DAN LUDWIG'S JOURNEY Part Two of Three Parts

Last time I told the story of Dan Ludwig, a cabinetmaker who came to America in 1955, built himself a big yellow workshop in his back yard, and went on with the business of making a living. But times have changed, though, and not for the better. Here’s how things might go for Dan if he’d been an immigrant in the year 2015 instead of in 1955. 

A typical zoning map (this one is for
Barnesville, Georgia—a town of 6,755 people).
Sorry, Dan, you're not zoned Commercial.

Dan is at the counter of his local planning department, applying for a permit to build his workshop. The exchange goes like this: 

BUILDING OFFICIAL: (staring into a computer screen): Hmm, your property isn’t zoned for commercial or light industrial usage--you’ll need to get a variance (the official grabs a thick sheaf of forms and hands it to a bewildered Dan). Here’s the application. They don’t grant many of these variances, but of course you’re welcome to try.

You’ll need to contact all your neighbors within a 300 foot radius so they’ll have an opportunity to comment on your proposal. You’ll also need to give the Design Review Board complete drawings of the workshop, so we recommend that you hire an architect if you can’t do it yourself. You’ll also need to submit photos of the twenty houses closest to yours so we can verify that your workshop’s design is in keeping with the character of the neighborhood. 

An application for design review
(Hilton Head,  South Carolina, in this case)
The design review process can take
weeks or months, and typically
has to be completed before you can
 even apply for a building permit.

We’ll need a color board showing the proposed finishes for the workshop, including the roof color, the trim color, and the color and material of the windows. By the way, just a friendly suggestion regarding the color choices--the design review board likes colors that are tasteful and harmonious. You know--beiges, tans, whites. What’s that, Dan? Yellow? No, I don’t think they’ll go for yellow. You’ll probably want to tone it down a little. Talk to your architect. He’ll know exactly what the Design Review Board likes to see.

Now, this workshop you’re proposing is ten feet tall and it’s near the neighbor’s property line, so you’ll have to provide a shadow study demonstrating that its height won’t adversely impact your neighbor’s natural light. Also, will those woodworking machines be noisy? They will? Well, here’s a copy of our noise ordinance. Basically, the louder the noise, the less time you’re allowed to produce it. What’s that? Your table saw will be running a lot of the time? Well, you’ll probably need to do extensive soundproofing. You may want to hire an acoustical engineer to prove that your shop’s noise won’t be a nuisance to the neighborhood, or the staff is likely to deny your variance.

Flow chart offered by one municipality
(Winnipeg, Manitoba) showing the
process to be followed in applying
for a building permit.  This just proves
that Canadians are no smarter
than Americans.

When you have your submittal package together, Dan, you can get on the Planning Commission’s agenda. They meet once a month. If you don’t get an approval the first time—and you probably shouldn’t plan on that—we’ll carry your application over to the next month, and so on. Remember, any of your neighbors can object to your building a workshop, so you should probably do some lobbying. What’s that? Your English isn’t so good? Well, you can always hire a consultant to present your project for you. Okay, now  here’s a schedule of the submittal fees....

And so it goes. Most likely, our present-day Dan Ludwig will go home and forget about building his shop. One less middle-class entrepreneur on the roster.

Next time: Why it’s so tough to get anything built these days, and a simple regulatory change that could help break the logjam.

DAN LUDWIG’S JOURNEY Part One of Three Parts

Children in a DP (displaced persons)
camp for refugees from Baltic
countries,  Germany, 1945
(Courtesy Wikipedia)

Daniel Ludwig, his wife, and four children arrived in New York Harbor in 1955 with little more than a homemade wooden crate containing Dan's most valuable possessions: his hand tools. He had been trained as a master woodworker in his homeland of Rumania, having come to the United States by way of a German refugee camp for displaced persons. Within two years of arriving in America, Dan had saved enough money to buy a ramshackle old house with a big back yard in the little town of Concord, California. 

After he’d achieved the American Dream of home ownership, Dan Ludwig turned his attention to setting up his own shop. He filled his first cabinet and furniture orders from the cramped old one-car garage that stood at one edge of his property. His business quickly outgrew those tight quarters, so in 1961, he took out a building permit and, with the help of his friends and neighbors, began adding a brand-new workshop onto the rear of his old garage. It was a spacious, ten-foot-high barn of a building, painted a sunny yellow, with several pairs of huge doors for loading in lumber and sending out his completed cabinetwork.

