FABULOUS FAKES

If you think fake finishes only go back to Z-brick and Formica, think again.  Architectural fakery has been around as long as architecture itself.  When the Egyptians began building with stone instead of plant stalks, they nevertheless carved their walls to look like reed matting and shaped their columns to mimic bundled papyrus.  Likewise, many of the details found on classical Greek temples are traditional wooden details merely copied in stone. And even after those fun-loving Romans started making walls out of concrete, they contrived to embed special slabs of fired clay in them so they’d look more like the brick walls they were used to.  

While these ancient cultures usually imitated older materials for the sake of tradition, economics soon became a more compelling force.  Craftsmen of the Middle Ages were already using plaster as a cheap stand-in for carved stone, and gossamer-thin gilding to masquerade as gold.  In the mid-eighteenth century, the Italians invented an imitation marble consisting of gypsum mixed with glue that was good enough to earn its own name--scagliola, or “little chip”.  

The Victorians were even bigger fans of fakery.  Many Victorian “marble” mantelpieces, for example, aren’t even scagliola, but merely cleverly-painted wood.  Another favorite fake of the period was Lincrusta, an embossed linoleum-like wall covering that was originally varnished in brown tones to resemble tooled leather.  Likewise, stamped metal ceilings--that ornate staple of Victorian store interiors--were simply a cheaper, faster, and lighter substitute for cast plaster.

The revivalist architecture of the 1920s used a whole host of cheaper stand-ins for the opulent originals.  Among these was cast stone, a fine cement that was cast in molds, which could imitate carved stone detail with stunning fidelity.  When more deeply modeled forms were required, architects turned to terra cotta, which could be glazed and fired to produce a spot-on imitation of granite and other stone finishes.  Building interiors of the 1920s also made spectacular use of painting techniques like graining and stencilling to mimic expensive woods and inlaid detail.  Even the humble bungalow homes of the era used graining to make cheap cabinets look like fine hardwood.

After World War II, architectural fakery relied more on advanced technology than artistry.  Various newfangled exterior finishes, from asbestos-cement shingles to aluminum, vinyl, and pressboard siding, sought to displace solid wood--though only with middling success.  Inside postwar homes, a new technique of laminating plastic sheets with photographic reproductions of wood or marble (as well as a number of weird patterns not found in nature) gave us materials like Formica and Micarta.  Later on came Corian and its successors, all of which sought to give a more convincing imitation of marble and other types of stone.

Among today’s most popular fakes are flooring materials such as Pergo (a variation on plastic laminates), as well as yet another generation of granite and marble imitations such as Silastone.  And of course, vinyl windows, with their hokey two-dimensional muntins, do their darndest to look like the pricey wooden kind.  

Ironically, some of the materials once used as cheap substitutes are now themselves being flattered by imitation:  For instance, various plastics are now commonly used to mimic cast stone or cast plaster details.  And no doubt it’s just a matter of time before we start seeing imitations of “genuine” plastic ornament. 

POSITIVE, NEGATIVE

Positive space, negative space. They sound like some kind of flaky New Age terms. But actually, they’re one of the oldest and most basic concepts in design. Nothing could be more deeply-rooted in the human psyche--yet both amateurs and architects routinely ignore their implications.

Simply put, positive space represents space that we want, while negative space is what’s left over. To draw a simple analogy, imagine cutting out cookies from dough. The cookies represent the positive space, and the pointy scraps left over are the negative space. In architecture as in baking, the idea is to maximize the number of cookies and minimize the leftover scraps.  

As it happens, maximizing positive space is even more important in architecture than in baking, since you can’t ball up the leftover scraps and roll more dough out of them. You’ve pretty much got to cut things out right the first time. To stretch the analogy even further, it also happens that architectural forms that are roughly circular--like cookies--provide a much stronger sense of comforting enclosure than do those nasty angular scraps left over from cutting them out.

As basic as this principle seems, you’d be surprised how often architects violate it. Acute angles, with their jagged, knife-like shape, are inherently dramatic, and we architects are nothing if not suckers for drama.  But there’s a price to pay for this kind of cheap effect. Acute angles inside buildings can’t be comfortably inhabited by anything other than gnats and spiders, and it’s not too much to say that they also have an unsettling effect on the human psyche.  Deep in our primitive brains, converging angles still give us an uneasy sense of walls closing in, of entrapment--not exactly the ambience you want for your living room.  

The Chinese design principles known as Feng Shui have long warned against acute angles--”secret daggers”--which are thought to generate malevolent forces.  It’s just another way of saying that sharp angles creep people out.

For their part, Western psychologists might allude to the womb to explain why humans gravitate toward rounded spaces and shun angular ones.  To be sure, more-or-less circular shapes are one of nature’s favorite forms, appearing in practically every living thing from the cell on up.  

