Array

Window mandates put safety first

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, November 20, 2009.

Last time, we talked about building code provisions that variously baffle or irritate do-it-yourself builders (and occasionally, seasoned builders as well). While some code requirements may seem arcane at first glance, most have a very simple purpose -- to keep you reasonably safe day to day, and possibly to save your life in a real emergency. There are still a number of different codes in use, along with regional variations (always check with your local jurisdiction), but most of them more or less agree on basic safety provisions.

By way of example, here are some typical code provisions on just one narrow topic -- windows -- and what they're meant to accomplish: more...

Building regs: help or hindrance?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, November 6, 2009.

"When I built my addition, the building inspector made me tear out the bedroom window and put in a bigger one! Personally, I don't think it's any of his (deleted) business how big my bedroom window is!"

I hear these kinds of gripes from disgruntled do-it-yourselfers all the time. Not to rub salt in the wound, but in most such cases, a passing acquaintance with the building code -- and even more important, an understanding of its intent -- would have saved these folks an awful lot of frustration. more...

Go green ... or else

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, October 23, 2009.

On Sept. 1 of this year, the European Union began banning the sale of incandescent light bulbs -- another well-meaning but heavy-handed effort on the part of EU bureaucrats to go green. This is the same government, you may recall, that blundered into requiring that 5.75 percent of its fuel come from biofuel sources by 2010 -- a mandate as ill-considered as it was premature.

Anyone who feels like tut-tutting the European nanny state, though, should know that, here in the good old free-market U.S., our own government is planning to phase out incandescent bulbs beginning in 2012. Rather than letting the obvious economies of more efficient lighting speak for themselves, Congress feels obliged to fine-tune America's buying habits with a sledgehammer. more...

Paying for an architect's brain

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, October 9, 2009.

A while back, I was half-listening to a radio talk show when a guest's comment struck me like a bolt from the blue. New York Times Magazine columnist Lisa Sanders, a practicing physician, was talking about the basic problem with America's health care system. What caught my attention was the following statement:

"Thinking, which is really what a doctor does -- thinking, examining, questioning -- is not valued by the system. We value doing rather than thinking." more...

Building materials stand test of time

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, September 25, 2009.

In architecture, the surest way to achieve a timeless design is to use materials that are familiar, durable and that become more beautiful the older they get. Not surprisingly, most of the materials that qualify have been around for ages.

Brick is a classic example. It's among the most ancient building materials -- the oldest known bricks, found in the upper Tigris region of what is now Turkey, date back to around 7500 BC. In all the intervening millennia, not much about brick has changed, either: Even here in 21st century America, where nothing happens fast enough, genuine brick is still installed at a relative snail's pace, one little piece at a time. more...

How right was Wright?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, September 11, 2009.

A half-century after his death, Frank Lloyd Wright is still considered the greatest architect America has produced, and all but indisputably the greatest architect of the 20th century. But how well have Wright's ideas stood the test of time?

Wright has long been faulted for placing aesthetics above practicality. Such carping has died down over the years, since in retrospect uncomfortable furniture or a cramped kitchen seems a minor price to pay for an architectural masterpiece. But it's also worth noting that Wright was the product of a time in which the most practical spaces in an upper-class home -- kitchens, bathrooms and the like -- remained the domain of servants. more...

Lofty ideal lost on developers

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, August 28, 2009.

A while back, I got a solicitation from a local real estate agent whose client was ostensibly in the market for a "loft." The agent described her buyer's ideal loft -- apparently without irony -- as having "at least two bedrooms, two baths, (and) 1,500-plus square feet."

I wondered why the agent bothered using the term "loft" when it sounded more like her client was really in the market for a huge condo apartment, if not a fair-sized house.

Webster defines loft as "an upper room or floor" or "one of the upper floors of a warehouse or business building, especially when not partitioned." more...

So you wanna be an architect?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, August 14, 2009.

At least once a year, some bright-eyed young student calls me up and, either out of academic compulsion or actual interest, asks to interview me about the architectural profession.

I can never say no to these requests, because I had to do the same thing when I was in school. But as much as I try to put a happy face on my profession, when our little chat is over, these kids always seem to leave a bit discombobulated, their image of the architect suddenly not so much Fountainhead as Mr. Potato Head. more...

A visit to Fadsville

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, July 31, 2009.