Class photo of children at Schauenstein, Germany
DP camp, around 1946: No future.
(Courtesy Wikipedia)

Inside this big yellow barn, as his budget allowed, he slowly accumulated the best power tools of his trade--table saw, planer, jointer, and all the other machinery of a modern woodworking shop. Thus established, Daniel Ludwig was the model American immigrant—a sole proprietor supporting a large family and bringing his Old World skills into the roaring New World economy.

A textbook tale of America’s promise, right? A man leaves a bleak and war-torn nation, poor and without much future, for a place with greater prospects. Yet Dan Ludwig’s story, as classic an immigrant tale as it is, took place in an America now long vanished. It was a time when practically everything seemed possible, including the ability of an ordinary person without wealth or connections to succeed on hard work alone. Alas, if we put Dan Ludwig in a time machine to replay his life in present-day America, the outcome might be quite different. 

Elderly couple, one of 1,267 European refugees
arriving on the refitted troop ship
USNS General Langfitt, in New York Harbor,
October 28, 1956. Statue of Liberty at background.
 (AP Photo)

To begin with, the likelihood of a working-class immigrant saving enough to buy a house—no matter how modest—within a few years of arriving in the United States is virtually nil. Home prices have continued to outpace family income for many decades now, even though, unlike Dan’s time, most families now have the advantage of two or even more wage earners. So if Dan had come to the United States in 2015 instead of 1955, chances are he’d never have become a homeowner at all, but instead would have remained a tenant-- probably for the rest of his life.

But let’s wave a magic wand and say that modern-day Dan somehow managed to buy that house with its big back yard, just as he did in the 1950s. And let’s say he set out to build his big yellow workshop in 2015 instead of 1961. Where once he obtained a permit over the counter, got some friends together, and got down to pouring concrete, today Dan's life would be more complicated. Next time, we’ll see just how complicated.

THE SHOWER CURTAIN MANIFESTO Part Two of Two Parts

Last time, I invoked Henry David Thoreau--”Simplify, simplify!”--to buttress my contention that the best design choice is usually the simplest one that does the job. Yet things appear to be going in the other direction. Following are some currently popular design choices that needlessly complicate our homes:

Better than a curtain?
Wait till you have to clean it.

• Glass bath and shower enclosures have become the default standard in bathrooms these days, showing up in every trendoid design magazine, invariably looking dazzling and pristine. Such adoring coverage might lead you to believe that shower curtains don’t even exist anymore. 

What’s wrong with glass enclosures? First off, compared to the alternative—our old friend, the shower curtain—they’re astronomically expensive. They’re also a real headache to maintain, since all that crystal-clear glass requires constant cleaning to maintain its design-magazine sparkle. Lastly, they unnecessarily clutter up a room that, for most people of ordinary income, is already pretty modest in size.

A ten-dollar shower curtain, on the other hand, stops water just as well and can be drawn back to virtually disappear from the scene. Nor is there any slavish daily cleaning required--when a shower curtain gets intolerably scuzzy, you can simply buy another and recycle the old one as a drop cloth. 

A minimalist triumph,
an ergonomic disaster.

• Kitchens are another nexus of bad or impractical choices made for fashion reasons. Let’s start with all those cabinet doors. Cabinet manufacturers delight in whipping up showroom kitchens with a plethora of doors: Big doors, little doors, narrow doors, glass doors—and with good reason: the more doors, the more profitable the order. 

More doors don’t equate to a more functional kitchen, however. A few generous cabinets with wide doors provide much better access to kitchen items. Even simpler, frequently used items can simply be left—gasp!—out in the open, just as they are in commercial kitchens. In short, generous, flexible storage areas beat a lot of little special-purpose cubbies, no matter how quaintly conceived.

Incidentally, with all due respect to closet organizer companies, the same holds true for closet space: The less special-purpose subdivisions, the more flexible the storage space.

Not Thoreau's kitchen.

