PICTURE PERFECT

In nineteenth century America, the only way an architect could view historic architecture was to go see it firsthand (usually on another continent), or else find engravings of it in books. Since architects of the era were much less likely to travel than their modern counterparts, engravings ended up being their usual reference. Mind you, the engraver unavoidably put his or her own spin on the thing they were illustrating, and this subjectivity, along with a frequent ignorance of historic context, made it hard for architects to get a real grasp of historic styles--one reason for the almost cartoonish nature of so much Victorian architecture.

Often-fanciful engraved illustrations, such as this scene of a procession
making its way to the great Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, were once
the only way architects could view historic architecture from afar.

All this changed in the 1890s with the introduction of the halftone process, which used thousands of tiny, variously sized dots to reproduce the full tonal range of actual photographs. For the first time, photos could be faithfully reproduced in mass publications such as magazines and newspapers, without the subjective distortions of the engraver. 

The National Geographic was among the first magazines to replace line engravings with halftone photographs, but architectural journals were also fairly quick to make use of the new process, As early as 1898, The American Architect and Building News published a popular series on Colonial architecture. After World War I, when many mainstream architects and builders became smitten with Europe’s vernacular architecture, photo features of historic architecture began going further afield. 

By the 1920s, architects were routinely referring to trade journals packed with photographs of European vernacular buildings, whether English, Spanish, or French. In 1926, Architecture magazine began a regular series of portfolios featuring authentic renditions of traditional European vernacular details such as iron railing, garden pools, and window grilles. Spurred by such information, architects explored increasingly exotic styles, whether Moorish, Indian, or North African.

The Depression and the advent of World War II put an end to America’s fascination with European and exotic architecture, and for the next half a century, trade journals instead published equally influential photo spreads on what they presumed to be the future of architecture: Modernism.

Ironically, while traditional detailing is once again all the rage, modern renditions of historic styles--or for that matter, copies of 1920s revival styles which were themselves copies--seem both less erudite and less charming than the originals. Decorative features such as columns, arches, and moldings are misused, overused, or carelessly thrown together in ways old-time prectitioners would have found laughable. This problem is merely troubling in modest tract houses, but epidemic in expensive custom homes, whose larded-on detailing is at once overblown, graceless and and clumsily proportioned--much closer to Victorian-era pastiche than to the refined revival styles of the 1920s and 30s.

Despite the blizzard of informaton to be had on the Internet, we architects seem to have a much lazier grasp of traditional design than did our predecessors. Today’s brand of pastiche strains to evoke the easy charm of tradition, but more often the result is plain old bedlam. It’s a far cry from our colleagues of the 1920s, who composed their “informal” designs with utmost care, and who always kept an eye on their faithful photographs.

LOOKING INTO WINDOWS

Can’t tell a double hung from a double hernia? Then here in a nutshell are the most common window types, along with the architectural styles they’re usually associated with:

CASEMENT windows are hinged at the side and open like a door, usually toward the outside. In addition to being the oldest type of operable (openable) window, they’re also probably the simplest, most practical, and most adaptable. Casements are available in wood, clad wood, plastic, aluminum, and more rarely, in steel or bronze. They can be paired with one or both sash (the part that moves) operable, with or without a center mullion (the divider between individual window units). Casements can also be ganged together into long bands, as in Frank Lloyd Wright’s prairie houses. With appropriate muntins (what the window manufacturers refer to as “divided lites”), they’re suited to just about any architectural style, whether traditional or modern.

DOUBLE HUNG windows are another old-time standby. They have a pair of sash that slide vertically past each other, counterbalanced by cast iron weights in older examples and by springs in modern ones. Double hungs are widely available in wood, clad wood, and plastic. Shortcomings include balky operation when they get older and the inability to open more than half the window at a time. Many modern double hungs have a tilt sash feature that makes cleaning much easier than formerly. In some examples, known as single hungs, only the lower half opens. 

Double hungs are mainly associated with American home styles such as Colonials, Victorians, bungalows, and early ranchers. They’re generally not suited to modernist designs or to European-derived revival styles such as Spanish, English, or Normandy.

HORIZONTAL SLIDERS have a pair of sash that slide horizontally past each other. They’re available in wood, clad wood, plastic, and aluminum. Sliders became very popular after World War II, when architectural styles such as the California rancher favored long, low horizontal proportions. Unlike double hungs, sliders don’t have to fight gravity, so they don’t require counterweights, but they have the same limitation of never being more than half openable.

AWNINGS have a sash hinged at the top that opens out, while HOPPERS have a sash hinged at the bottom that opens in. They’re often combined or “mulled” with a larger fixed window. They’re available in wood, clad wood, plastic, and aluminum. Both are mainly found in modernist designs, and will look out of place in most traditional architecture. 

