING

The other day, as my car juddered over constellations of potholes, past tenuously-maintained schools and bus stops done up in graffiti, I got to wondering. The Califonia county where I live has some of the highest taxes in the nation. The sales tax is 9.75 percent. It costs four dollars to cross the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge. Yearly property taxes can easily reach five figures--and no, I’m not including the cents column.

Yet in return for the oceans of money our state government takes in, Californians have roads rated among the very worst in America, libraries that close for part of the week due to lack of funding, and a public school system that one respected research group has ranked 47th among the fifty states.  

Where, I wondered, was all this tax money going?  As my car dived to a stop at yet another ill-timed red light with no cross traffic in sight for miles, the answer came to me from above.  

Traffic signals. 

Apparently there’s never a shortage of funds to pay for huge, complex, and usually unnecessary arrays of traffic signals. They sprout like weeds along roadways large and small, now and then actually making an intersection safer, but more often just obstructing traffic by reflexively “regulating” some half-abandoned side street that would be just as well off--possibly better off--with a plain old stop sign.  

Apparently, an intersection unfettered by signals is a terrifying prospect to traffic engineers, and not just in California. So, after erecting jungles of signal poles on every streetcorner of every jerkwater town in America, they’ve gleefully moved on to the suburbs, slavering at all those miles of roadway waiting to be put in harness.  

Today it’s a rare suburban boulevard that hasn’t got a huge tangle of signals arching over it every few hundred feet, with redundent stacks of lamps individually addressing each and every lane and then some. Either we motorists are so dense that it takes five red lights to tell us what one used to, or else traffic engineers just can’t get enough of all that neat hardware.   

Yet despite their numbing ubiquity, far too many traffic signals remain utterly brainless, mindlessly regulating traffic flow by time instead of by context.  In this age of computing miracles, vast numbers of signals aren’t even smart enough to know that nobody’s coming.

We’ve all been in thrall to this third-rate technology for so long that we’ve come to accept its hurky-jerky senselessness as a normal part of driving.  Yet there’s no immutable law that demands traffic signals on every streetcorner in America, much less signals that can’t think straight. It’s happened in large part because many cities and towns have come to regard elaborate signal installations as a sort of badge of urbanity, rather than as a useful tool that can be senselessly overemployed.  And it surely hasn’t hurt that the civic addiction to signals offers traffic engineers virtually infinite job security.

Given this kind of bureaucratic inertia, it seems inevitable that every pair of intersecting ruts in America will eventurally be fitted with a full complement of traffic and pedestrian signals. Then, at last, you can be idling at a red light in some Iowa cornfield, while nobody’s coming the other way. 

THE FASHION-GO-ROUND

Which do you prefer, shiny finishes or matte ones?  New-looking finishes, or old? Granite, glass, and chrome, or brick, wood, and iron?  

All of these have gone in and out of fashion over the years. We tend to think that any finish that’s popular in our own time is the ultimate word in good taste, but we couldn't be more wrong.  No matter how execrable an outdated finish may seem today, you can be sure that it, too, was the height of good taste in its own time, and that sooner or later it’ll be chic all over again.  So, you haters of Harvest Gold appliances--beware.

The popularity of some finishes--paint colors, for example--simply depends on the cyclical comings and goings of fashion.  Color fads are largely created by the industries involved, although clever marketing makes it seem like consumers are driving the demand.  And since the prior color fad must be portrayed as unappealingly dated before the “new” colors can perk up sales again, successive color trends are intentionally extreme, running from pastels to primaries to whites to deep saturated tones, the better to differentiate what’s hip from what’s hopelessly passé.   

New technologies bring other types of finishes to the fore. In the mid-19th century, for instance, raw brass, which tarnished to a clove-brown color if it wasn’t kept polished, was the usual material for hardware and plumbing fittings. In the late 1880s, though, the introduction of nickel-plated fittings quickly made tarnished brass obsolete. Despite nickel’s propensity to wear through to the metal underneath, it remained popular until the arrival of more durable chromium-plated finishes around 1930.  