• Faucets, both in bathrooms and in kitchens, have reached a zenith of functional absurdity. A client of mine, for instance, recently insisted on a very trendy and expensive kitchen faucet, but all she really got for her money was an ergonomic disaster. For reasons that can only be ascribed to style, the single control lever stuck out from the right side of the spout, requiring a very unnatural sideward arm motion to control the flow. Worse, instead of observing the time-honored standard of hot-on-the-left, cold-on-the-right, the manufacturer expected users to choose the temperature by rotating the lever forward and backward. Needless to say, all this was virtually impossible for any first-time user to figure out--and it’s worth bearing in mind that homeowners aren’t the only people who use the kitchen sink.

Why complicate your life in this way, especially when an ordinary faucet, a simple shelf, or a plain old shower curtain actually does the job better? I’m sure that Henry David Thoreau—when he wasn’t busy keeping his accounts on his thumbnail—would have agreed.

THE SHOWER CURTAIN MANIFESTO Part One of Two Parts

Thoreau: Cool your jets, man.

“Simplify, simplify!”

Today, more than ever, there’s wisdom in Henry David Thoreau’s well-known exhortation. And it applies to our domestic lives as much as anywhere else. Here’s Thoreau’s quote in its entirety:

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.”  

Alas, the unstoppable wheels of marketing and mercantilism that subtly direct so much of our America lives make it damnably hard to heed Thoreau’s advice. But once we recognize that there’s only thing absolutely crucial to a contented life--namely, your good health and that of the ones you love--and all that attendant bric-a-brac of materialism quickly falls away. 

What you really, really need is a refrigerator with
an internet connection—at least,
Korean appliance giant LG hopes so.

Architects are as much a captive to rampant materialism as anyone else. After all, much of an architect’s time is spent divining and assembling collections of people’s material wants into tidy packages, whether they take the from of a kitchen, a bathroom, or a whole house. And since we’re the gatekeepers for some of the biggest expenditures most people ever make, marketers are hell-bent on trying to influence us. We’re treated to a ceaseless array of products brochures, samples, and telemarketing. As a matter of fact, in the midst of writing this, yet another sales representative telephoned to draw my attention to his product--let’s see, was it a home elevator, whole-house automation, or a fridge with an Internet connection? 

The truth is, I’m more likely to steer people clear of such products than to specify them, all the more so in this dismal economy. Yet while it’s easy to blame the marketers for creating such a cult of materialism, we Americans are far from blameless: Our overbearing sense of self-entitlement is central to the economic problems we’re now mired in: We want all that fancy stuff they try to sell us whether we can afford it or not, and we’re willing to be in hock up to our eyebrows in order to get it. Having so fully bought into the marketers siren song conflating possessions with happiness, we’ve lost perspective of how little it really takes to be happy. Or as the sage blogger Charles Hugh Smith recently pointed out regarding the relativity of our expectations: “If you’re used to living in a tent, a plywood shack seems like a luxury.”

 See that little bitty sink next to the real one?
That's the "toothbrushing sink" plumbing fixture
makers tried to convince Americans they needed.
Kohler hawked this one in 1939.

Getting people to buy things they don’t need isn’t a new idea. Back in the 1930s, one plumbing fixture manufacturer—Standard Sanitary, today’s American Standard—declared that “Cleaning the teeth in the regular lavatory is a very unsanitary practice,” and suggested that every bathroom have a separate “dental lavatory” just for tooth brushing. Sensing a new market, a few other manufacturers followed suit, but the idea didn’t fly, probably due more to the Great Depression than anything else. Yet the same clever sales strategy did eventually break through in the form of his-and-hers master bath lavatories.

Next time, we’ll look at some more recent examples of selling people things they don’t need, even though, in many cases, they cost more and don’t work as well.

WHAT'S REALLY GREEN?

What’s the greenest way to build? Using natural, renewable resources? Using salvaged building materials? Or using the same old stuff you’ve always used, which some corporate PR firm has now managed to repackage as “green”?

These are all ways to profess greenness, some effective, some merely gestural. But by far the greenest approach to construction is to adapt buildings that already exist--and that’s one avenue in which we Americans still fall woefully short.

