China is a nation filled with ironies. It's a purportedly socialist state in which the images of Chairman Mao that used to gaze down from buildings have been largely replaced by an equally paternal-looking Colonel Sanders. And it's an enormously proud culture, but one whose ideals of beauty -- whether smiling women on shampoo bottles or virile men on packs of underwear or goo-gooing babies on diaper boxes -- are most often depicted as Caucasian.  more...

According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, the size of the average American house more than doubled between 1950 and 1999. From 1982-2004, the typical new single-family house grew some 40 percent larger from 1,690 square feet to 2,366 square feet. 

In the face of these increases, however, the size of the average American household has shrunk from 3.3 to 2.6 people. This seeming paradox betrays the trend toward ever-larger houses for what it is: a real estate fashion, and an irrational one at that. And like all fashions, it's doomed to reverse eventually.  more...

(This is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1.)

Last time, we saw how many well-known brands in the American building industry got their start through innovation and invention. It's a credential that many of today's reverse-engineered, flash-in-the-pan competitors can't lay claim to -- something to bear in mind next time you're tempted by a slickly advertised brand you've never heard of.  more...

(This is Part 1 of a two-part series. Read Part 2.)

Aside from my usual grumbling about Hewlett Packard products, I seldom mention brand names in this column. Today, however, I'm going to mention a whole raft of them. Before I'm accused of selling out, though, let me say that none of the firms I mention have paid me to drop their names, nor so much as taken me out to lunch. However, just for future reference, I could probably be easily bribed with a nice fresh rhubarb pie.  more...

A while back I was sitting in a cafe near a couple of freshly minted techie types. I happened to overhear -- OK, after a while I strained to overhear -- as one explained to the other how he'd loathed his Pennsylvania hometown for its stodgy work ethic, its Middle-American attitudes, and so on.  more...

People do lots of thinking when they remodel a bathroom. They agonize over colors, countertop materials, and choosing the latest lavatory sink, but too often they overlook the kind of improvements that would matter most.

Simply upgrading your bathroom with fancy fixtures and materials won't do a thing to improve its function. You'll just be trading a lousy old bathroom for a lousy new one. So make sure you don't miss these basics:

1. Don't rule out relocating a toilet, a sink, or even a bathtub if doing so would definitely improve the room's layout.  more...

In China, single-family homes are rare, and the vast majority of people live in what Americans would charitably call high-rise apartment blocks or, put less delicately, projects. As dismal as these may sound (and as dismal as they sometimes appear), the neighborhoods that form around these Chinese projects really work. They're far from tidy and seldom beautiful, but on the whole they're livelier, safer and more inviting at all hours of the day than any American equivalent. They are as successful as most American housing projects have been catastrophic.

Why?  more...

A while back, I stopped at a locally owned burger emporium for one of my periodic hits of cholesterol. The giant cheeseburger was stupendous, but the decor was something else again.

In architecture, there are few things as tawdry as yesterday's red-hot fashion.  more...

Cars can't help but affect architecture, as they constrain so much of what we design and build. We devote a big chunk of our homes to them, and build shopping centers in which a quarter of the space is for people, and the rest is for parked cars. Add up all this area given over to cars, whether moving or standing still, and you'll find that around 40 percent of our cities belong to our four-wheeled friends.

Of more pressing concern to humankind, however, is the fact that cars consume vast amounts of petroleum while pumping out vast amounts of pollution.  more...

There are three project ideas I hear from homeowners again and again -- probably because at first glance they seem like dirt-cheap ways to add space. Alas, all three are far from being the slam-dunks people think they are. They go something like this:

"We just want to move this wall out a couple feet." This idea usually reflects the hope that a modest addition will translate into modest cost. Actually, the opposite is true.  more...

While the field of electronics has made stellar advances in the past half century, electrical systems for homes, like so many other aspects of building, have remained firmly mired in the 19th century.

Other than adjusting to our seemingly boundless appetite for energy -- the average electrical capacity of our homes has increased tenfold in the past century -- the apparatus of home electrical systems has changed so little that Edison would easily understand it.  more...

Over a century ago, American builders began using a remarkable mineral product. Being mined from a type of serpentine rock, it was natural, abundant and easy to produce, yet its unique properties made it almost limitlessly useful. It was resistant to chemicals and intense heat. It was an excellent electrical and thermal insulator. Out of its fibers, you could weave a cloth that wouldn't burn.  more...

Not long ago, in a pleasant, Sixties-era neighborhood of California ranchers, I came across a renovated house that looked all too familiar. The owner had replaced the original front doors, all the windows and the garage door in a style that could most kindly be described as Home Depot Eclectic.

To begin with, there was a huge, modernistic vinyl picture window.  more...

Hardly a day goes by that I don't get a news release from some public relations firm touting their client's latest ersatz Tuscan villas, or some decadent new cook stove for people with too much money. Nowadays these promotions arrive by the Internet instead of by mail, which no doubt saves those PR folks lots of money.  more...

Every so often, there's a brief span of years in which innovation comes thick and fast. In the area of building technology, the Roaring '20s was such an age. The houses of this decade were chock full of new ideas that, quaint as they seem to us now, let Americans live more comfortably than ever before.

The homes of the 1920s were, for one, the first to truly integrate electricity. In prior years, clumsy surface installations of switches and wiring were still common, along with lighting fixtures that often consisted of little more than a naked bulb at the end of a cord.  more...