FIXED windows don’t open at all, and therefore can be had in just about any shape and any of the usual materials. 

In general, clad wood windows are the most expensive, followed by wood, aluminum, and vinyl. And lastly, some caveats: Avoid using casements or awnings along exterior walkways or in other locations where people outside (especially frolicking kids) may run into them when they’re open. Remember that bedrooms have to have at least one emergency egress window with a sill is no higher than 44” from the floor, and which will allow a 21” diameter sphere to pass through it when open. Use special window shapes such as round tops, circles, or octagons in moderation, and don’t forget that it can be tough to find window coverings that will match their shape.

WHICH IS WHICH?

Homeowners these days are amazingly facile with architectural jargon, thanks no doubt to the gaggle of home-improvement shows on TV these days, not to speak of the wealth of information on the Internet. But while lots of folks now know their antae from their astragals, as it were, a few stubborn terms are still routinely confused--sometimes even among architects. Here are the usual suspects:

Cement/concrete: Cement only refers to the powder that hardens when you add water. If you add sand and aggregate to the mixture, though, you get concrete. So strictly speaking, a cement mixer should be called a concrete mixer. 

Sash/window: The part of a window that moves is called the sash. The whole shebang--sash, jambs, sill and everything else--is called a window.

Mullion/muntin: A mullions is a heavy vertical or horizontal member between adjoining window units. Muntins are the narrow strips of wood that divide the individual panes of glass in traditional sash. In the case of so-called “simulated divided lites”, grilles resembling muntins are either sandwiched between double glass panes or else installed over the outer surface of the glass to give a divided look.

Trim/casing: On the outside of a house, the decorative frame around a door or window is called trim, while on the inside, the same thing is called casing. Go figure.

Sliding door/pocket door/bypassing door: The term sliding door refers only to the sliding glass variety that usually leads outside. Those interior doors that disappear into a slot in the wall, on the other hand, are properly called pocket doors.  To make things more confusing, the type of paired closet doors that slide past each other aren’t called sliding doors either--they’re called bypassing doors.

Girder/header/beam. In wood frame construction, a heavy horizontal member is called a girder if it’s below floor level, a header if it’s over a door or window, and a beam if it’s pretty much anywhere else.

Wall/partition: Structurally speaking, a wall is always bearing, while a partition is always nonbearing. In most houses, the exterior walls and at least one wall running down the middle of the house are bearing, while all the other walls--er, partitions--are nonbearing. Since these two varieties aren’t always easy to tell apart, it’s prudent to call in an architect or engineer before you go tearing out either one.

Shingle/shake: Wood shingles are sawn by machine and are relatively thin. Wood shakes are larger and thicker than shingles, and are split from a solid block of wood rather than sawn.

Flue/vent: Both of these things stick out of your roof, but a flue exhausts combustion gas from a fireplace, water heater or furnace--anything with a flame--while a vent leads those nasty gases in your plumbing system to the atmosphere. 

Banister/Baluster. Banister refers to the entire railing on a staircase. Balusters are the individual uprights in any railing, whether on a stair, a balcony, or whatever. So it’s fine to slide down the banister, but you probably wouldn’t want to slide down the balusters.

BIOFUEL BALONEY

We Americans have happily given our cars the run of the country, paving over a good forty percent of our cities so they can roam unfettered, and generously ceding a big chunk of our hard-earned homes to keep them warm and dry. But apparently that’s not enough. Now some interests are suggesting that, in order to keep our four-wheeled friends tanked up at all costs, we share our food supply with them as well.

Imagine creating fuel from plants instead of having to drill for it! We can guzzle all the biofuels we can grow! No more oil wars! No more Third World countries trying to push us around! 

Alas, as appealing as all this may sound, it’s a pipe dream. Among the many pitfalls of the biofuels concept:

Economics. Farmers across the globe, whether corporate or independent, will switch to growing plants for biofuel the instant it becomes more profitable than growing food crops. The current price of gasoline will give you a good idea how many seconds this decision might take. Result: Besides ceding even more of our environment to automobiles, we’ll also be competing directly with them for food. 

Logistics. To replace even a small fraction of current fossil fuel consumption, vast portions of arable land would have to be dedicated to growing biofuels crops. It’s been calculated that satisfying ten percent of the European Union’s total fuel demand with biofuels would require an agricultural area the size of Spain.

Science. U.S .and E.U. leaders alike are jumping on the biofuels bandwagon as a panacea for petroleum woes. Case in point: An E.U. directive instituted in 2003 required that 5.75% petrol and diesel should come from renewable sources by 2010--a quota the E.U. plans to increase to 10% by 2020. Yet the European Environment Agency’s Scientific Committee--the E.U.’s own advisory panel on biofuels--has concluded that this move will not curb the production of greenhouse gases, and in fact may actually increase them. 

