I was always interested in architecture. Building stuff. I liked small “a” architecture best. Little pink houses, for you and me. Vernacular housing for regular people is durn interesting in many parts of the world.
However, when you study architecture in a formal setting, they don’t give a fig for little houses for regler people. They like public buildings, big apartment buildings, office towers, and other big, honking structures. I’ve seen lots of examples of every sort of architecturally important structures from all over the world. Forever and a day, I’ve always assumed that the Sainte-Chapelle, in Paris, France, was, and would always be, the most outrageous polychrome building in the world. Boy was I wrong. More on that later.
First, let’s look at Sainte-Chapelle, shall we? Here’s a picture of the interior of the nave from their own website. See what I mean?
Ste. Chapelle is Gothic, of course, but the term “Gothic” covers a lot of ground. In France, there were four different eras of Gothic architecture. This is the best example of Rayonnant architecture I know of. Rayonnant is the third of four Gothic styles, and was superseded by the Flamboyant style, which is less flamboyant than the Rayonnant style, if you ask me. Flamboyant stuff was fascinated with intricate tracery and lots of weird ribwork on the ceilings. But laying on all the tracery kind of smothered the buildings. They begin to look more like coral reefs than architecture to my eye. Rayonnant minimized the structural stuff, loaded up with outrageous stained glass, opened up the interiors, and generally looked like you were standing in a kaleidoscope. Great stuff. Here’s another look at the interior:
I’ve never been there, but even in photos, it’s kinda staggering. When I was a kid, I thought I’d go there someday and stagger around in it, but it was not to be. I’ll never darken France’s doorstep, or their hotel towels. But I’ll assuage my disappointment with the knowledge that they’ve come in second in the outrageous polychrome dustcatcher sweepstakes. I’ve discovered the Meenakshi Temple in India, and it’s a doozy:
It’s a whole neighborhood of these polychrome whathaveyous. If you go over to the Wikiup, they’ve got hi-res images you can really zoom in on. That’s handy, if you don’t have any magic mushrooms and want to get transcendental anyway.
I dare you to got through the links and zoom in on the pictures. Here’s one. Monty Python’s animator has got nothing on these guys:
The interior of these shrines are another kind of outrageous:
Well, if I ain’t going to Paris, I’m certainly not going to Madurai, India, so they can rest easy. I will, however, scratch my head and wonder why anyone wants to see the Taj Mahal for its architecture when this place is (figuratively) right down the street. It makes the Taj Mahal look like the Garage Mahal, doesn’t it?
Postmodernism is a very important concept to understand. It’s also a very difficult concept to understand. It’s shambolic and protean. Organized mayhem. As soon as you start finding a method in the madness, the madness shifts. I’m most familiar with postmodernism in architecture, but it’s basically the American way of life in everything from films to fire hydrants.
Here’s the American Heritage dictionary definition of postmodern. I’ll grant you that it’s a postmodern dictionary that doesn’t feel very attuned to any American heritage I know about, but it will have to do, because I’m lazy:
postmodern /pōst-mŏd′ərn/
adjective
Of or relating to art, architecture, or literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying modernist styles or practices to extremes.
Of or relating to an intellectual stance often marked by eclecticism and irony and tending to reject the universal validity of such principles as hierarchy, binary opposition, categorization, and stable identity.
I first encountered the term postmodern because of architecture. It reared its confused, ugly head back in the ’50s, but it really didn’t get a full head of steam until the ’80s rolled around. It’s allegedly a reaction to the bland, featureless ethos of the international style. You know, this sort of thing:
So since 1930 or so, people had inexplicably gotten the urge to live in a simulacrum of a dentist’s office, like that one, and postmodernism was supposed to fix that. How? By copying Las Vegas, of all things. From the Wikiup:
Las Vegas was regarded as a “non-city” and as an outgrowth of a “strip”, along which were placed parking lots and singular frontages for gambling casinos, hotels, churches and bars. The research group studied various aspects of the city, including the commercial vernacular, lighting, patterns, styles, and symbolism in the architecture. Venturi and Scott Brown created a taxonomy for the forms, signs, and symbols they encountered.[3] The two were inspired by the emphasis on sign and symbol they found on the Las Vegas strip. The result was a critique of Modern architecture, demonstrated most famously in the comparison between the “duck” and “decorated shed.”
