The notable floor plan

13 April 2009 by 3 Comments

Friday we drove over to Enid, Oklahoma again to look at an almost perfect house — or so it seemed based on our understanding of the house in comparison to our needs.

washington

On paper, the property is indeed just right for us. However, when we walked through it yesterday we both realized this 1,900 square foot building had less space than our current 1,500 square foot bungalow.

Allow me to explain. We knew the second floor of this Enid house would be somewhat cut up simply by observing the dormers from outside. What we didn’t expect was a first floor that was almost as bad, functionally. The largest (i.e. “master”) master bedroom was off of the dining room, which isn’t too unusual in older homes but is particularly strange in this one. The only main floor bathroom is off of the kitchen. A smaller bedroom boasted a bumped out closet and doors on two walls, leaving about six feet of wall space for furniture, and the kitchen was hashed together indiscriminately.

Some of these problems could have been easily dealt with during the home’s recent remodel. Instead, the remodel apparently focused on utilities (with some obligatory new paint, carpet and kitchen cabinets). Most of the money the owners spent went into new HVAC and electrical. From what I could tell, the electrical was done very well, but this doesn’t make up for a poorly laid out interior space.

My wife and I don’t need 1,900 square feet. We don’t even need 1,500 square feet. In fact, to a degree the amount of square footage in a home is irrelevant,

if the home is well-designed.

The realtor said there had been a lot of interest in this house, from as far away as California, although we were the first to see it. I know that the house, with it’s chopped up 1,900 square feet, newer utilities and two car garage will be great for some family out there. However, I’m not convinced it’s for us.

Filed under Architecture, Basis for designing well, Design, Interior design

IAM Encounter: Billy Collins on subdivisions

9 March 2009 by 1 Comment

United States Poet Laureate Billy Collins read a number of his works during a plenary at the IAM Encounter 2009 gathering. I was already familiar with some of his work, though couldn’t have told you that without hearing specific poems.

His reading was fantastic, a very somber and almost monotone voice conveying common yet humorous observations. “A lot of poetry is born out of irritation,” he said.

One of his poems, The Golden Years, reminded me of a personal irritation I wrote about way back in 2006 in a post titled How to name a subdivision. In that entry I ask why subdivisions seem to be so randomly named after natural phenomena that bear no relevance to that particular location. Billy Collins asks the same question.

    The Golden Years
    All I do these drawn-out days
    is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
    where there are no pheasant to be seen
    and last time I looked, no ridge.

    I could drive over to Quail Falls
    and spend the day there playing bridge,
    but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
    would just remind me of Pheasant Ridge.

    I know a widow at Fox Run
    and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
    One of them smokes, and neither can run,
    so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.

    Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
    I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

The Golden Years is from Collins’ Ballistic: Poems (Amazon link). It’s well worth owning a book or two of his poems; I bought The Art of Drowning at the conference.

Filed under Basis for designing well, Community planning

Yellow is more yellow on the truck

5 March 2009 by Leave a Comment

For years — and years — I’ve had a fascination with the Yellow trucking company. This stems mainly from the paradox of the business’ name and color of their logo. The name is “Yellow,” but the logo is distinctly orange.

This dichotomy was probably a very intentional part of the company’s original branding scheme, for whatever reason. Even with this knowledge, however, the mismatch still bothers me — which very well may have been their reasoning.

Running to the post office today I spotted a Yellow truck sporting a new logo. This newer, slightly Web 2.0 esque design actually bears a tinge of yellow running through its core.

YellowLogo

I must admit that, yellow or orange or both, I approve of this new incarnation of the company’s identity. Alas, it’s apparently not going to last that long. “The trucks and trailers for Akron-based Roadway and Yellow Transportation will soon sport a new, supplemental logo: YRC. And at some point — the parent company won’t say when — the Roadway and Yellow names will be replaced by YRC,” according to Ohio.com. The following image from the Under Consideration blog places Yellow, Roadway and YRC logos next to each other.

yrc_logo

I’m not really feeling the new YRC logo; it’s trying to do too much, and the type seems unintentionally askew. I will be, in fact, sad to see the Yellow brand disappear. For whatever twisted reason, it’s been a part of my personal visual iconography since childhood.