The other day I was rummaging through a local architectural salvage yard when, way out in one corner, past the rows of forlorn toilets and racks sagging with old sinks, I came across a depressing sight. It was a literal mountain of fancy whirlpool tubs, each of which some home-buying couple had once considered absolutely indispensable to their master bathroom. In reality, these tubs had been unused, unloved, and finally ripped out and given away. And here they were, a moldering monument to a silly but ubiquitous fad that's still with us today.

Dubious building fads are certainly nothing new. In tract houses of the 1920s, for instance, a separate breakfast room was deemed a must, even if many of them were barely big enough to fit a table, let alone four chairs. Upscale ranch houses of the 1950s, on the other hand, frequently boasted an indoor barbecue, a patently impractical feature that was almost immediately covered over to net more counter space. more...

High-tech turns parking into profits

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, July 17, 2009.

In cities from Chicago to Austin to Berkeley, old-style mechanical parking meters are rapidly being replaced by a new type known as a multispace meter. If your town doesn't have them yet, you'll be getting them soon enough. But unless you work for your city government, you may not find this much cause to celebrate.

Cities like to bill the new multispace units as being more convenient for consumers, but experience indicates otherwise. To park in a multispace meter zone, you walk from your car to the meter, which can be some distance down the block. Once there, you buy a paper permit imprinted with the expiration time. Then you go back to your car to put the permit in the windshield, and finally go on your merry way. more...

Steel gives masonry a run for the money

By Arrol Gellner, Monday, July 6, 2009.

For millennia, the only way to build to build a strong building was to pile up lots and lots of stone or brick, forming massive masonry walls that could hold up the weight of the floors and roof. This ancient approach worked well enough as long as buildings weren't more than six stories tall or so. If they were, the lower walls had to be made impractically thick in order to carry the weight of all that masonry above them -- the more stories, the thicker the walls.

By the late 19th century, when American engineers and architects began contemplating structures of 10, 15 or even more stories, the limitations of masonry construction reached a critical point. more...

Architects do more with less

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, June 19, 2009.

In 1978, the British architect Norman Foster was showing a distinguished visitor around the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, an innovative new art gallery he had just completed. Now, typically, such a guest might ask the architect about his inspiration, his design philosophy, or any one of a dozen more-or-less standard questions routinely fielded by architects. But this distinguished visitor was architect/inventor/visionary R. Buckminster Fuller, and the question he memorably asked Foster was this: "How much does your building weigh?"

What Fuller was driving at -- something he drove at in nearly all his work -- was the question of how to do the most with the least. His was a lifelong concern with energy and material efficiency, not only in the field of architecture, but also in engineering and design. more...

New Urbanism: more fluff than function?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, June 5, 2009.

The New Urbanist movement aims to recapture the best of historic urban design, and it's done much to help extricate our cities from the hyperorganized zoning and crushing scale of postwar planning.

New Urbanism can be considered revolutionary only in its return to common-sense principles: It acknowledges the idea -- so abhorrent to modernists -- that messy complexity is often preferable to the sort of desiccated order that's characterized most planning since World War II. It holds that neighborhoods should be diverse, both in planning usage and demographics, and that human beings rather than motor vehicles should form the basic metric of urban design. more...

When cast iron was king

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, May 22, 2009.

For millenia, the only way to create a strong, durable, and fireproof structure was to build it out of stone or brick. Needless to say, this required plenty of time, material and effort, not to mention a lordly budget. But for most of man's history, this tried-and-true ancient method had to suffice.

There was finally a tantalizing glimmer of change in this situation toward the end of the 18th century, when a material long in use for other items -- cast iron -- began to be used in building. Pound for pound, cast iron was much stronger than stone or brick. Since it was cast in molds, it could be cheaply mass produced. And lastly, cast iron wouldn't burn. more...

What gives home 'good bones'?

By Arrol Gellner, Friday, May 8, 2009.

Now and then, you've probably heard people describe some interesting old house as having "good bones." But what do they really mean by this? What gives one house better "bones" than another? The answer lies in an aspect of architecture that's little appreciated and even less understood: composition.

Many people assume that the way a house looks from outside is just the inevitable consequence of the room layout within. But this is a modern conceit brought on by the idea -- equally modern -- that "form follows function." For all the modernist talk about buildings reflecting their internal functions, though, modernist architects were even more attuned to the need for artful composition than their predecessors were. They were fastidious in arranging the purportedly functional features of those otherwise stark facades -- juxtaposing big window against small, high roof against low -- to wring more drama out of their compositions. more...

Columnists