NOT-SO-RADICAL RADICALS

As Berkeley goes, so--eventually--goes the nation. As frightening as this may sound to some, it’s a fact borne out by history. Opposing the Vietnam War, spearheading ecological concerns, mandating energy efficient buildings, banning smoking in public places, demanding equal access for the disabled--these causes were all dismissed as “Berkeley radical thinking” in their time. Today, they’ve all long since been integrated into mainstream America. While some might still quibble with one or another aspect of these ideals, in retrospect, most of us would now regard them as honorable and thoroughly American. 

Today there’s another revolution brewing in Berkeley, albeit a much quieter one. No matter where you look, the streets of this small university town are teeming with hybrid vehicles--most of them made by Toyota, with a lesser number from Honda (and very few, I’d point out, made by that blundering straggler, General Motors). 

If Berkeley proves as prescient in this “radical” trend as it has in prior ones, the environmental implications are vast. For one, it signals the beginning of the end for conventional internal-combustion powered vehicles--and many years sooner than auto industry analysts and other in-the-box thinkers would have us believe. Then again, these are the same folks who saw nothing shortsighted about GM cashing in on SUVs while leaving their advanced vehicles program to molder. 

What’s the big deal about hybrids, which, after all, still burn gasoline? It’s this: Conventional cars have huge engines sized to meet peak power demands which typical drivers use perhaps one percent of the time. Hybrids, on the other hand, use a small, high-efficiency gasoline engine to generate electricity onboard. This in turn powers an even more efficient electric motor that moves the car. The gasoline engine provides power for  average cruising, not for peak demand. When extra power is needed, as in climbing a grade or passing, it’s provided  by the batteries or by the gasoline engine, as appropriate. 

Hybrids also have a regenerative braking system that transforms braking energy into electricity instead of wasting it in heat as a normal car does.  The small size and steady running speed of the hybrid’s engine, the regenerative braking system, and other features let hybrids achieve about twice the mileage of conventional cars, while producing a fraction of the pollution. These advantages will only become more pronounced as the cars are refined over time. 

While hybrids have many of the same shortcomings as conventional cars--an inherently inefficient internal combustion engine that burns gasoline and spews pollution, and a relatively friction-laden drive train--they nevertheless represent a huge advance over the clumsy mechanical-drive cars most of us still own, providing an important stepping stone to true zero-emissions vehicles.   

The only bad news is that the American auto industry will likely be at the tail end of this revolution, watching foreign competitors write the conventional car’s epitaph. This is largely thanks to the monumental stupidity, shortsightedness and greed of General Motors executives who, prior to getting such a pasting by the Great Recession, preferred to wallow in the lucrative SUV trough while foreign competitors did their homework. Maybe those GM folks should’ve gotten out of their swanky boardrooms now and then, and taken a drive around Berkeley.

EBAY: A PROFUSION OF STYLISTIC CONFUSION

The names of architectural styles are often invoked, but seldom used precisely. Even people who should know better conflate styles, whether intentionally or not. In real estate listings, for instance, nondescript old piles are routinely elevated to Victorians, Bungalows, or whatever else happens to be selling. Architects aren’t immune from such stylistic confusion, either: Many of us bandy about terms like Tudor, Elizabethan and Half-Timbered, or Mission, Mediterranean and Moorish without really knowing how they differ.

Still, you’ll never find more stylistic muddlement in one place than you will browsing vintage items listed on eBay. Casual descriptions from lay sellers are understandable, but the many others who represent themselves as antique or collectibles dealers really ought to know what they’re offering. Granted, the idea is to cram as many key words into these listings as possible so that they’ll show up under various search categories--but many examples go well beyond the pale. Here, for instance, are some actual listings for vintage lighting fixtures being auctioned on eBay:

• “1920s Victorian Fixture.” By definition, the term Victorian refers to things dating from the reign of Queen Victoria (1837 to 1901), making this object pretty much of an impossibility. What the seller meant, I suppose, was that the lamp was ornate, and perhaps he or she should have just said so.

• “Vintage Victorian Art Deco Lighting Fixture.” Here’s another time-warped descriptions. The Paris exhibition from which Art Deco took its name didn’t even take place until 1925, nor did the style get much traction in the U.S. until the early 1930s. This, you’ll recall, was long after poor old Victoria had joined the choir invisible. Perhaps the seller could have classified his lamp based on this simple test: Victorian objects typically have lots of floral and/or classical motifs more or less jumbled together. Art Deco objects, on the other hand, have stark geometric decoration in shallow relief. 

• “Circa 1920 Art Deco Ceiling Lamp.”  Once again, time runs miraculously backward. 

• “Art Deco Nouveau Ceiling Lamp.” If this description were accurate, it would be a  lamp worth seeing, since these two styles are just about diametrically opposed. The earlier style, Art Nouveau, spanned roughly the years 1890 to 1905. It made lavish use of sinuous plant motifs such as meandering vines and leaves, with hardly a straight line to be found. Art Deco, as we’ve just noted, caught on a generation later, and was uncompromisingly geometric.