This building was demolished to make room for—
no kidding—a casino parking lot.
(Columbia Building, Pittsburgh, destroyed 2011;
courtesy of enthusiasticnoise.blogspot.com)

We are, after all, a young nation built largely from scratch, and we consider it normal for our built environment to be in a constant state of upheaval. Here, it’s common for buildings to be demolished after fifty, thirty, or even ten years of use--and the expected life of buildings is getting shorter, not longer.

One study has pegged the average lifespan of American buildings at just shy of fifty years. Compare this to Europe, where a building’s life is measured in centuries rather than decades. The average life of an English building, for example, is 132 years. The typical lifespan of buildings on the Continent is probably even longer if we discount the effects of two World Wars. 

San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square—
a repurposed chocolate factory—
was among the first great
examples of "adaptive reuse".

America’s obsession with change, however, leads us to build quickly and on the cheap, since it’s assumed that buildings will be obsolete in a few decades anyway. Such thinking naturally leads to a vicious cycle of wastefulness: Because permananence is considered irrelevant, buildings are worn out in a few decades whether they’re actually obsolete or not. These, in turn, are typically replaced by structures that are even shoddier and more temporary--whether theoretically green or otherwise. 

Preserving and reusing older, well-built existing structures, on the other hand, is the ultimate expression of true green design, since it requires relatively little additional expenditure of energy when adaptation is required, and occasionally, none at all when it isn’t. 

The average old building represents a vast investment of energy--not only in the form of materials, but more importantly, in the form of labor (and by “old”, let’s assume we mean those built before World War II). It’s self evident that old buildings typically used more opulent finishes than their modern counterparts; they were, after all, built at a time when high quality materials had not been depleted and were still used generously. 

The crafts that built interiors like this one—
the Los Angeles Theater—are not coming back at
prices anyone can afford. 

What is less seldom appreciated, however, is that an old building also embodies an enormous storehouse of labor--much of it of a kind modern society can no longer afford. Many once-ubiquitous building trades have all but disappeared over the last century--from stonemasons to stained-glass makers, from plasterers to gilders--and the fruits of their labors remain in every extant building, essentially frozen in time. 

These skills won’t be coming back, except in their current status as boutique trades carrying astronomical costs. Hence, destroying an old building doesn’t just squander physical resources--it also negates forever a huge investment of skilled work that’s no longer affordable and sometimes no longer even obtainable. To my mind, this is a waste of nonrenewable resources more tragic than that of any precious material.

HAUNTED HOUSES OF HOLLYWOOD

The "Psycho" house.
(Courtesy thestudiotour.com)

As Alfred Hitchcock well knew, nothing sets a mood of suspense better than a spooky old house. The brooding Mansard-roofed Victorian in Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, which still stands on the Universal Studios backlot, is probably the best known creepy old house in pop culture. But there are plenty of others: For instance, the eerily rendered Xanadu, home of Charles Foster Kane in Orson Welles’s milestone 1941 film Citizen Kane. The hauntingly composed images of Xanadu are so central to the story that they’re used both to open and close the film. 

More recently, there was the anthropomorphic house featured in 1979’s The Amityville Horror, perhaps the world’s only frightening Dutch Colonial. On the lighter side was the Addams Family’s eccentric television abode (another Mansarded and iron-crested Victorian, although, like Kane’s Xanadu, it was actually just a matte painting). 

Just what makes for an unnervingly spooky house? And mind you, we’re talking aesthetic creepiness, not pulp-novel style haunting. Back in the 1960s, old Victorian houses of the Gothic or Mansard variety were Hollywood’s standard issue for spookiness, probably because they were decaying and far out of fashion at the time. After their popular renaissance in the 1970s, however, those gaily-colored gingerbread houses had a much less sinister effect in the public mind, and hence Hollywood moved on to other archetypes.

Is this the world's creepiest Dutch Colonial?

A really creepy house usually has some anthropomorphic character--the vaguely hunchbacked, head-and-shoulders silhouette of Mrs. Bates’s house in Psycho, for example, or the diabolical, eye-like attic windows seen in promotions for The Amityville Horror, or the gaping mouth-like porch of Freddy Krueger’s house in Wes Craven’s Nightmare on Elm Street (1984).