Now, none of this implies that rooms should be literally round--a pretty impractical idea, what with all our relentlessly linear building materials.  But it does suggest that rooms shouldn’t contain wall or ceiling angles sharper than ninety degrees, and that they shouldn’t be more than half again as long as they are wide.  Nor should they have sharp angles intruding into them, or far-flung, dead corners with no through traffic.  This applies to outdoor rooms as well, except that here, you can use landscaping to produce a pleasingly positive space for people to inhabit.  

In short, the closer you come to approximating a circular shape--whether using architectural features, furniture arrangements, or planting--the more comfortable your rooms will be.  Whether we call the result intimate, auspicious, secure, or just plain cozy--we all know positive space when we feel it.

IS IT JUST ME, OR IS IT GETTING HOTTER IN HERE?

According to urban legend, if you put a frog into a pot of hot water, he’ll have the good sense to jump out of it immediately. On the other hand, if you put him in cold water and then gradually turn up the heat, he’ll obligingly stay in the pot until he cooks himself to death.

Whether fact or myth, this observation applies to humans as well, as we stubbornly cling to our routines under ever more stressful circumstances.

For hundreds of thousands of people living in metropolitan areas, daily commute times have gradually crept up from a half hour to an hour, to one-and-a-half hours and beyond.  For those who’ve retreated to the far-flung suburbs, where homes are more affordable, a two-hour drive to work is nothing unusual.  

Even a relatively painless one-hour commute will have you spending a full twenty days of each year--about 480 hours--crawling along in a sea of brake lights and carbon monoxide.  And that doesn’t even include the time you spend in the now all-but-routine weekend traffic jams.

While no one seems thrilled with this situation, neither do we seem much inclined to challenge it.  Despite all the grumbling, these ever-increasing commutes engender a kind of stalwart tolerance.  In other words, though the heat has already risen quite a bit, we’re still sitting in our pot of water, oblivious.

What has put us in this situation?  A booming population is one obvious reason. But our own ideals are just as much to blame. Prior to the real estate bust of a few years back, we Americans had developed a near obsession with owning huge houses.  On average, these recent new homes were about twice as big as the average home of the prewar era, despite a clear trend toward smaller families and a growing awareness of environmental issues.  

What’s more, even in these financially troubled times, many of us still seem willing to make any sacrifice to secure the holy grail of square footage. And since nowadays the only big houses that are remotely affordable are far from the city, that’s where we go to get our fix. An epic commute is just the price we pay for the privelege.

In the face of a purported economic recovery, developers will be only too happy to resume this trend, once again gobbling up acre after acre of open land to make sure we never run out of the big houses we crave. Planning officials, mired as they are in the concept of old-style, low-density subdivisions, will continue to make things even worse by still doggedly insisting on useless “setback” land between houses. 

The Great Recession has, among other things, offered us a chance to think through the things we’ve been doing wrong, including the way we build. It’s given us a chance to break the vicious triangle of forces--buyers, builders, and bureaucrats--that have until now pointed us to a future of unstoppable sprawl and ever-increasing congestion on our roads.

What can any one of us do to change this dead-end paradigm?  To begin with, we should remember that any historic trend gains currency one person at a time--and also dies out by the same mechanism.  It’s not easy to convince a whole society that it’s on the wrong track.  But a society is made of individuals, and it’s not nearly so hard to look inside yourself and ask:  Is this really the lifestyle I bargained for?  Would I have been willing to put up with these daily headaches ten or twenty years ago?  In short, is it just me, or is this pot getting hotter?

THE DEADLY DECADES

If you were to plot the popularity of an architectural style on a stock-market style chart, you’d first see it take a quick nosedive from near-universal acclaim to near-universal distaste.  After fifty years or so of hugging the bottom, it would start a little upward tick with small-scale rediscovery and “What-were-they-thinking?”-style wonderment.  In another decade, you’d find it rocketing up through rekindled appreciation and into widespread admiration again.  

This is the classic cycle followed by practically every popular building style, from Victorian through Craftsman through Period Revival.  Currently, the California Rancher--for decades ignored, disparaged, or gracelessly remuddled--is beginning the upswing to renewed appreciation.

Alas, while architectural styles invariably return for an encore, individual buildings don’t always survive the trip.  That fifty-year dormancy period is, of course, the most hazardous time for them. Many of our grandest architectural works have succumbed to those five deadly decades, with few people to mourn their passing.  

The great buildings lost to the deadly decades are so numerous, in fact, that they’re easier to describe by type:  The great Victorian, Richardsonian, and Beaux-Arts railroad terminals, of which a relative handful survive; the sumptuous Period Revival mansions of the Roaring Twenties; the movie palaces of the same decade.    

