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Making Better Architecture
A recent comment by Ricochet member extraordinaire James Lileks discussed an article from Forbes which stated “Frank Gehry, the world’s most famous architect, recently said that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure [crap]. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else.”*
The Forbes article continues with “insulated architects are “increasingly incapable … of creating artful, harmonious work that resonates with a broad swath of the general population, …this has been a problem for over forty years, and that things are even worse today.” The article also shows a pretty “Katrina cottage” vs. another modern monstrosity in New Orleans. As we have little power over what’s chosen by politicians, we can (still) choose our residence to reflect both our needs and wants.
When I was young, I enjoyed drawing superhighway exchanges and houses, so I thought of becoming either a Civil Engineer or an Architect. My older cousin went to a special four-year program at Michigan State University in Architecture Engineering but then became an Urban Planner instead. After I graduated with a Computer Science degree in Engineering, my Architect dream never faded, and within ten years I designed the first of two houses.
I spent many nights and weekends not only drafting plans but also learning about all the subsystems (Electrical, Plumbing, Heating/Air Conditioning, etc.) and construction details. The two-story house was ”solar ready,” with a 45-degree pitched roof on the south side and three bedrooms upstairs. The first floor had a bedroom/office with a full bathroom for guests or special needs. The downstairs Family Room and upstairs Master Bedroom both had a fireplace within a common wall. For the façade, I found a modern design with an extended stone wall (a required covenant) to help hide the outside air conditioner unit. After making mistakes on the first house, I returned six years later with a bigger house and better floor plan, and tackled designing the façade. It was also “solar ready,” trying to anticipate future modifications.
Like fashions, house designs go through fads. In the 1970s, houses had intercom systems that played music and also incorporated the doorbell. Upscale, one-story houses in Texas included “conversation pit” in front of the fireplace. Frank Lloyd Wright developed this idea before World War II, but it wastes space by being inflexible. Since then, we’ve gone through the McMansion stage, where people buy the biggest house to sell later at a profit. The present Open Floor Plan (Kitchen, Dining, Family) tries to compensate for smaller houses, but it mimics the 1930s Usonian homes of Frank Lloyd Wright and others. In my daughter’s apartment, the noise from the kitchen made it difficult to listen to the TV or read a book, so another enclosed room is still needed.
If you want help designing your home, I recommend reading the following:
A Pattern Language “The wonderful places of the world were not made by architects, but by the people.”
I especially liked the first book, as it gives templates such as a “sheltered entrance with a sitting space” (e.g. a short wall) as an example. In Georgian architecture, the “five (widows) over four with a door” is pleasing, but it doesn’t have an entry sitting space and sometimes not even a roof for the rain. Georgian designs work in London’s tight city streets by reducing the exterior entry space.
The second book was written by an architect who adds functionality with less space. Because so few homes are custom designed, her experience tends to be very upscale. From Goodreads with a positive and negative comment:
What a concept. Small is beautiful. And yet we continue to build MacMansions. This book made me rethink what I want and need in daily living. I guess I am not alone because Susanka has spun off about a dozen books reflecting this sensible concept. “Return to Simplicity” is now my mantra.
The biggest challenge was the totally open floor plan, with kitchen, living room, and dining room all in one rectangular space that didn’t lend itself to built-in dividers such as ceiling beams or bookshelves;
Even after designing two houses, I still have the bug and have purchased a half-acre lot. The present design is focused around a south-side sunspace. The main rooms (Family, Room, Nook, Kitchen, and Master Bedroom) share solar heat in the winter and cross ventilation during the summer. The small Living Room is isolated using doors and can become a fourth bedroom. Removable panels allow Dining Room adults visual contact with children in the Nook, with hot and cold food areas around the oven. It’s designed to be Americans with Disability Act (ADA) ready, with the large lot and “reasonable” size/cost appealing to young families.
Do you have comments on good/bad house designs throughout the years? Is a smaller house with more architecture details better than more space? Do you think the Open Floor Plan is a fad again?
* Gehry’s designs like the Walt Disney Concert Hall above (one of his “best”) still put him in the 98 percent yuk category. Gehry’s design method has been satirized as “dropping sugar cubes on the floor, throwing water over them until they mold into an interesting shape” and then drawing the result, as shown in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology building on the right. In Architecture, form follows function is not an absolute, but it is a good starting point.
Published in Group Writing
No. Brutalists have better taste and more color.
And I thought the Clinton Library was bad:
Actually, look at it again. Someone else saw this when the design was first unveiled:
Wow, that one looks like an elongated Moving & Storage PODS.
I’m thinking more this:
A fitting tribue to an effete narcissist, the worst president in US history.
My main complaint with open concept is that I don’t want my kitchen in my living room. Eat in kitchen is great, dining room is nice if you have family over – but my cooking is smelly and smoky and greasy. All that crud gets into the air and into upholstery, wood surfaces, knickknacks, and books. It can be hard to keep up with keeping everything clean.
I agree with the comment about having more space up north when you can’t be outside. I love my three-season porch (although in MN it’s more of a one and a half season porch). We open all the screened windows and use it as a sleeping porch all summer – it’s very relaxing and no mosquitos (pretty cool during a thunderstorm, too).
Yes, Obama building is destined for the recycling bin!
Effete. An interesting choice of words to describe our former Leftist President. I always thought he was a wimp, but I never heard any pundits criticizing him for that. Black men generally don’t like wimpy guys and I was always puzzled by the support they gave him. My guess is that his race was a far more important issue to them.
This is the same reason I surmise, that so many Black Men have turned to support President Trump. For all his faults and conservative policies, he exudes manliness and decisiveness.
Known in the trade as a 12:12.
They did popcorn ceilings because it was cheaper than having the sheetrock finishers give it a smooth finish.