Anthropomorphism plays an even bigger role in one of the scariest spooky-house films of all time, Robert Wise’s The Haunting (1963). Here, the gloomy stone pile known as Hill House features rearing Gothic towers and cavernous window openings that eerily recall the empty eye sockets of a skull. In this case, Hill House was not just a matte painting but an actual English manor house called Ettington Hall near Stratford-upon-Avon. To get the eye-socket effect, director Wise used a special high contrast film to make the house's window openings seem black and empty (Ettington Hall seen in normal light looks considerably less diabolical, and in fact is now a popular hotel).

The Addams Family lived here—well, sort of.
It's only a painting, though based on a real
house in Los Angeles

What makes Hill House so deliciously spooky is the fact that we never see anything more explicit than mundane parts of the house itself: a door swelling and bending as if under pressure from some terrible force beyond, or malevolent faces creepily emerging from the patterns in ordinary wallpaper. These nightmarish inversions of the ordinary, unlike the explicit fare of slasher films, are all the more frightening precisely because they’re so domestic and familiar. How many of us, as children, didn’t see faces in the wallpaper? 

The fact that we never learn just what malevelent force stalks Hill House in The Haunting only heightens its stature as one of the spookiest houses in pop culture. Just as in real life, we aren’t presented with neat conclusions--only more unnerving questions. 

Ettington Hall: Not so scary in the daytime.

As Alfred Hitchcock once put it: “There is no terror in a bang, only in the anticipation of it.”

I BEG YOUR PARDON?

Nipple: Not so sexy.

What do the words nipple, flashing, chase and butt have in common?

That’s right--they’re all parts of a building.

As someone who’s gotten used to casually tossing off the many quirky terms found in building construction, I’m sometimes caught short by the sidelong glances of my clients, who aren’t always sure exactly what kind of anatomy I’m invoking.

Since contractor humor has presumably changed little over the centuries, I suspect that most of these terms harken from Medieval builders who, like their modern counterprarts, delighted in coining colorful or even risque names for otherwise mundane bits and pieces of buildings. 

Having used such blatant tittilation to draw your attention, I’ll explain the above words before I move on to a couple of other favorites.

• A nipple, as any plumber can tell you, is a very short length of threaded pipe. Back in the days when water pipes were threaded, plumbers had to make up all the long lengths on the job, but a range of nipples--short pieces in one-inch increments up to one foot--were prethreaded and kept at hand to save time. 

Flashing: Ooh la la...

• Flashing--which is a noun, not a verb--is a kind of sheet metal fabrication that’s used for waterproofing, typically where walls and roofs intersect. This word is just a shortened version of the original term, “flashing metal”, which better explains its origin--on a slate or tile roof, these pieces of metal were literally the only part that flashed in the sun.

• A chase is a vertical shaft, usually continuous through storeys, in which pipes, ducts, and the like are run. This kind of chase isn’t rooted in the more common word meaning “hunt”; rather, it comes from an Old French word meaning groove or enclosure.

Now that's a NICE butt.

• Butt—a shortened form of “butt hinge”--is builder’s lingo for the type of hinge typically used on a residential door. Curiously, butts are always counted like pants--in pairs. Hence, a door with a hinge at the top and bottom is said to have a pair of butts, while one with three hinges is said to have one and a half pairs.

And while we’re on some of the more arcane building terms, here are a few more:

Woodworkers go chasing this kind of rabbet.

• A rabbet is a groove or recess running the length of a piece of lumber. It has nothing to do with the name of the like-sounding animal, but rather is just the woodworker’s corruption of “rebate”, an old architectural term with nearly the same meaning. The exact same groove made perpendicular to the grain rather than parallel to it, however, is inexplicably called a “dado”.

• In construction, to “furr”--yes, it really has two Rs--means to apply false framing over a wall or ceiling, usually to hide something unsightly beneath. The word comes from the Old French “fourrer”, which has the delightful meaning of “to trim or line with fur”.

• A “sleeper” is one of a series of wooden strips laid down over subflooring in order to increase its height. Since this piece of lumber doesn’t have to do much of anything but lay there, its thirteenth-century meaning seems wryly appropriate: “One who is inclined to sleep much.” Zzzzzzz.