The story of how these buildings are lost is always more or less the same. Waning popularity or obsolescence eventually leads to neglect, initiating a downward spiral that  ends in early destruction.  Even the works of famous architects aren’t immune.  Some of Frank Lloyd Wright’s greatest commissions fell to the wreckers during the deadly decades:  the epoch-making Larkin office building in Buffalo, Chicago’s Midway Gardens, and Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel are three long-lamented examples.  And if Wright’s works were susceptible, imagine the dangers facing buildings with lesser pedigrees, let alone vernacular roadside architecture.    

At the moment, late modernist works of the 1960s and 70s are in the midst of their own deadly decades and in the greatest danger of loss.  These range from prestigious buildings such as banks and civic centers, to some very competently-designed schools, supermarkets and gas stations, all the way to the “Googie” commercial architecture of drive-ins, motels, and car washes.   

Paradoxically, even though we recognize these recurring destructive cycles, we seem powerless to avert them.  Most of us can never seriously believe that any buildings from our our own time are worthy of preservation--they’re usually too familiar and too shopworn to rate that kind of affection.  For example, as a child of the 1970s, I ‘d be loathe to concede that even a handful of the horrible Mansard-roofed gas stations, office buildings, or fast-food joints of that era might merit preservation. Yet the lessons of architectural history assure me that some of them do.  

As silly, premature, or distasteful as this kind of recognition may seem, it’s the only way we’ll manage to save noteworthy buildings from their deadly decades:  We must look past the aesthetic biases of the present.  We must learn to see architecture through posterity’s eyes, and not our own.

KEEP IT SIMPLE, STUPID

Now and then, people ask me to critique designs for homes or additions they’ve drawn themselves. Many of these plans are both thoughtful and inventive, but even the best of them tend to suffer from one recurring flaw: Too many features crammed into too little space. 

This is a problem endemic to creative types: They’re bursting with ideas, and they’re hell-bent on including every single one of them. For example, the design for a living room might be loaded down with level changes, multiple finishes, jutting cabinets, complicated ceiling vaults, and busy window arrangements. While any one of these features might work beautifully taken alone, using all of them is more likely to yield a busy, cramped, and amateurish design. 

Smart designers rein in this natural tendency to complicate things using a sophisticated formula. It’s called KISS--for Keep It Simple, Stupid. People who subscribe to KISS know that good design has less to do with putting stuff in than with throwing stuff out.

KISS says that a few rooms with more generous dimensions are better than any number of cramped and inadequate ones. Now, since World War II, Americans have been led to equate more rooms with more prestige, so it’s no surprise that even in these days of lowered expectations, amateur designers are always trying to shoehorn too many rooms into too little space. They think that more rooms will make their houses seem bigger and more impressive. In fact, the opposite happens:  All those barely-adequate cubicles with fancy names--media room, breakfast room, walk-in pantry, or whatever--only impinge on the meat-and-potatoes spaces that are used every day.  

Within individual rooms, KISS also posits that a few generously-sized features will serve better than a whole slew of busy ones. For many lay designers, this isn’t welcome advice either, because it usually means that a number of their pet ideas will be politely asked to croak off. Maybe it’s that swanky island they’re determined to shoehorn into the kitchen, or those double lavatories they’ve cruelly wedged into a mere scrap of bathroom counter. They might even have to ax a whole bedroom to yield decent dimensions throughout the rest of the house.Ouch. 

But the value of KISS doesn’t end there. It’s also a good rule for designing elevations (the way the house looks from the street). Here, it says that a few strong elements usually give better results than a cornucopia of competing ones. In a small house, for example, one each of an eye-catching window, gable, or chimney per elevation are about the limit--more will just junk up the place. But even on a larger house, where there’s room for multiple grouped elements such as windows or dormers, one of them should always be clearly dominant.  

KISS is a hard enough rule for architects to follow--as many modern buildings will attest--but for homeowners, it can be downright agonizing. It’s not easy giving the axe to all those cool details you’ve clipped from magazines over the years. But hang tough:  you’re far better off choosing a few of your favorites and leaving the rest for another day.  

MAKIN' COPIES

For years now, I've railed at people who remodel just to keep up with some architectural fad or other.  But the truth is that we architects are as faddish as anyone else.  A few lead, and most follow, whether consciously or not.

Architectural fads are nothing new.  For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English, Germans, Spanish, and most every other European nation were busily ripping off the French, whose architecture was seen as the epitome of elegance and prestige. As buildings such as the Louvre and Versailles still attest, no one could touch the Gallic flourish for theatrically grand compositions.  As a result, no self-respecting palace of the era, whether in Salzburg or St. Petersburg, was complete unless it boasted Versailles-like formal gardens and was crowned by a Mansard roof. 