• If you think the foregoing descriptions run the gamut, how about this one: “Art Deco Medieval Tudor Porch Lamp.” Let’s see--the Middle Ages, the early English renaissance, and the eye-popping modernism of Art Deco all in one lighting fixture. It turns out that the actual imagery on the lamp--a ring of three fretwork panels depicting speeding chariots, each separated by a flaming-torch motif--was Roman. I can say this with confidence, because the lamp is now hanging in my office.

• Lastly, amid all this stylistic hooey, here’s an accidentally accurate listing: “Rare 1910s Victorian Deco Pendant Fixture”. Yup--that’s a rare one, all right. 

VAN DER VOLE: The Forgotten Modernist

The death of architect Ruud van der Vole at 109 last week was met with resounding silence. Though his contemporaries Mies, Le Corbusier, and Gropius have earned prominent places in the architectural pantheon, Van der Vole, a Modernist of equal conviction, has been largely ignored. His seminal publications of the 1920s and 30s are long out of print, and astonishingly, he has no biographer. The following is an admittedly belated attempt to acknowledge his great contribution to Modernism.

Ruud van der Veer der van der Vole was born in Dåg, Holland in 1904, one of nine children born to a wealthy family in the cough-drop manufacturing business.  He attended a private school until age 13, when he was expelled after the headmaster declared him “a doodling imbecile.”  

His influential parents quickly found him a position at the nearby Dåg Works For Belt-Driven Machines. Although clumsy with tools, van der Vole found a niche in preparing catalog illustrations of the firm’s machinery. Eventually the work of drawing blueprints for plant expansions fell to him as well. His Boring Machine Annex of 1920, designed in conjunction with the plant’s painter when he was just sixteen, reveals the germ of what was to become his early style: White plaster, white-painted concrete, white window sash, and in a brilliant, unifying stroke, white-painted glass to diffuse the low winter sun.

Van der Vole completed several subsequent designs for the Dåg Works. The Sand Bin of 1921, the Worker’s Commodes of 1922, and the Flywheel Foundry of 1924 all refined the grammar of the Boring Machine Annex. Further commissions seemed assured when disaster struck: Financially overtaxed by its expansions, the Dåg Works closed.   

Van der Vole returned to work in his family’s cough-drop factory, and it was there he met Laçzlo Turnep’, a Hungarian immigrant employed as a stirring-boy. Turnep’, later to found the school of painting known as De Schreck, or The Shock, introduced van der Vole to the works of Mondriaan and van Doesburg. 

In his own work, Turnep’ sought to further simplify Mondriaan’s ideas by limiting himself to one dimension rather than two.  Intrigued, van der Vole attempted to integrate this concept into his early designs. The use of one-dimensional form in architecture remained elusive, however, and van der Vole was never able to produce a truly one-dimensional design to his satisfaction.  

In 1925, a large addition to his family’s thriving cough-drop works provided van der Vole a welcome opportunity to return to architecture. The building consisted of a single enormous bay containing retorts in which cough-drop syrup was prepared.  Particularly evocative was its brutal concrete facade, which carried a bas-relief cough drop beneath the stark inscription HÅKBONBONFABRIK.       

During the mid twenties van der Vole began writing for the French art review LeCucu. Widely read by the avant-garde, it brought him numerous commissions and a forum in which to experiment. Intrigued by Le Corbusier’s technique of elevating his buildings on piers or pilotis, van der Vole expanded upon the concept in a series of houses for wealthy French clients. At LeSpideur, a villa near Charleroi (1927), he placed the house atop pilotis nearly twice as tall as the house itself.  

The same year, in his Cottage for Msr. Bufaleaux outside Paris, the pilotis were similarly tall and were carried through the roof an additional 3 meters. Van der Vole’s use of the Modernist device reached its highest expression in the Villa Logjam of 1928, where the pilotis stood entirely independent and the house was built elsewhere.

Never content to repeat himself, van der Vole began postulating a concept he termed gegenverstand, loosely translated “against reason”, which rejected the use of building forms based upon architectural evolution. He elaborated upon these ideas in his 1925 German-published manifesto Das Uberschreitendes Gewaltungsvertrieb mit Ungeheuere Einwohnergesellschaftsmeinungen (“What I Think About Houses”).      

His finest residential commission of this period is the Villa Soleis-Beaucoup of 1929, outside Nimes, known locally as the Burning-Glass House. Here he ingeniously designed the windows and shading in such a way as to admit the summer sun and exclude the winter sun. Of the Villa he wrote:  

“We must make every effort to break away from the tyranny of established knowledge. If an architecture is to be truly modern, it cannot, by its very definition, be composed of evolutionary forms. We must begin with fundamentally new and radical forms, and invent knowledge to explain them.”