Just for kicks, here’s a photo of the old Yellow logo from ToastyKen’s Flickr photostream.

yellow

Filed under Advertising, Basis for designing well, Color, Design, Siloam Springs

The mathematics of beauty

23 February 2009 by 4 Comments

Sebastian Smee of the Boston Globe penned a very interesting profile this weekend on one Horace Brock, an imposing man with five degrees under his belt including classical music, mathematics and economics.

Brock claims to have discovered a formula for beauty. From the article:

    What about this theory, then?

    In truth, it’s satisfyingly simple. Designed objects, Brock writes, can be broken down into “themes” and “transformations.” A theme is a motif, such as an S-curve; a transformation might see that curve appear elsewhere in the design, but stretched, rotated 90 degrees, mirrored, or otherwise reworked . . .

    Brock wants to be clear that his theory applies only to beauty in design – in other words, architecture, furniture, and other kinds of decorative art: “That’s very important – I wouldn’t want to claim too much.” But in his catalog essay he claims his account “makes it possible to clarify, and indeed to quantify, one of the deepest principles of aesthetics: People . . . tend to be bored if there is too much simplicity (the kitchen chair, certain Gregorian chants) and overwhelmed if there is too much complexity (pastiche Victorian furniture, much 20th-century classical music).”

    In his estimation, the theory also subsumes most previous theories of beauty in design – from Pythagoras’s golden rectangle to Hogarth’s “line of beauty,” from the celebrated golden section to the Fibonacci series – into a neat mathematical equation.

Smee probes a little and questions whether beauty can be reduced so simplistically to an equation. Brock is absolute in his response to the idea that beauty is merely in the eye of the beholder, “It’s absolute crap.”

A man after my own heart. Read the article in its entirety here.

Filed under Aesthetics, Art, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Design, Furniture

Alarm clock aesthetics

12 February 2009 by 4 Comments

I never thought it would be so difficult to find a well-designed — functionally and aesthetically — alarm clock. The two in our home now are both quite old, and some of their more basic functions recently ceased to operate. Thus we’ve been thinking about purchasing a new model for some months now.

I checked Walmart to no avail before heading over to Amazon.com. They have a large variety of items with competitive prices and a large number of user reviews. I was stunned at the hideous objects that resulted from my search. Apparently alarm clocks haven’t been redesigned in thirty years.

Of course, there are a few space-age exceptions, as well as your more expensive iPod ready fair with decent minimalist aspirations, in line with Apple products. However, I’m not so much into the coldness of the space-age aesthetic, and both of these options cost more than I wanted to pay for a simple alarm clock.

clock2

We ended up with the little clock above. It possesses all of the functionality we wanted, which was basically two alarms, a radio and the ability to set times both forward and backward. But you can’t read the time from halfway across the room. The time is backlit, and neither my wife or I can make out the digits from the bed to the dresser. Further, it’s quite bright and potentially interferes with sleep.

Oh, and the wife doesn’t like the looks of it either. I still contend it’s the best from among the options I found, but she’s correct when observing that the design is more or less blah, and that the white color pops whereas black would recede.

This is problematic. The little thing just won’t work for us, but I dread starting the seemingly futile search over again. I don’t need gimmicks, which there are an abundance of. I just want something that looks good and functions.

Perhaps we need to bring back certain principles espoused by the Bauhaus, where aesthetics were at least some part of industrial design.

Filed under Aesthetics, Basis for designing well, Beauty, Design, Modern culture

A modern home’s lack of foresight

2 February 2009 by 7 Comments

Last week — during and following the great ice storm of 2009 — my wife and I were without power for four days, almost 100 hours by her count. We learned very quickly how inept so many modern American homes are when it comes to, well, self-sufficiency.

We toughed it out for two nights, but after seeing our own breath upon waking the second morning we decided that was enough. The house registered 43 degrees (the lowest it would get, from what we could tell).

fireplace

Illustration of a fireplace, from the 14th century Tacuinum Sanitatis

Our little bungalow, like so many other American dwellings, lacks a fireplace (or wood-burning stove). Such a simple implement, a staple in buildings for millenia, and quite basic to everyday activities such as lighting, heating, cooking and romance and our little Hygge and Fika (as we’ve so named our cottage) falls short in this category.

Our American homes aren’t built to function without electricity. Sure we have candles and battery operated lanterns, and perhaps even portable heaters. But kerosene and gas heaters are supposed to be used in “well-ventilated” areas (which makes me wonder why I have one built into the third bedroom in my house), lest you die from carbon monoxide. A friend suggested that these function just to cut the chill. That is how I’ve used ours, but it wasn’t enough to cut the chill back from 43 degrees.