In the early 19th century, excavations in ancient Athens and Herculaneum touched off a tremendous fashion for archeological copies of Greek and Roman architecture.  The French were again at the head of this new wave (soon to be followed by the Germans), with each nation building rather fevered copies of the Parthenon and other ancient monuments in the stark style we now call Romantic Classicism. 

Even in America, banks and courthouses in the guise of Greek temples sprang up in every jerkwater town, and no less an architect than Thomas Jefferson jumped on the bandwagon by endorsing the Greek Revival as the keynote style for Washington DC.

The arrival of Modern architecture in the twentieth century brought a whole new level of faddishness.  Alas, while having architects cranking out line-perfect copies of Greek temples was merely tiresome, having mediocre talents copying Modernism was an urban disaster.  While the likes of Mies, Gropius, and Le Corbusier put infinite care into their austere compositions, lesser architects simply assumed that building anything with glass walls, a flat roof, and white paint qualified them as geniuses.  It didn’t.  Such dreary, bargain-basement Modernism, which still populates a good many American downtowns, is one of the main reasons why modern architecture fell so hard, so fast.  The firm I interned with, for instance, went in big for a late-Modernist trend called Brutalism, leaving behind a legacy of memorably awful exercises in raw concrete.

It’s easy to spot such bandwagon-hopping in hindsight, but not so easy to recognize it in our own time.  Yet the purportedly rebellious styles of recent years have brought us just as many cases of architectural copyism.  One need only count the mushrooming number of buildings with outward-leaning walls, angled props supporting pointless overhangs, and strident color schemes of ochre, bile, and olive to recognize the faddishness of much of today’s work.  

Such aesthetic recycling stems, I suppose, either from intellectual laziness or from the wish to play it safe.  It takes monumental self-confidence and--dare I say it--arrogance, to put something really different before people and willingly be savaged for it.  Ironically, the moment someone does this kind of heavy lifting and manages to survive, the imitators arrive, their glossy magazines firmly in hand. 

So just imagine how many half-baked Frank Gehry knockoffs are still coming your way. 

ARCHITECTURAL FROSTING

There’s an old joke on architects that goes back to the days of Beaux-Arts classicism. It seems a big city suffered an earthquake, and a reporter was sent out to report on the damage.  He soon returned with his assessment. “The buildings are fine,” he said, “but all the architecture fell off.”

The tendency of architects to lard buildings with ornament goes back centuries, if not millenia. In more recent times, Victorian architects were renowned for their addiction to ornament. But in fact, no architect of any era, no matter how chaste, can really claim to be immune from the urge to decorate.

Mid-twentieth century modern architecture should represent, if anything, the ultimate refutation of ornament. Yet the Modernists slyly came up with their own brand of decoration, though they strained mightily to justify it on functional grounds.  

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, among the most supremely rational architects of his era, insisted that buildings should express their underlying structure. So passionate was he in this belief that when he designed Chicago’s highrise Lake Shore Apartments in the late 1940s, he couldn’t bear the thought of the building’s steel frame being hidden by fireproofing. His solution was to apply a phalanx of delicate, costly, and most definitely nonfunctional bronze I-beams to the outside of the buildings to “represent” its structural columns.

Edward Durell Stone, another stellar Modernist, did much to steer modernism into the more decorative phase it entered in the late 1950s. Stone was terribly fond of sunscreens--whether of pierced metal, cast concrete, or stacked block--and he never passed up a chance to feature them in his work. To be functional in the Modernist  sense, of course, a sunscreen seemingly ought to face the sun, yet Stone’s increasingly elaborate screens often appeared on all sides of his buildings (in fairness, Stone eventually recanted Modernism and gave his decorative gene free rein.)

The Postmodernist movement, ushered in by architect Robert Venturi’s seminal book Learning from Las Vegas, more or less called a spade a spade and acknowledged that undecorated buildings were, well—dull.  

“Less is more,” Mies had said. “Less is a bore,” countered Venturi. This rebellious premise opened the floodgates for a whole new generation of decorative architecture, some well-reasoned, some not.  

In our own time, we’re still seeing the detritus of the Postmodernist love for ironic, discordant, or illogical decoration. If anything, today’s architects have upped the ante on superfluous doodads. Rather than design growing naturally out of structure in the Modernist sense, architects are increasingly returning to the idea of buildings as mere decorated boxes, to which a profusion of nonfunctional sunshades, canopies, and metal outriggers are applied like so many bangles and bows.  

Whether we identify with Traditionalism, Modernism, Postmodernism, or some other “-ism” yet to be invented, we architects still respond to gewgaws the way ants do to a dropped Slurpee. We may think of today’s work as more sophisticated, but in that old joke’s proverbial earthquake, it still wouldn’t matter if all the architecture fell off.  The pieces would just look a little different.