ARCH-ITECTURE

If you’ve ever seen a picture of Stonehenge, the prehistoric monument near Salisbury, England, you’ll recognize the structural system known as post and lintel. It consists of two upright blocks--the posts--with another block--the lintel--spanning the gap between them. This was the earliest type of structure used to span open space.

The trouble was, the widest distance you could span with a post and lintel was limited to the size of the biggest stone lintel you could get your hands on--not to mention lift into place. Hence, even the grandest ancient buildings under roof--Egypt’s vast temple at Karnak, for instance--were little more than forests of stone columns with narrow passages left over in between. 

The invention that finally overcame this problem was the arch. It had humble enough beginnings. It was already known to the Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, and others, often in the form of a roof over underground drains. Yet the Romans were the first to really exploit its unique structural properties. They recognized that, unlike a lintel, an arch could span distances much greater than any single block in the structure.

Here’s why: A stone lintel carries a load by bending infinitesimally, which compresses the upper half and stretches the bottom half. Now, stone is strong under compression but fairly weak under tension, so the lintel has to be really deep relative to its span or it may crack.

An arch works differently. Because the wedge-like stones are arranged in a circular shape, placing a load on top squeezes the blocks against each other, compressing them but not putting them under tension. This takes much better advantage of the strength of the stone, and hence requires a lot less of it to do the job. 

Of course, an arch can’t just stand up by itself--something has to brace it on either side to keep it from spreading apart under load. Usually, a bit of solid wall serves this purpose. But you can also put a series of arches side by side to form a continuous arcade, letting one arch brace the next, as in the elevated Roman aquaduct known as the Pont du Gard near Nimes, France. 

Arches form the basis of even more useful structural systems, though. By stretching an arch into a tunnel shape you get a vault, an early means of roofing over space without needing intervening supports. By intersecting two vaults at right angles you get a groin vault, which the Romans used to roof their monumental Baths of Caracalla, among other things. And if you rotate an arch about its centerline, you get a dome--the basis of some of man’s greatest architectural works, from Rome’s Pantheon to Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia.

Ironically, since modern structures are now seldom built of masonry blocks, true arches are rarely used anymore except for dramatic effect or, occasionally, to support bridges, trestles, and the like. What’s most commonly used instead? Why, it’s our prehistoric pal, the post and lintel--though nowadays it’s made of wood, steel, or concrete.

PAST PERFECT

A contractor once told me an interesting story about a house he’d built for a man in Connecticut. Winter was already setting in when he’d gotten the place weather tight, so as soon as he finished the fireplace, he built a fire in it to keep the house warm. When the owner found out, he demanded that the contractor tear out the bricks inside the fireplace and replace them because they’d gotten sooty. He told the contractor that he was paying for a brand new fireplace, and he was damned well going to get one.

This brought me back to a paradox I’ve pondered from time to time. When some people build, they become obsessed with getting everything absolutely perfect. It’s not uncommon for owners to have brand new materials ripped out again because they’ve picked up a tiny scratch or a little ding somewhere along the line. This happens even with materials predestined to show age or wear from normal use--say, hardwood flooring, painted trim, or in the case of our unlucky contractor’s client, the inside of a fireplace. 

What’s odd about this obsession with newness and perfection is that the sort of buildings we seem to admire most--Europe’s storied old cottages, let’s say, or perhaps China’s ancient courtyard houses--are precisely the ones that are old and thoroughly beaten up, with a patina that bespeaks their many years of history. And “patina”, after all, is really just a nice word for the flaws that arise from age and use--if anything, it’s a sort of anti-perfection. And given that we covet the patina of age in old buildings, why do we place so much value on flawlessness in new ones?  

In architecture and construction, quality--soundness, durability, and fitness of purpose--is never negotiable. On the other hand, we’d lose very little in easing our compulsion for flawless surfaces. For one thing, time and Mother Nature never allow us the pretense of perfection for any length of time--something modernist architects have usually learned the hard way. Better to start with the assumption that our work will get a good thrashing over time, and design accordingly. 

One way to do this is to use materials that don’t demand a high degree of finish: Oiled wood, rough plaster, wrought iron, to name a few. Better yet are materials requiring no additional finish at all: Natural wood, stone, brick, textured concrete, clay tile, weathering steel, and tinted stucco, among others. Beside requiring negligible maintenance, all of these materials can absorb years of abuse, and in return just keep looking better and better. 

Take a look at much of today’s architecture, though, and instead of materials that improve with age, you’ll find mirror-polished surfaces, razor-sharp corners, and demanding and intricate finishes. Seeing these flawless designs in photographs, forever protected from the indignities of daily use, it’s no wonder so many of us have come to expect flawless results in our own projects. To this rarefied school of design, I suppose, a soot-blackened fireplace would indeed be seen as a thing that’s ruined and imperfect, instead of being testament to a human tale unfolding. 