“I see absolutely no reason to use a lot of energy, money and large swaths of farmland (to produce biofuels),” concluded Professor Helmut Haberl, a member of the E.U. panel. “The E.U. should scrap the 10 percent mixture rules."

In the United States, a recent study led by Timothy Searchinger, an agricultural expert at Princeton University, concluded: 

“By using a worldwide agricultural model to estimate emissions from land-use change, we found that corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.” 

While the scientific news is bad enough, the worst thing about the political push for biofuels is that it only mires us deeper in a broken system, pandering to America’s energy addiction and perpetuating a culture and an economy in thrall to the internal-combustion engine.

We’d all like a world with adequate energy, a clean environment, and fewer conflicts. If biofuels can’t help deliver it, what can? In the short run, at least, that answer truly IS easy: Conservation. American technology, not to speak of American resolve, could easily reduce petroleum consumption by ten percent given the moral leadership to do so. The fault is not in our fuels, but in ourselves.

WHEN SIZE DOES MATTER

How many structures have qualified as the tallest thing ever built? Surprisingly, it’s a pretty small club. 

We don’t know much about structures of the distant past, of course. But we do know that if you’d been hanging around Giza in 2570 BC or so, you’d have found the spanking-new Great Pyramid soaring some 481 feet into the sky--high enough to hold the title of tallest manmade structure for nearly four thousand more years. 

The Great Pyramid was finally overtopped around 1300 by England’s Lincoln Cathedral, whose spire was said to stand 525 feet tall.  Alas, this record-breaker was wrecked by a gstorm in 1549, ceding the honor to St. Olaf’s Church in Tallinn, Estonia--whose spire was barely three feet shorter--until this too burned down after a lightning strike in 1625.

Thereafter, the title to seesawed between a series of German and French churches--first St. Mary’s in Stralsund, Germany (495 feet tall, but guess what?--another lightning casualty in 1647); then back to France’s Strasbourg Cathedral (1647, with a 469-foot spire). It took the Germans over two hundred years to reclaim dominance with the spire of St. Nikolai at Hamburg (1874, 483 feet), only to have the French embarrass them again two years later when the cathedral of Notre Dame de Rouen topped out at 495 feet.

The Germans ultimately won the spire wars in 1880 with the stupendous 515-foot tall northern spire of Cologne Cathedral, but this also turned out to be the last hurrah for Christianity’s long monopoly on erecting super-tall buildings. Instead, a secular structure--and one in the New World at that--claimed the title of World’s Tallest Structure for the first time. After being long delayed by a shortage of funds and then by the Civil War, the Washington Monument finally reached its full height of 555 feet in 1884 after 36 years under construction.

Yet this triumph was short-lived. Five years later, France once again reclaimed ownership of the World’s Tallest Structure, this time delivering a walloping knockout punch with its 986-foot Eiffel Tower. So complete was the Eiffel’s domination of the height race that it managed to retain its title right through the flurry of skyscraper building that took hold of America after 1900. Only in 1930 was it finally bested by New York’s 1,046-foot Chrysler Building.

The latter, ironically, had perhaps the most fleeting reign of all. It was unseated the following year by its downtown neighbor, the Empire State Building (1,250 feet), which retained the title for the next 36 years.

Although we usually think of skyscrapers when we consider super-tall structures, any freestanding structure qualifies, and thus the next two world height records were set by communications towers--first Russia’s Ostankino tower (1967, 1,772 feet) and then 

Toronto’s CN Tower (1975, 1,815 feet). The latter owned the trophy for the rest of the twentieth century. 

In 2000, however, Canada’s pride was quietly surpassed by a building still under construction in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Designed by architect Adrian Smith, the 163-story Burj Khalifa (known as Burj Dubai prior to its opening in 2010) sets the modern record at 2,722 feet, or just over a half-mile high. It's far and away the world’s tallest freestanding structure--for the time being, anyway.

PLASTIC, BY ANY OTHER NAME

The other day I came across a plastic house. Not the futuristic World’s Fair variety--this was just an ordinary old house that had been “improved” with a brace of glaring-white vinyl windows, lots of wavy vinyl siding, and some flimsy looking vinyl gutters and downspouts. As icing on the petrochemical cake, it was ringed by a white vinyl picket fence. If there were any termites left in the place, they must have been pretty hungry.

Vinyl is, of course, the plastics industry’s more euphonious name for polyvinyl chloride, or PVC . It’s the world’s second-largest commodity plastic, second only to polyethylene. About 35 million tons of the stuff are cranked out in a typical year, but with the housing market in rebound, production is now predicted to reach 49 million tons by 2017. 