The “duck” represents a large part of modernist architecture, which was expressive in form and volume. In contrast, the “decorated shed” relies on imagery and sign. Virtually all architecture before the Modern Movement used decoration to convey meaning, often profound but sometimes simply perfunctory, such as the signage on medieval shop fronts. Only Modernist architecture eschewed such ornament, relying only on corporeal or structural elements to convey meaning. As such, argued the authors, Modern buildings became mute and vacuous, especially when built for corporate or government clients.
So the modernists got rid of all decoration. That was bad. The postmodernist decided to fix it by building everything to look like dentist offices only with misshapen and proportion-less classical elements stapled all over them willy nilly. Like this:
There are lots of ways I could think of to fix Brutalist and International style buildings, but Postmodernism ain’t one of them. It reminds me of this:
Because what we’re looking at here, really, is pastiche.
noun
A dramatic, literary, or musical piece openly imitating the previous works of other artists, often with satirical intent.
A pasticcio of incongruous parts; a hodgepodge.
I don’t know how many times I’ve tried to drill it into the side of how many people’s heads, but architecture shouldn’t accommodate jokes. Irony is mentioned in the definition of postmodern, you’ll recall. Architects don’t do irony. Architects aren’t supposed to tell jokes. Hell, a good architect probably hasn’t ever heard a good joke.
Making visually disturbing, disorienting structures might be fine for the Las Vegas strip, but it’s of no use to regular people living in regular housing. Back in 1920, people knew that architecture rendered in disturbing misshapen pastiche was appropriate for the set of a horror movie, not a suburban split-level:
Honestly, I don’t know why Frank Gehry doesn’t have to send a percentage back to Caligari’s copyright holders:
Lamebrains praise this sort of thing, because it’s wrong, and they love the wrongness of it.
Architecture had rules. The rules were based on three things: commodity, firmness, and delight, if you ask Vitruvius. They’re as applicable today as they were in antiquity. Does it accommodate the occupant’s needs? Is it sturdy? Is it beautiful? Everything is supposed to be based on the human being, too. The scale of it, the amount of decoration, the size of it, the effect of it. The commodity part also warns you away from wastefulness, as one of the primary occupant’s needs is to be able to afford the damn thing. And affordability also means adaptability. There’s an old joke that a bad doctor gets to bury his mistake, but a bad architect can only advise you to plant vines. Do-overs cost too much in architecture to start telling jokes in sticks and bricks.
Architecture shouldn’t be anti-human. But it is, now. The last stop on the postmodern express, where everything is just a jumble, and can be all decoration, or no decoration, swollen and misshapen and malformed is just fine, any old whichaway you feel like it, and the human beings who have to live and work in a structure don’t matter one bit, devolves into this:
Hmmm. “SIMILAR TO BE BUILT.” I know a threat when I hear one.
If I were you, I’d demand to live in a post-postmodern world as soon as possible. You can’t live in a regular postmodern one. They didn’t make a spot for you, or anyone else human for that matter.
If you’ve never heard of him, van der Rohe is the patron saint of Minimalist architecture. He, and his Swiss partner in crimes against humanity, Chuckie Jeanneret, have done more to make humans miserable than anyone since Deimos and Phobos.
Mies, as his toadies like to call him, is one in a long line of frauds who taught their acolytes that ideas are more important than people. If you run totalitarian states, ideas like that idea lead to mass graves while you convince everyone your ideas are peachy. If you’re an architect, people just have to live in the sterile concrete birdhouses you built for them, and lump it. Think I’m exaggerating? He built this, in Chicago:
The main idea, if you can call it that, behind “less is more” leads to all the botoxed Instagram strumpets on Better Homes Than Yours tearing out all the walls in every house they encounter. Less must be more! They’ve got weird ideas about how people should live, and ideas trump reality every time.
The central theme of the Minimalist movement is to remove all surface decoration, and when you’re done with that, get rid of anything that looks structural if you can manage it. Rohe’s most famous home is a double-wide terrarium in Illinois that no sane person would want to live in.
It’s underwater every couple of years, because on top of a dumb design, it’s built in a dumb place — a flood plain. Anyone trying to live in it would have to keep the blinds closed morning, noon, and night. You’d have to buy a thousand acres in every direction to get any feeling of privacy, but the house is surrounded by other houses. It depended on hand-waving fraud for its pizzazz, just like all modern architectural messterpieces. A house is a form of shelter, and part of the feeling of shelter is strictly visual, not just massive walls between you and the outside. A feeling of shelter is deliberately made impossible in that house. If you prefer to live like an ant with a demented child holding a magnifying glass over you, instead of a normal human person, Rohe’s your man.