HOW NOT TO GET TO YOUR FRONT DOOR

Here's a textbook example of how NOT to reach your home’s front entrance. A while back, I came across this otherwise rather charming house that was set back quite a distance uphill from the street. 

Alas, this is how you got to the front door: Assuming you even noticed the narrow flight of concrete steps hidden among the shrubs and didn’t clamber up the driveway instead--as most baffled visitors did--you were rewarded with an additional hike over uneven and badly-spaced stepping stones that drifted aimlessly up the hill. At the last minute, the route swerved to avoid a huge tree and then just barely squeezed you in at the foot of another narrow, L-shaped stair.leading up to the front porch. 

Climbing up to the first landing got you an excellent closeup view of the electric meter, the gas meter, and a tangle of assorted power and telephone lines, along with the corresponding paraphenalia belonging to the neighbor’s house. A final flight of steps to the left aimed you straight into a spiky, towering juniper bush, enroute to which you might just happen to notice the actual front door in a recess to your right.

So let’s look at each of these problems in turn:

• The beginning of your entrance approach should always be clearly discernible from the sidewalk. If it isn’t, call attention to it with a lamppost, a mailbox pylon, a gate or some other distinguishing feature. The approach should also be entirely separate from the driveway, so that people don’t have to pick their way around parked cars and oil stains to get to your front door.

• Outdoor stairs and steps need to be both broader and shallower than the ones used inside a house. Make them at least six feet wide, and even wider if appropriate. Stair risers should be no more than six inches high, and treads no less than eleven inches deep. Traditional porch steps can be a bit steeper, but in general, the easier the climb, the better.

• Your entrance path should follow a clear, rational course. If you’re after a formal approach, derive your layout from just a few basic geometric shapes. For a more naturalistic result, combine no more than one or two strong curves, and avoid feeble, tentative changes of direction--you cannot get a picturesque effect just by making your approach meander aimlessly. Avoid a layout that points people toward immovable objects like trees, bushes or blank walls--a path in nature invariably winds between obstacles, not directly toward them.  Above all, whether your approach is formal or informal, don’t make the layout too complicated, or it’ll lose its visual power. 

• Lead people past the best features of your front yard, not its worst ones. Consider potential vistas from various angles, ways to showcase favorite plants, opportunities for benches or other stopping points, and the possibility of water or arroyo features, however modest. Conversely, avoid routes that look onto gas and electric meters, garbage cans, garage doors, heat pumps, and other utilitarian features.

• Lastly, make sure the final leg of your entrance approach points people clearly toward the front door, and nowhere else. This is especially important if there are patio doors or other exterior doors nearby. There should never be any doubt about which door is the entrance.

UGLYTECH

In the days of laborious hand crafting, before the coming of the Industrial Revolution, ornament such as carving or engraving was a hallmark of extraordinary quality. Yet after the advent of mass production in the mid nineteenth century, automated machinery was able to replicate the most elaborate decoration at nominal cost, whether for a piece of furniture or a whole house. 

This literal cheapening of ornament set off a popular craze for mass produced items encrusted with decoration--not necessarily of high quality--and also began a trend of treating an object’s decoration as separate from its functional aspects. Hence, many late Victorian items, whether clocks, couches, or cast iron stoves, are positively wriggling with superfluous ornament, blithely gleaned from a jumble of periods and slathered on like so much wedding cake frosting. 

Likewise in architecture, the mania for mass-produced ornament yielded a series of increasingly ornate home styles, culminating in the frenetically decorated Queen Anne houses of the 1880s. Eventually, these bombastic designs overhwhelmed even the general public’s vast appetite for gewgaws, fomenting the backlash known as the Arts and Crafts Movement.

The instance of technology changing aesthetics isn’t confined to the Industrial Revolution, however. In fact, we’re in the midst of another such period today, and for many of the same reasons. Until a generation ago, objects with complex shapes--say, lots of intersecting compound curves--were relatively difficult and expensive to design, tool, and manufacture. 

Automobile bodies, to cite an extreme example, had to be hand modeled in clay at full scale and their measurements painstakingly transferred to permanent dies for mass production--one reason it used to take three years to bring a restyled car onto the market. Today practically all of this work is done on a computer; and the full-sized clay model, if it’s used at all, is more often created by a digitally-controlled milling machine than by human hands. 

The same digital methods used to design cars are used in practically all manufacturing industries today. And inevitably, the comparative ease of creating complex forms by computer affects the design of these products--just as the ease of churning out ornament during the Industrial Revolution encouraged its rampant use and eventual overuse. 