My wife and I designed the house we live in now, and the one we’re fixing to build. In our present house, every bedroom has a walk-in closet, and there’s a pantry and storage under the stairs (plus an unfinished attic full of junk). The kitchen, breakfast room and family room are open plan, and there’s an isolated sort of formal dining room and parlor (we figured the kids might want private space for dates). The man cave is over the garage, a lot of room I’m going to hate to give up when we build the new house, but construction is expensive now. We had to downsize a lot. But the new design is all on one floor, an attribute that’s becoming more important.
It kinda gives me a Death Star vibe:
Our house is a log home built in 1803. The original structure was what is called a 2-pen construction. That is, it is built in two parts in order to minimize the length of the beams that were needed. There were 4 rooms, 2 downstairs and two upstairs. The kitchen was in a separate building called the “summer kitchen” and there was no internal plumbing. Originally, there were doors to close off every room – I assume so that only a minimum amount of heat would be necessary. Recent additions have added closets and an upstairs bathroom that makes an airplane lavatory look spacious. A kitchen/dining room and screened in porch were also added as well as an open porch on the other side.
In spite of the small size, it seems we spend most of our time in two rooms – the kitchen and sitting room. There isn’t much wall space for a large screen TV, but that is fine with us. Our relatively small TV is hidden in an antique armoire and we rarely watch it.
We would love build an addition which would provide living space on the first floor, but problems going through the log walls and the layout of the property make that nearly impossible.
I was always partial to the WJ Clinton Library and Double Wide Trailer….
I love the way the design incorporates the inevitable Hillary Clinton Presidential Wing.
oops.
I liked a design feature some neighbors put into their then-new house near Rochester (NY) for their then-teenaged children – an open and wide stairway from the kitchen down to the finished basement (rather than the typical narrow stairs hidden behind a door). The kids socializing in the basement did not have mom and dad in view, but mom and dad could hear what was going on.
Plus, the kids had ready access to the kitchen for food. The parents ensured there was always a supply of teen-friendly food in the kitchen so their house became the go-to place for their kids and the kids’ friends.
Ooh! Ooh! Double-pen log houses are the best. I assume that yours has a central stair hall, no?
I’d agree with Frank Gehry’s statement. It’s a pity he hasn’t taken his own advice.
I have no objection to “open concept” plans per se. (Greene and Greene managed quite well, I think.) I do object to the wanton destruction of walls and woodwork — something converting a “closed” plan to an “open” plan all but requires.
. . .
Modern architecture’s single greatest problem, in my opinion, is its stubborn refusal to take ornamentation seriously. There’s a reason why Angkor Wat, Mayan temples, Roman baths, Gothic cathedrals, and Islamic mosques — different buildings designed in different times for different people — all make use of it. One of architecture’s great achievements was its democratizing of an aesthetic once reserved solely for monumental buildings. (Ordinary Mayans didn’t live in stone structures festooned with serpents, nor did ordinary Greeks live in homes with pediments and columns; but an ordinary American might well have a temple of his own.) Alas, we’ve squandered this achievement.
Ornamentation costs money. The house we’re getting ready to build will be as plain as possible.
Utilitarianism has forced beauty to take a back seat these days, but here and there somebody builds a beauty.
Yes. But this needn’t be the case. People are trained not to give a darn about aesthetics, and the market responds accordingly.
There’s no good reason, in a country as wealthy as ours, why the market couldn’t supply such a thing at a reasonable price.
I think you’re wrong about that. Labor is the killer.
Yes – it still has two doors at the top – one to the right hand bedroom and one to the left. Originally, it also had a door at the bottom. The massive fireplace is in one of the downstairs rooms and that room could be shut off from the rest of the house. Of course, more recent modifications have changed all of that. Which is fine until we lose power, in which case, I would like the original setup back.
I think it is just a matter of priorities. In the early 1900’s houses were more ornamental in an era when Americans were less than half as rich as they are now. People today are willing to settle for less beauty if they can get more space.
Not all ornamentation has to be hand-crafted.
With all the mass production these days, things like complex moldings and trim are incredibly cheap.
“Frank Gehry, the world’s most famous architect, recently said that “98% of everything that is built and designed today is pure [crap]. There’s no sense of design, no respect for humanity or for anything else.”
It’s odd, I often find myself agreeing with much of what I hear Gehry say, but I’m not a fan of his work. It just feels… whimsical, I guess. And in a way that isn’t cohesive or thematic. Just haphazard. I did see the Disney Concert Hall up close recently — not the interior, but I walked around in the various public spaces and mezzanine outside. I enjoyed the sheer spectacle of it, and was impressed with it as an engineering feat, but I think 20-30 years from now it’s going to feel very sad and dated.
Right next door is an interesting contrast — the Broad Museum, which is a contemporary twist on those conservative, boxy midcentury buildings, complete with a light-filtering facade. I like it better than Gehry’s building… it has some interesting whimsical details, but at least it feels cohesive. And a little more welcoming. (when the “giant cheese grater” nickname caught on, I think it signaled a grudging respect for the place)
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I was very lucky to have lived in a Louis Sullivan house for several years when I was young; I wish there were more examples of his work still around. I’m impressed at how monumental his structures could be, yet still have a kind of warmth and human scale to them.
But the labor of the people who can put it up and make it look right isn’t.
You do have a point about labor. Carpenters and construction workers demand much more pay than they did a century ago, not just because of inflation. It used to be considered more menial work than it is now, because more men were “handy” back then. But I still think tastes have changed, and poorer people are able to afford homes. To enable that, they cut out any of the extras. Then again, even people with money cut out a lot of the extras as evidenced by that Clinton dumpster library. The architect probably cost them more than any ornamentation would have, and they probably wasted their money on him.