Why, pray tell, aren’t houses built in a self-sufficient manner? How difficult would it be to design for south-facing windows to capture the winter sun and westward eaves to eschew the summer heat? How difficult would it be to plan a home around a hearth? Even before my first significant brush with an ice storm, last week, I built these things into the homes in my head (if ever I get the chance to design and build my own).

The simple answer is that spec homes, which constitute the great majority of humble Stateside abodes, are built as money makers more than as places people live. It seems to come back, again, to the short-sighted culture we live in. The developers want to make money now. The buyers, first-time and otherwise, want the amenities their parents patiently waited for years to earn in their first home, even if it means the home is a cheap piece of poo.

How can we change this aspect of our culture? Please, let us change this aspect of American culture!

Image from Wikipedia.

Filed under Affluenza, Architecture, Basis for designing well, Community planning, Design, Disposable culture, Interior design, Modern culture, New Urbanism, Northwest Arkansas, Siloam Springs, Sustainable living

The real and the imitation

30 January 2009 by 4 Comments

Today’s post — The Truth About Materials — over at A Public Sketchbook is largely a follow up to my Autumn post Entropy, patina and the built environment. From the Sketchbook’s entry:

    The predominance of vision has effected the way we think about materials. As more and more communities employ “stampcrete” and if they can’t afford that, “stamphalt” in public spaces, the erosion of values is painfully obvious. The attitude of ”as long as that stuff looks like brick, it’s OK ” is exactly what got the ponzi scheme victims into trouble. Actually all the use of fake materials is sort of like a ponzi scheme–you simply put the day of reckoning off until the whole thing fails and at great expense you end up doing what you should have done the first time around. Materials carry memory, and the replacement of materials with facsimiles destroys memory, with it the hard won truths and values of our society. As an example I’ve posted two images of bricks one of painted stamped asphalt and the other of 19th century brick pavers.

brick_31-copy

    The inadvertent marks of the makers, of the hands that handled the wet clay can be seen in the lower image, the memory of the lives that made these bricks. The moss growing between each brick reveals an unanticipated symbiosis of inert and living matter. the bricks, slightly uneven gently accommodate the pushing of tree roots below without cracking or failing. The stamphalt has none of this capacity to hold time and life–no capacity for memory and for that matter, imagination. The fact that it is unsustainable and unrecyclable is no coincidence. Whenever we remove the dimension of time and the capacity to remember from materials, we fall prey to appearances and hidden costs, not only economic and environmental but cultural and societal.

Siloam stamphalt

Siloam Springs very own stamphalt, downtown.

Filed under Architecture, Basis for designing well, Disposable culture, Environmental stewardship, Handmade, Siloam Springs

Design Don’t: Hotel faucet

4 January 2009 by 4 Comments

This faucet graced a granite countertop in a Hannibal, Missouri hotel.

photo0064

The handles are poorly designed. They are very difficult to turn on and off, and they aren’t very attractive. Don’t design functional objects like this, and don’t purchase them either.

Filed under Aesthetics, Basis for designing well, Design

Conversant visual elements

20 October 2008 by Leave a Comment

I’ve had a bit of a difficult time getting back into Alain de Botton’s Architecture of Happiness after being back from my California trip. It may just be a lack of concentration on my part, and it may be that he seems to have wandered from his point a little bit. Regardless, on page 218 he pulled this of the hat: “We could say that nothing in architecture is ever ugly in itself; it is merely in the wrong place or of the wrong size, while beauty is the child of coherent relationships.”

This reminded me of two things, specifically. First off, my second year architecture studio prof telling us there is no such thing as a bad color. This was important to hear. My generation still held a grudge over avocado green kitchen appliances. Really, though, it’s not the color that’s the problem. It’s the application.

And it also reminded me of the alumni building on campus, the Wick Center.

I actually wrote a paper on this building as a young architecture student. It was designed by Gwathmey/Seigel in 1982, apparently a young firm at the time.

I learned that my grandfather had bid the millwork for the building (I don’t remember if he got the job or not). He worked in Lincoln at what was then Hoppe Lumber Company and distinctly remembered his impression of these young “hot-shot” New York architects who were calling for teak doors and window frames to be sealed or polyurethaned. Teak doesn’t take stain or poly, as some of you may know, because of the oils already in the wood. The wood evidenced this problem when I was a student at the university in the late 90s, looking a bit shabby as the coating peeled off.