Alas, among today’s product designers, the unfettered power to create complexity seems to have brought on a corresponding fear of simple lines and clear-cut themes. Instead, objects ranging from copiers to computers to coffeemakers are loaded with gratuitous curves, bulges and distortions that contribute nothing but baffling visual chaos. On the other hand, ergonomics--design for ease of use--seems to be more neglected than ever, despite the vast computing power that could be brought to bear in its service. 

For these two reasons alone, the tortured Baroque shapes of today’s digitally-designed objects will probably mark another historic low point in aesthetics, just as the Victorian era’s overuse of its own technology eventually brought its products to the very pinnacle of aesthetic absurdity. Whether today’s supremely busy yet ergonomically bumbling designs will eventually rank with those of Victorian times, we’ll find out soon enough.

A WAKE UP CALL FROM CHINA Part Four of Four Parts

There’s one good thing about a nation developing late and developing fast: it can pretty much pick and choose from among all the best ways of doing things. This is exactly what China, with its vast cash reserves and virtually unlimited labor, is now doing.  As a result, it’s no longer just playing catch-up with the United States. In many ways, it’s playing leapfrog.

Technology in China’s developed areas--where most of its people live--has already long been on par with our own. Internet cafes flourish, and the most sophisticated computers and display systems are ubiquitous in banks, stores, and transportation facilities. These things shouldn’t surprise Americans, since most of our own high-tech goods come from China in the first place. What may surprise people is that some parts of China’s infrastructure have already begun to surpass ours.

For example, modern China’s communications network, developed just as our old hardwired telephone infrastructure was becoming obsolete, is almost entirely cellular. Here, everyone from the high-roller in his Benz to the farmer in his rice paddie carries a cell phone. Never has a nation so vast and populous been so well connected.

The bulk of China’s electrical distribution system was also built fairly late in the twentieth century. For starters, this gives it a definite aesthetic edge--the Chinese use tidy and permanent concrete stanchions to carry power lines instead of the dilapidated wooden poles and tangles of wire that make up much of our own power grid. 

But even this modern system is advancing. A number of Chinese cities now have plans afoot for complete undergrounding of all existing power distribution systems--a sweeping improvement which, owing to its cost and complexity, has long eluded municipal governments in the U.S. And since the Chinese are loathe to risk a loss of face by announcing plans they can’t fulfill, we can fully expect these undergrounding projects to be realized, and sooner rather than later.

Chinese traffic controls, mostly developed in the thirty years since the Opening, have already led American systems for years. For example, the digital countdown signals only now being adopted by some American cities were already commonplace during my first visit to China in 1994. 

Moreover, the newest traffic controls have entirely superseded the redundant clutter of red, yellow and green lamps found in the U.S. Instead, Suzhou’s signals use a compact and attractive stanchion with a single, bold LED arrow that changes color to indicate both traffic direction and status. If you can’t quite picture this, don’t worry--your town will probably be installing these systems in five or ten years, and no doubt they’ll be made in China.

These advances may seem trivial, but they’re emblematic of China’s spectacular rate of progress over the past thirty years. Now, having largely caught up with the West, the Chinese have both the desire for bigger plans, and the resources to fulfill them. 

Is all this bad news for America? It depends on your point of view. If we’re content to be slowly but surely surpassed by the nation we patronizingly call our “workshop”, then we can relax. If not, we’d better wake up and smell the tea.

SO THE CHINESE ARE ENVIRONMENTAL CRETINS? Part Three of Four Parts

When it comes to environmentalism, the Chinese are bad, bad people, right? Not exactly. Thanks to their government’s knack for disseminating ideas, the Chinese are acutely aware of their environmental troubles. Given their many other priorities, the surprise is that they’ve already started grappling with the problem.

The Chinese have had basic energy conservation practices in place for years. On my first visit to Shanghai in 1994, for example, I was surprised to see solar water heaters crowding the rooftops of practically every apartment block--something we don’t see in the United States even today. And things have only improved since then. Energy-saving fluorescent lamps are now the rule rather than the exception in China, not only in commercial and industrial buildings, but in residences as well. Even more efficient LED lighting is widely used in traffic signals, street lighting, and many other applications. 

While China’s streets are regrettably teeming with more cars than ever, they’re also increasingly well populated with innovative and affordable electric bicycles, scooters, and utility vehicles. Granted, since these are recharged by being plugged into the nation’s largely coal-generated electrical grid, their environmental friendliness remains arguable-- yet they’re nevertheless a more visible sign of innovation than we find on our own SUV-clogged streets. And while American automakers are only now fielding viable green transportation--thanks mainly to the incredible shortsightedness, stupidity and greed of upper management--their scrappy Chinese counterparts are almost certainly hard at work on the design of zero-emission vehicles that will someday ease China’s pollution troubles, and perhaps our own as well.