Chrome has had an exceptionally long popular run because of its ease of maintenance.  Still, when earth-toned colors were being pushed during the 1970s, brass came back for an encore.  This time, though, a clear lacquer coating was used in an attempt to keep it permanently shiny.  Eventually, in their never-ending pursuit for fresh offerings, manufacturers also came up with artificially patinated finishes--brushed brass, antique brass, and the like--that tried to mimic the warmth of natural patination.  

This brings up another force behind popular finish trends that can influence both marketers and consumers alike--that of historical circumstance. After World War I, for example, American soldiers returned from the front charmed by rural Europe’s timeworn vernacular architecture, and by the early 1920s intentionally rustic or distressed finishes such as hammered iron, mottled stucco, and adze-marked wood were showing up in new houses.  During the late Twenties, though, another historic event--the 1925 Paris exposition that give the world Art Deco--helped drive a complete reversal of this trend.  By the early 1930s, smooth, highly polished surfaces such as glass, tile, and Monel metal had made rustic and patinated finishes look laughably outdated.  

And so it goes--one finish vogue arriving, another departing.  Yet no matter how unfashionable a finish may seem to our marketing-biased senses, rest assured it never permanently leaves the scene:  One of today’s more popular finishes, oil-rubbed bronze, is neither plated nor lacquered, and therefore oxidizes to a clove-brown color and develops wear highlights very much like the old unlacquered brass of Victorian times. In other words, after a century and a half, some things are pretty much back where they started.

WELCOME TO NOWHERE

Traveling the United States has, among other things, gently tutored me that the residents of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania pronounce their town’s name WILKS-bree, not Wilks-BAR; that the good citizens of Vermont call their capital MontPEELyer, not MontepeLEER, and that that lovely town in southern California is called LaHOYA even though it’s spelled La Jolla. These are nuggets of everyday wisdom that book learning can seldom impart, but that being on the spot can teach one in a hurry.

Alas, traveling the U.S. also reveals a dismaying transformation that’s more obvious year by year:  What was once a nation of kaleidoscopic architectural variety is slowly being turned into a homogeneous landscape stretching from coast to coast--one in which freeways and boulevards, suburbs and downtowns all look more or less like their counterparts everywhere else.

As a nation founded on individualism, it’s a sad trend, especially since it’s being furthered by a number of forces we usually think of as positive.

One is our ever-increasing speed of travel and communication.  Among the earliest such milestones was rail travel, whose speed and convenience profoundly shrank the nation during the latter half of the nineteenth century, linking city, farm, and suburb.  Our familiar standard time zones--an attempt to rationalize train schedules nationwide--are one enduring legacy of this period, 

A generation later, the rise of the automobile set off even more dramatic changes, culminating in the construction of the interstate highway system after World War II.  And as American cities were brought closer, regional distinctions became more blurred.  The interstates also hastened the rise of standardized architecture, beginning with off-the-shelf designs of gasoline stations, hamburger joints, and motels.  Suburban shopping centers were next, anchored first by large chain department stores and later by the ubiquitous big-box outlets. 

Now the last bastions of regional distinction, the downtown cores, are succumbing to the same brand of monotony.  In city after city, shopping streets are lined almost exclusively with the usual suspects--the Gaps, Barnes & Nobles, Banana Republics, and the other overfamiliar retail chains--bringing on a rather queasy sense of deja vu. Is this Portland, Oregon or Portland, Maine?  

Civic design review boards, who fancy themselves the guardians of the built environment, have only helped increase urban banality by promoting the idea that there are “right” and “wrong” styles of architecture for such settings. At the moment, traditionalism is the reflexively “right” style, and those eerily similar shopping streets with their happy applique storefronts are as much a product of modern planning ideals as they are of chain-store commercialism.   

Lastly, for all its positive effects in networking America, the very universality of the Internet is ironically helping dissolve what few traces of regional idiosyncrasy remain.  What a loss it will be if the brilliantly uneven patchwork quilt that is America is allowed to fade into a monotone devoid of the offbeat or the unexpected--a  nation whose cities have been Wal-Marted, Old Navied and Starbucked, networked and new-urbanized into lookalike places, set apart by little more than signposts reading “Welcome to Wilkes-Barre”, or Montpelier, or La Jolla, or your town.