Haiku for the book “From Bauhaus to Our House” by Tom Wolfe

The esteemed Tom Wolfe

And modern architecture

Do not quite square up…

“From Bauhaus to Our House” by Tom Wolfe (yes, THAT Tom Wolfe, the same one who invented the phrase “good ‘ole boy”) is a dripping-in-blood-from-the-fingertips diatribe against modern architecture, specifically the International Style. He simple hates everything about it, from its tenets (glass corners, flat roofs, honest materials, lack of color, expressed structure) to its theoretical underpinnings (really, he hates the simple fact it has theoretical underpinnings) to his belief that modernism changed architecture from a client-focused endeavor to an architect-focused endeavor (one cannot break with theory, after all…).

Tom claims that the International Style (so named because early practitioners from a variety of countries produced structures that looked very similar) has deep Marxist/socialist roots (a potentially powerful [and potentially hyped?] argument as this book was published in the heat of the cold war in 1981). The Internationalists set out to create a purer form of architecture unadorned with frivolous decoration. According to Wolfe, the Internationalists eliminated anything perceived as bourgeois from their structures. Decorative trim? Gaudy jewels of the spoiled princess... Pitched roofs? Crowns of decrepit nobility... Color? Garish badge of the boorish braggart...

Internationalists strived to strip structure to its pure and honest essence, all for the common man (and common woman, one presumes). Ironically, homes in the International Style tend to only be built and owned by the upper middle class or wealthy. As the internet-infused youth yarble these days: “FAIL.”

Wolfe blames the movement of the modern malaise to our American shores on the eviction of the Bauhaus elite from Nazi Germany (another reason for him to hate Hitler, I presume). Once installed into positions of influence by adoring fans, the Bauhausers set about Bauhausing the world. Mies van der Rohe, he of “Less is more”, the Sears (now Willis) Tower, the Barcelona Chair, and “My architecture is almost nothing”, was a leading lieutenant of this German architectural invasion. You can pretty much blame him for blocky glass buildings or, in Wolfe’s eyes, for ruining the world.

And while modern architecture is not for everyone, there is beauty there, both in the houses and in the ideas behind the houses. The Schroeder House, Falling Water (Frank Lloyd Wright’s [half] answer to International Style), the Mandel House, the Lovell House, and many others are quite beautiful and striking, in part due to how radical they were for their time and in part because they simply are what they are: sculptural works of art born from the hands of genius. Minimal yet artfully assembled. Unadorned yet adorable. Unfortunately, Wolfe doesn’t see this beauty among the blockiness, lost as he is, I imagine, in a bonfire of cubist bathroom vanities yearning bitterly for days gone by…

living room

Loving what this dude over at Wheat Ridge, 80033 did with his ceiling and wall in his living room...

the house we are leaving

This is the house we are leaving. The first house we've owned, we've been in it for almost 20 years. And it's a lovely place: 11 foot tall ceilings, old-skool floor to ceiling windows, claw foot tub, intimacy, and charm galore. It will be sad to leave this house: there are many good memories here. Spike Gillespie reading from her latest book, Kinky Friedman politicizing from our backyard stage, countless shindigs with green chile and margaritas, and, oh yeah, getting hitched in the back yard. Indeed, there are moments when we wonder "What the hell are we doing?" Hopefully happiness moves as easily as books...

Dollars and Sense: Part 3 of 4: What your location will support

Previously I’ve posted about Your finances and What you can build. This part is about what your location will support with respect to size and cost of your planned home. I’ve written about this topic before, so I’ll only summarize here and relate back to the spreadsheet I put together for the What you can build post. In short, it’s a good idea, as you design a house, to take a look at comps in the neighborhood on the size, total value, and price per square foot and compare them to your dream home (you’ll need to get these numbers from your favorite real estate agent or use tax assessment data [which is less reliable]).

If your planned house is a whole lot bigger and a whole lot more expensive than others in the hood, you might want to take a deep breath and reconsider. For one, the house may be a challenge to sell in the future. For two, if you’re needing to finance a substantial chunk of your project, you may not be able to find a bank willing to lend you the money (if the bank [or your mother-in-law] is holding the note, they’re at your side taking a risk on the project, so they’ll be looking at these numbers closely as well).

The spreadsheet I put together for the What you can build post includes the square footage of the house, total cost, and various flavors of price per square foot. For this assessment of what your location will support, I suggest you use the price per square foot (total)(includes everything) number. May you find the support you need!

sandcrawler, take 2

Here's the latest section through the sandcrawler. Not as cool as it was before with the mouthy balcony off the second floor (to the left of the solid structure shown above), but still cool.

After wandering about the Cool Home Tour and seeing a couple clerestories and asking The Architect about them, we now have one (easily added since we already had the double height space). I think all that was needed was a way to naturally direct hot air toward an openable window at the tippytop of the wall.