I’m sure there’d be a line to live in it if it were for rent, don’t get me wrong. There are lines to get grommets inserted into your earlobes at the mall, too. The idea that you’d really like this house if everyone else on earth was dead appeals to a certain clientele. The architect blames society for looking into your transparent house, and global warming for building a low-slung house in a flood plain in the first place.
But my real beef with stuff like this is that it’s fussy. You heard me right. I’ve had a hand in building Minimalist houses, and you can’t believe how fussy a complete lack of ornament can get. Push past simply stripping all the trim out of a building, and go to work on hiding the structure, and the fussiness goes hyperbolic.
The reason that there is trim around your doorframes, and windows, and the join between the floor and the walls, is only partly aesthetic. It covers up the transitions from one thing to another. It’s the simplest, most inexpensive, un-fussy way to do it. It’s not just coverup, either. Done correctly, it appeals to a human’s sense of proportion, and safety, and color, and texture, and a lot of other stuff.
Ask a child to draw a house. They’ll draw a rectangle with a triangle on top of it with smoke curling out of a chimney, and a door and windows that look like the symmetrical features of a face. That’s because children are smart, and not jaded yet. Ask Mies to draw you a house, and you’ll get an abbatoir.
You can boil the trim in a house down to their plainest version if you must, but you can’t get rid of it unless you’re prepared to spend ten times what the trim costs. The construction tolerances for that human goldfish bowl he built in Illinois are space-shuttle-ish. It’s a complete waste of time and money and effort to achieve such studied simplicity and stupidity. There’s a reason why your iPhone costs more than a phone with a screw showing. It’s not a good reason, but it is a reason.
I’ll teach you, if you’re interested, how to spot something stupid masquerading as something simple. Simply look for this word:
Elegant
If it says it’s elegant, it’s fussy and stupid. Whenever you spot that word anywhere on the internet, just substitute “fussy” for it, and whatever you’re reading will make sense. If you’re a crank like I am, put fussy and stupid in there instead. You’ll never put a foot wrong with the translation.
Look at Rohe’s alleged masterpiece, the German entry for the 1929 International Exposition held in Spain, and generally referred to as the Barcelona Pavilion.
This might be the fussiest structure of any kind I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been around the architectural block, a lot. It’s in the running for the fussiest object ever made by humans, especially when you consider how useless it was. It’s fussier than the Chartres Cathedral or a Faberge egg. It cost a small fortune. Well, actually, a large fortune, and they demolished it right after the exhibition was over anyway. Why not? It’s useless, no matter what it cost. It turned into a place to get in out of the sun for people who grew tired of looking at more interesting things at the exhibition. You could have managed that with a canvas tent, a bucket of water, and some dixie cups.
There were a couple of Barcelona Chairs on display in it, which he also designed, and one lumpy statue, but that’s it. Barcelona Chairs got famous from this event. You can buy copies of them today, and people do. They’re elegant, according to their sales blurbs. They’re uncomfortable, according to my ass, but discomfort is a small price to pay for something that looks comfortable, but isn’t. Besides, did we mention it’s elegant?
Let’s take websites, for another example. Web designers are often asked to make the text “more elegant.” What this actually means in practice is “less legible.” The Apple cult has convinced the public that nearly invisible, thin, goofy fonts rendered in light gray text on a light gray background are not only easier to read, they’re elegant. They’ve also convinced that public that a wafer thin phone is elegant. I guess it makes it easier to fit inside the mandatory gaudy oversized ruggedized case, so I guess they’re only 99% full of merde.
On a good day, elegant is Brutalist, which is the opposite of actually elegant, and no way to live like a human being. On a bad day, you’re up to your shins in water, with your neighbors looking and laughing at you through your glass walls. Luckily, there are no partitions in your house, so there are no electrical plugs about to take water and shock you back to your senses. Keep living your elegant life, until you can palm your masterpiece off on the National Park Service. It’s the elegant solution.
[Thanks for reading and commenting. Please recommend Sippican Cottage to your most discerning friends, and all the rest of them, too.]
[Editor’s note: first offered in 2007. Look at anyone else’s blog from 2007. It all sounds like insane drivel five years on. We’re proud to only offer sane drivel here, year in, year out]
[Author’s note: There is no editor]
Could you take this picture in your kitchen?