There exist a lot of nice things about this building. The interior spaces are very nice, and I like the choice of materials — even if they were used in ignorance, like the teak. The plaza next to the building is marvelous, and I would cut through there as often as possible on the way to class to look at the sculpture or flowering trees.

But the structure also bugged me to no end. The facade is just off. Other than being utterly flat, the pillars are much too narrow. The proportions are way off, and whenever I walked by the front of the building I cringed. Herein the building lacks the coherent relationship of its parts which de Botton talks about in the quote above.

I can understand an artist or architect intentionally creating visual tension, which can work very well. But the Wick Alumni Center’s facade is a tension that doesn’t work. The pillars are at least half the width the rest of the building suggests they should be, and there isn’t any transition from their structural action into the rest of the facade. Yet, in and of themselves, they are fine pillars of an elegant brick.

Just not as a part of the whole.

Photo by Mary Ann Sullivan.

Filed under Aesthetics, Architecture, Basis for designing well

Personal Aesthetics: In shoes

22 September 2008 by 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to decipher what makes or breaks appeal in women’s shoes ever since I wed. For some reason that men just aren’t able to grasp (I think it’s tied to the static size of the body part in question; Cathy seemed to confirm this last week.), women are infatuated with shoes. Actually, it may be more than an infatuation.

My wife and I engaged in a discussion on aesthetics last weekend on the way back from dropping her crocheted bamboo sculpture off at a show (She won took third place, although she was more giddy about learning how to spin than getting a ribbon and a check.). Topics included shoes and the human form.

On shoes. I recently bought two pairs, one online and one on sale in Kohl’s. I hate buying shoes. I’m cheap out of necessity as much as thriftiness, although I don’t like spending a lot on shoes regardless. That’s limiting right off the bat. It’s also difficult to find my size — which seems to be the most popular size for men — on sale. Further, I really don’t like a lot of shoe design. I don’t like pointy toes. I don’t like square toes. I don’t like a lot of busyness, something that afflicts nine out of ten common tennis shoes in our day and age. I just want an elegant, durable and comfortable piece of footwear. Why does that seem so difficult to come by?

My wife possesses the gender-specific ability to very quickly assess cute factor in a shoe. Within milliseconds of viewing, a particular design will elicit a groan or a cocked head, sweet vocal affirmation and an adorable smile. What I want to know, however, she isn’t always able to quickly enumerate: “What qualities of the footwear’s design is she reacting too?” What makes it good or bad?

Back to my own recent selections. One of them she really likes, the other she quite dislikes (and feels free to tell me so every time I wear them).

This first pictured pair she does like. Apparently they are just loaded with cuteness (oh joy, just what a man wants to slip into every day), although she isn’t fond of the pre-scuffed look on the toes. When pressed for details, she specified that the wide laces are a most definite asset.

This second pair she absolutely does not like. Granted, I am not a fan of the black sole creeping up the toe, and don’t like the material of the black meshiness. She pointed to the mesh as the worst offender of this design. But overall, it’s a solid shoe in my opinion. I did purchase it more for function (no laces, good for cycling) than looks — in fact, this purchase was almost solely functional, although I’d never spend money on something I didn’t agree with aesthetically, so help me God. I suppose that’s a foreign concept to most females?

The debate here revolves around personal aesthetics as much as anything. Both my wife and I groan constantly when we troll the shoe departments. We inevitably end up suggesting the worst pumps or boots or sandals we can find to each other for a good laugh. It’s amazing to me the hideous concoctions people try and peddle in the realm of footwear. But it’s also amazing that such things keep getting made. If there weren’t a market (i.e., an aesthetic) for the 95% of shoes my wife and I love to deride they’d quit making the things.

Apparently there are enough varied visual values to warrant the continued production of 10 million new female shoe styles a day though. I don’t have a source for that number; it’s just my estimate.

Adding: At lunch my wife reminded me that I was going to post this in order to create a forum where she and others could interact with respect to the shoes in question, and any others under the sun. So please feel free to comment on why you do or don’t like the pictured footwear . . .

Filed under Aesthetics, Basis for designing well, Design, Feminine aesthetics

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