You may be surprised to learn that the building industry is the world’s biggest consumer of PVC. According to an industry website, <pvc.org>, about 23% of PVC production is used for pipes and fittings alone. Another 27 % goes to extruded profiles such as those used in vinyl window frames, gutters, and the like, and 10% or so to other building applications such as coatings and vinyl flooring (the latter, not to be confused with more eco-friendly linoleum, shows up in two out of three American kitchens).

Like many other environmentally troubling manmade materials, PVC starts out innocuously enough: its raw ingredients are salt and petroleum. Salt water is electrolyzed to produce chlorine, which is then combined with ethylene obtained from oil to produce ethylene dichloride. This compound is processed at high temperature to create a vinyl chloride monomer--still with me?--which is finally polymerized to form a polyvinyl chloride resin. Various additives make the resin suitable for different uses and protect it from its archenemy, ultraviolet light. 

The final result is a material that’s cheap and easily processed, which is one reason millions of tons of PVC are gobbled up each year in the form of vinyl windows, siding, gutters, flooring, and other economy-grade building products. Alas, when these not-very-substantial products end up in the landfill--which they usually do much sooner than the traditional materials they aim to displace--there’s trouble. A number of environmental authorities consider PVC to be the most toxic plastic in the environment. Bury it in a landfill, and it just sits there. Burn it, and it produces dioxin, a toxic chemical compound that’s a known teratogen, mutagen, and carcinogen.

PVC has proven its usefulness in many applications. On the other hand, it’s also wended its way into markets for which it simply isn’t suited. PVC gutters, for example, are neither durable nor attractive--in fact, other than their cheap first cost, they have no advantage whatever over more traditional gutter materials such as sheet metal, wood, aluminum or copper. The same goes for PVC fencing and the host of other nominally architectural PVC products on the market. Even in the vastly successful arena of vinyl windows, long term durability remains an unknown, manufacturer’s claims notwithstanding.

Every miracle material conjured up by man has downsides, and PVC is no exception. Since for practically every newfangled architectural use of PVC there are more eco-friendly traditional materials at hand, it’s worth thinking twice before choosing “vinyl” for your home. By any other name, it’s still 35 million tons of PVC.

RUINOVATION

The word “renovation” implies they you’re replacing something old and worn out with something new and better. Yet too many so-called renovators simply replace things that are old and substantial with new ones that are cheap and flimsy. That’s not renovation--it’s more like ruinovation. 

If every modern building product were better than its counterpart of fifty years ago, meaningful renovation would be easy. But they’re not, and so it isn’t. While some things really have improved--modern heating systems, for example, are vastly superior to those of years past--the sad fact is that many building products are mere wisps of their former selves. 

The euphemistic “economic pressures” that corporate types like to talk about--put plainly, “greed for fatter profit margins”--are the real culprit behind the declining quality of so many building items. The practice of outsourcing to cheap labor overseas means many name-brand products are now manufactured in places with indifferent or nonexistent quality control, regardless of what manufacturers claim to the contrary. The fact that many venerable American brands are now haphazardly manufactured in Third World countries may do wonders for corporate profits, but it won’t do wonders for your home. You’ll merely be replacing things that have lasted twenty-five, fifty, or even a hundred years with new ones that’ll break in four or five.

Therefore, before you replace any item in your home in the interest of sweeping renovation, ask yourself two questions. First: Does it still serve its purpose well?  If so, it shouldn’t be high on your renovation agenda--certainly not for reasons of fashion alone. 

Second: If it no longer serves its purpose, can it be fixed? Here’s where many stalwart Americans seem to have lost their Yankee grit. We’ve slowly come to believe the fallacy that throwing things away and replacing them with new ones is easier and cheaper than fixing them. In the case of many items in a house, however, this is just plain bull.

Windows, for instance, are a frequent candidate for ruinovation, due mainly to cunning marketing by window replacement companies. Many people are talked into replacing their windows to save on utility bills, but the truth is that, in an average house, heat loss through windows makes up a relatively modest fraction of total energy use. Therefore, upgrading your home’s attic insulation or even replacing your furnace would probably be a much more cost effective way to conserve. 

Moreover, no matter what the problem with a home’s original windows might be, chances are it would take less money, effort, and resources to have them repaired by a local window shop than it would to replace them wholesale with new ones. The fact that this approach also best maintains a home’s original style is just icing on the cake.

But whether we’re talking about windows, doors, flooring, hardware, or plumbing fixtures, there’s little to be gained by replacing sound original items en masse just to experience the briefest thrill of newness. On the other hand, there’s much to be lost: As often as not, you’re actually be downgrading the quality of your home, and spending good money to do it.