None of this is to excuse China’s deficiency in other areas of environmental policy. Its tolerance for industrial polluters, in particular, is a disgrace. Yet this is a calculated economic decision aimed--with spectacular success--at attracting foreign investment. Lax restrictions on polluters are in fact one major reason so many American corporations have moved factories to China. Yet this current lassitude will also come to an end when the Chinese government’s environmental priorities inevitably supersede those of economic growth. 

When will this happen? In the United States, gross industrial pollution continued utterly unhampered for a century. At China’s current rate of progress, and despite its posturing to the contrary, industrial polluters may well be brought up to Western standards within the next decade. 

What’s more, when the Chinese decide they’re ready to tackle their environmental problems full force, they’ll move quickly. Unlike us fiercely independent-minded Americans, the Chinese are far more amenable to sweeping change being imposed from the top down--a deep-seated cultural trait that stems, not from China’s trifling time under Communism, but rather from its nearly three and a half millennia under dynastic rule.

The result is that official pronouncements--whether they concern spitting on the sidewalk, smoking in restaurants, or wasting electricity--are acted upon with a sense of earnestness and devotion that’s quite impossible to imagine here in the United States. So when an exemplary environmental policy finally reaches the top of the agenda, those bad, bad Chinese may yet become Mother Earth’s best friend.

Next time: A wake up call for Americans.

WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT CHINA? Part Two of Four Parts

Americans are no doubt getting tired of hearing how well things are going for China. Having painted just such a rosy picture in my last report from Suzhou--my Chinese home away from home--I thought I’d dwell on a few of China’s biggest shortcomings, at least for this installment. 

At the moment, the People’s Republic is in the news for one of its characteristically blundering foreign policy moves--this time, the sudden expansion of its air defense zone over the entire East China Sea, which has set a whole slew of Pacific Rim nations on edge. But this sort of calculated high-level posturing, driven by the PRC leadership’s deep political insecurities, is a topic I’ll leave to political pundits. Instead, I’ll examine things of more immediate concern to Chinese citizens. 

Anyone arriving in a Chinese city will recognize a problem it shares with the United States--too many cars. But while the U.S. has hopefully reached a saturation point at around 1.2 cars for every licensed driver, car ownership in China is still in its infancy, with less than one in twenty-five Chinese owning a vehicle. Should the Chinese aspire to American levels of automotive lunacy--and there’s no reason to think they won’t--Mother Earth could potentially be hosting another billion or so pollution-spewing cars. Hopefully, before this cataclysm approaches, China will manage to leapfrog current internal-combustion technology (as it has leapfrogged America’s old hard-wired telephone infrastructure) by developing practical zero-emission vehicles.

This brings us to a Chinese problem that’s literally inescapable--its abysmal air quality. On a typical day in any developed part of the country, the sky is a monochrome grayish-white, with a peripheral haze that can often limit visibility to less than a mile. Because the sun is seldom evident as more than a diffuse patch of glare in the sky, daylight is virtually shadowless, making even China’s enchanting, emerald-green landscapes look flat and dreary. 

The Chinese are acutely aware of this problem, though they ascribe it, not to the rising tide of cars on their streets, nor even to their none-too-tidy heavy industries, but rather to their heavy dependence on dirty, coal-fired power plants. For the time being, however, they seem resigned to sacrificing their once-clear skies to rapid development--much as the United States was for the first half of the twentieth century.

Last, and perhaps most dispiriting, modern China remains a nation with an astonishing indifference to quality--a problem that’s hardly improved since I first came here in 1994.. In general, manufactured items, whether cheap or expensive, remain exasperatingly third-rate. And yes, this assessment includes many familiar American brands “manufactured in China to So-and-So’s strict quality standards”--a claim that’s basically balderdash. 

This disinterest in quality and durability extends clear up to the scale of China’s heroic new buildings. More often than not, the workmanship beneath those gleaming exteriors of marble and granite is breathtakingly shoddy. The effects of an acid-laden atmosphere don’t help matters any, leaving many buildings literally falling to pieces after a few short years. 

Since thirty-five years have now passed since China’s economic Opening, these shortcomings can no longer be explained away by the country’s years under strict Communism, by government corruption, or by its haste to catch up with the West. 

Rather, the problem persists because, with ready markets for slipshod products at hand, there’s simply no incentive to improve them. 

Yet as China is eventually forced to compete with other developing countries that can undercut its heavy market advantage, its current indifference to quality--insulting as it is to the nation’s brilliant past--will no doubt tarnish its brilliant future as well. 

Next time: Sorry, more good news about the People's Republic.