Van der Vole turned to public housing in 1930 with the Frickenschnecken Complex, a bold concept for the renewal of a venerable district of Rotterdam. Under his plan, the old neighborhood was cleared and its rubble cleverly utilized to fill an adjacent portion of the harbor. In the center of this new area was constructed a single enormous ten story tower which housed the entire population of the former district. Of the Frickenschnecken Complex van der Vole wrote,

“You may ask me, what is the secret of this place? It is plentiful light and fresh air. At Frickenschnecken, the willy-nilly disposition of houses, the shadows, the trees, the narrow lanes, have all been swept away and replaced by light and air. Everywhere is light and air—air and light. Abundant light, and fresh, plentiful air.”

Although his master plan called for virtually all of Rotterdam’s housing to be replaced along the lines of the Frickenschnecken scheme, rising political tensions prevented its implementation. The prototype building was regrettably destroyed by its occupants. 

In 1935, van der Vole returned to Dåg and renewed his collaboration with Turnep’, now the leading exponent of De Schreck.  There, inspired by Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus school at Dessau, they founded their own atelier under the name Dåghaus. At its peak, the Dåghaus was home to nearly five artists, architects, and craftsmen. Van der Vole became a beloved mentor to this talented group, who referred to him simply as “Vole.”  In 1937 a disastrous cooking fire financially crippled the Dåghaus, however, and two years later the onset of war dispersed the remaining collaborator.  

Disheartened, van der Vole moved to Paris in 1939, where he hoped to wait out the war. When Nazi occupation seemed imminent, he fled to London. Within two months of his arrival, his apartment was heavily damaged by a deranged chambermaid. He moved again, this time to Edinburgh, where he remained until the war’s end. He then returned to London and offered his services to the British government. He was eventually assigned to develop a new master plan for the city of Leeds.   

“This dreadful town, now but a vulgar stain on the face of Britain, will soon become a showcase for the triumph and order of Modernism,” he wrote of Leeds in 1947.  “Once again, democracy is free to impose itself.”          

After much consideration, van der Vole concluded that all of Leeds should be demolished. He proposed a sleek new city divided into quadrants: One industrial; one residential, another industrial; and the last, also industrial.  At the axis of the quadrants was to be a massive, diagonally-placed tower which could be rented out for monthly parking. Parliament enthusiastically approved the plan in 1949, but the considerable funds necessary to implement it did not materialize.  Thus the proposal for Leeds was shelved. It became van der Vole’s most painful defeat.

In 1958 Van der Vole, at 54 already an elder statesman of Modernism, was invited by the Dutch chocolate industry to design the first true skyscraper in Holland, the Kakao Turm. Though small by U.S. standards, its five stories would tower over the Amsterdam skyline. Faced with a building somewhat wider than it was tall, he wrestled with the difficult problem of emphasizing its verticality. His solution remains a cunningly  Modernist detail: Applied vertically to the glass facade, continuous from street to roof, is a hierarchy of extruded copper strips of various widths. 

“The largest strips represent the fundamental aspect of the building: Structure,” wrote van der Vole in 1961.  “Between these, subordinate strips further represent structure, yet on a finer scale. Finally, ribbon-thin strips represent structure on the very finest scale. Copper symbolizes the vats in which chocolate is conched.”

Van der Vole’s activity declined markedly following completion of the Kakao Turm.  His last major commission, and his only work in the United States, was the campus for the Nebraska School of Architecture (1965-77), designed when he was well into his sixties. Located thirty miles east of Omaha, the complex is a Modernist tour-de-force. The entire campus is contained within a single huge reflecting pool and is reached by a causeway. The low buildings hover lightly above this pool, supported on delicate, stylized bronze stalks of wheat. At the exact center of the complex, also within the pool, stands a water tower whose single leg is sheathed in bronze grillwork.  Van der Vole wrote in 1969:

 “Water here symbolizes architecture—for both cover vast portions of the earth.  And water symbolizes Nebraska. Without water, nothing could survive in Nebraska.  And so, in equating water with architecture, and water with Nebraska, we have equated Nebraska with architecture.”

By the time the Nebraska campus was completed, no further U.S. commissions were forthcoming for van der Vole.  He retired to his native Holland at the age of seventy-seven, where for the next twenty years he continued to write and take on occasional small commissions.  

Appropriately, his final work was completed in Dåg for his family’s  cough-drop factory. It is the main entrance to the Håkbonbonfabrik:  A stylized Greek pediment supported at each end by three huge cough-drops, stacked edgewise and painted to resemble various flavors.  At first glance, it appears to contradict all that van der Vole believed; and yet it carries his personal stamp of integrity.  Two days before his death, he wrote in his journal:

“And so, I believe, I have brought my philosophy to its ultimate conclusion. Though in the cause of architecture we rationalize and ponder and write and agonize and reconsider and debate, and endlessly ask of ourselves, What does this mean?...in the end, it means only that which we believe it to mean.” 

Ruud van der Vole, the forgotten Modernist, was buried last week in Dåg, Holland, within a stone’s throw of the house where he was born.

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.