After further discussions last weekend, we're going to shorten the balcony that's shown (it feeds into the master) and reconfigure the sliding doors below (which go into the kitchen). This will allow the downstairs patio to be screened off with a retractable screen (added now or added later depending on budget...), allow a door from the kitchen to the bbq outside of the on-again-off-again screened area, and allow more light into the adjoining rooms, something I've been concerned about.

another brick in the wall

We’ve been discussing cladding, the stuff that goes on the outside of the house, with the architect. And there are lots of choices out there. If we were Steve Jobs rich, we would get something really cool like this underlain by a rubber rainscreen. But we’re not. So we must choose cladding for mortals. Like bricks.

And that’s fine, except that it’s relatively difficult to find cool icetones in bricks, especially locally. Elgin-Butler bricks comes to mind, in part, because I've toured their factory. Several years ago, a friend and I organized and published a geological guidebook that focused on the Sandow lignite mine and the Elgin-Butler clay mine (We filled said guidebook with photos of the lignite mine’s namesake, Sandow, a bodybuilder from back in the day. We’re pretty convinced we produced the world’s most homoerotic geologic guidebook.). So when I think of local bricks, I think of Elgin-Butler.

And Elgin-Butler makes beautiful bricks. Their clay is whispy light, and they glaze their product smooth as baby butt. Plus, they have non-standard dimensions (we like long and thin). Unfortunately, Elgin-Butler cater almost exclusively to institutional customers, and their bricks tend to be twice as much as standard (yawn) home-building brick. Yet the Butler bricks call to us (and, it seems, the architect). So we’ll see how the initial price estimating goes with the house to see if we can afford them…

Another potential local choice is Acme. Bummer of bummers, they don’t really have any good whites. The white they do have looks like it had a 30-minute tussle with a terracotta pot and a high school football locker room mop. And lost.

If we squint and peer north, Bilco Brick out of Dallas-Fort Worth might-could be considered local. They have a white brick, but in standard brick dimensions. However, maybe their bricks could be Frank Lloyd Wrighted to look more non-traditional and uberhorizontal.

The white bricks by Hansen called “Snow Mist” (that name fits our IceHaus!) are a definite possibility. These could also be pointed in the style of the Wright to increase their horizontal cool factor. In fact, these might be the same bricks used on a project our architect designed on Lamie Street, a hunk of which he left on our front porch today. Hansen also has a brick named “White Splitface” that has horizontal macrotexture (good for the caterpillars…) and, perhaps, nonstandard dimensions (3” x 10”). These bricks are from Mormon country, so they aren’t exactly local, but they are closer than, say, Australia, right? And both of these bricks are from their “Texas Collection”. That counts as local, right?

Addendum: The brick search continues… Snyder Brick & Tile Co. out of Snyder, Texas (famous among certain circles for “Mr. Peanut” [Yep, I've been there…]) makes a white and psuedo-blocky brick called “Village Frost Brickstone” that may be promising. Metro Brick and Stone out of the Dallas Area have several flavors of white brick: “White Ivory”, “Silverado”, and “Cottonwood”, among others. Going south of the border to Santa Catarina, Mexico (distribution out of Edinburg), there’s TecnoIndustries with some beautiful white brick named “Artic” with slightly longer-than-standard dimensions that also comes in a split face version.

haiku for the book “architecture for dummies”

is it a building?

or is it architecture?

“That’s my outhouse!”

I’ve been looking for a good book on architecture. And after reading this book, I’m still looking. But having said that, this is the best beginners book on the topic I’ve read. I don’t heartily recommend it, but I recommend it.

Needing something fluffy and fun to read at the beach a couple weekends ago and not wanting to partake in unrequited love between vampires and young girls from the south, I downloaded this book to my iPad, slipped said iPad into a Ziploc freezer bag (a trick of the trade!), and marched out to the sand and sea.

This dummies book is written by Debrah Dietsch, a trained architect who is now a journalist. Being blessed with ovaries, Debrah builds a pleasant female angle into what has been (and is?) a mostly male-dominated sport. I have several architecture books, but the often-pompous writing is too much for me, a simple soul searching for simple words. Give it to me straight, O Dummies book! And it does, albeit sometimes (too) brutally so (and with some failed attempts at hipness). Nonetheless, you’ll walk away with a frame and foundation, however shaky, of understanding.

One of the most enjoyable sections was a list in the Part of Tens section on the ten most fascinating architects working today. Not being immersed in the culture, I hadn’t heard of many of these folks, but it was a hoot to use the iPad to Google and explore their work (the book doesn’t have much in the way of images, so be sure to be near a surf-station…). One of the highlighted architects, Antoine Predock, designed our (Austin’s) city hall.

Another section I really enjoyed concerned post-modernism (what the cool kids refer to as po-mo), a style that causes vomit to bubble in the back of my throat, and various named contemporary styles (sensuous minimalism, deconstructivism) (side note to The Architect: Is our house sensuous minimalism?). And I’ve fallen hardhat over steel-toed boots in love with Richard Meier’s stunning you-can-have-any-color-you-want-as-long-as-it’s-white work that unabashedly steals from modernism’s roots. Without the Dummies book, we would not have met…