I don’t mean are you baking your own bread, that’s unlikely now. But is there any place with a hint of the picturesque in your kitchen?
You cannot worship the god of hard surfaces and become the priest and priestess of the picturesque. The kitchen has become the altar of sacrificed comfort. Reject it. It needs to return to being a pleasant room with a kitchen in it, not a hole in your house into which to ram appliances and particleboard boxes. Formaldehyde! It’s what’s for dinner!
I will say before we begin that even poor people are generally well housed in the United States, and the reliability of utilities into every home like water, sewer, electricity, and so forth would be a source of envy for great portions of the world. We are not complaining here. We have been given the luxury of worrying about small things instead of where our next meal is coming from, so we can turn our attention to… well, where our next meal is coming from.
Let’s make a list of generalities.
The room has to be pretty big. We’re going to eat in there.
No low ceilings. No vaulted ceilings.
If you yanked out all appliances, fixtures, and cabinetry, would the kitchen be a pleasant room? If not, start over.
Forget row after row of cabinets. Add a walk-in pantry next to the kitchen and get rid of the majority of your wall cabinets. Add windows. The pantry can have all open shelves. Put a door on the room to hide clutter. Putting casework into niches in the walls, so the face of it is flush with those walls is dynamite. Look at the china closet in the second picture.
You need light coming in from at least two adjacent sides.
Make the sink and drainboards huge. Doesn’t matter what they’re made from Just plain huge.
Gang at least two windows over this huge sink, with a broad sill. Three’s better.
Never cook with electricity. Fire, baby.
Maximize the horizontal space at waist level with nothing on it.
Put dishes and glasses on open shelves, or shelves with glass doors. They naturally stack and display well. Keep things you use all the time close at hand. Don’t hide them in the endless cabinets.
Never ever show the side of a refrigerator. Any cabinet over a frig should be flush with the face of frig, and extend right down to the floor. Refrigerators used to be sleek and rounded and looked good standing alone in the landscape. They’re not any more.
Almost all kitchen cabinets are bland and ugly. Frameless cabinets particularly so.
Lower cabinets with doors are almost all useless. Use drawers below waist level wherever possible. Drawers behind doors are four car collision designs. Just have drawers.
All corner cabinets are useless. For all the money and trouble you go through to get your stuff diving off a lazy susan in there, or worse still, the floppy door with all the hinges that bangs around and pinches your fingers, they’re not worth doing. Have the corners boxed in and forget them. Use the money you saved to help build the pantry.
Never put the microwave above the stove or in the upper cabinets. Pulling occasionally superheated stuff out at eye level is madness. And you always want to defrost things while you are cooking something else. Don’t work over a hot stove. Put it in a lower cabinet and then your kids can make their own popcorn.
A cooktop with a separate wall oven is great. It was standard issue in tract houses in the fifties. Now it’s seeing a resurgence. Great. Gets the oven up where you can see it, too. But never NEVER put a cooktop in an island counter that humans have anything to do with the other side of, especially if people sit and eat there. Are you insane?
A real table that can be moved around and has fold up leaves that people can eat at in a kitchen is five hundred times more convivial than a counter. Make sure there’s room for the chairs to be pulled away from the table on all sides.
A door to the outside if there’s any way it can be done. A real door. No sliders.
Frameless cabinets look industrial. If you must go industrial, do it with some exuberance and get yourself a quilted chrome/formica/enameled steel/neon/Cadillac finned 1950s thing going on. Or an elegant 1930s Bauhaus modern if you can’t stand hominess. But eschew the brutalist concrete/honed stone/nuclear power plant plumbing/ expiatory chair look please.
Overlay cabinet doors are…are… Never mind. Face frames with inset doors, period. Nothing that looks like it was yanked out of a box and screwed to the wall. Make sure all upper cabinetry has some sort of cap or head on it. The particleboard stuff wrapped in woodgrain wall paper with bland overlay hardwood doors always looks bad. Your cabinetry should look like casework or furniture. And it should look good, or ideally better, after you use it and wear it out a little. You’re going to live in there, you know. If it relies on the look of pristine sterility, that makes you a bacillus in the body kitchen.
The day couples put a television in the bedroom, it signifies a fundamental change in outlook. Placing one in the kitchen is the same. I’m not saying it’s bad. It just represents the failure of the cook, the food, or the company to hold your interest. Just sayin’. But you need music. Plan for it early.
Well there you go. Go to the kitchen designer with this list. Bring defibrillator paddles. You’re going to need them.
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