After “a simple organization and renovation techniques you can completely change the style and give a space a fresh and modern makeover.” The after  photo has the hallmarks of a fashionable interior makeover: designer furniture, an accent wall, useless empty baskets on shelves, and a mysteriously cord-free computer (this was a big hit in the comments).

Yes, it’s fresh. It’s modern. But what have we really accomplished here? Every last shred of personality has been stripped from the room. God forbid anyone have to look at family photos, or (even worse) books! While I might not have kept all of Granny’s furnishings, there is something wonderful about going into someone’s house and learning about him or her through the things on display.

Clutter can get out of hand, but Granny’s office was far from being an episode of Hoarders. There is a contemporary trend in interiors to put antique cameras and baskets everywhere, and to find quirky vintage items to “curate” (one of the most grossly misused words I can think of, of late). Why not actually put your own things on display? What’s wrong with a few of Granny’s framed photos and maybe some books you’ve actually read instead of empty white storage boxes? One comment summarized it nicely,  “Where did the books go? The shelves are now cluttered with tchotchkes that don’t serve any purpose.”

Hopefully Granny’s stuff was carefully put in boxes and it will slowly filter its way back into the office.

It’s been a few months now, but in July I had the chance to witness the destruction of one of Buffalo’s concrete grain elevators. Written about 30 years ago by Reyner Banham, and in the early part of the 20th Century by Corbusier and other European Modernists, the grain elevators on the Buffalo River are one of the world’s most important intact architectural landscapes. While many are currently sitting unused, their solid construction allows them to maintain their imposing presence even as windows get broken and their metal fittings rust.

I was initially alerted to the demolition of one of Buffalo’s elevators via the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s website but it was shocking to see the demolition actually taking place. The silhouettes of these structures are so seemingly permanent on the Buffalo landscape it is nearly impossible to imagine them disappearing or being altered, even when I consider all of the other important buildings I saw demolished while living in Western New York.

Grain Elevator Demolition, July 2011

Marine tower adjacent to the Wheeler Elevator, July 2011 (prior to demolition)

Seeing the gaping hole in the outer concrete wall of the building was a shock, knowing how quickly it was being demolished after standing on this site for 101 years. While the elevator complex being demolished is not the most architecturally significant of the structures that line the Buffalo River, the importance of the Buffalo elevators lies more in the complete landscape created by lining up a variety of these structures on a narrow river in the midst of an urban neighborhood. As buildings are demolished one at a time, the overall landscape is diminished- a landscape that is a testament to both the industry of the late 1800s and early 1900s and to the history of architecture.

Cargill Electric and American Elevators

South Buffalo Sunset, 2010

The elevators are not all empty, Cheerios are still manufactured here and Gold Medal Flour is still milled in the same building photographed by Erich Mendelsohn in 1924 (one of these is reproduced in Reynar Banham’s Concrete Atlantis). 700+ foot-long lake freighters coming from the west still dock in this port and occasionally make their way through the sharp turns of the Buffalo river, yet the glory days are long over. In 1900 Buffalo was one of the ten busiest ports in the world, despite its inland location and the winter closure of its harbor each year. Now it’s the 28th-largest in the United States.

General Mills Complex

On a positive note, I did visit a new public park that has been created on formerly industrial land across the river from the under-demolition Wheeler Elevator. By allowing people to enjoy the river and encouraging urban kayaking and boating, I can only hope that the appreciation for this landscape grows in the general public or soon it will be too late.

Buffalo River Park

Great Northern/Pillsbury Elevator

A view of the lodge from across the fields:

The sea nearby. The wind was blowing so hard I nearly lost the camera:

Portions of the lodge itself are going to be torn down as part of a development being undertaken by the new owner:

Even the public toilets are done in the “Sea Ranch style”:

From there it was south to Jenner, where I encountered one of the windiest beaches I’ve ever set foot on. There were seals with their pups at the end of the beach but I never got close enough for a particularly good photo. The beach itself is spectacular:

After an overnight stay in Guerneville, it was on to see Armstrong Redwoods State Park. The Armstrong Tree, the largest in the park, is one of the key attractions:

It’s a spectacular park and nowhere near as crowded as the parks closer to San Francisco (like Muir Woods). I assume it’s probably more heavily used on weekends or in the summer but if you’re in the area it is worth a visit.

The first stop was the Sonoma wine country town of Healdsburg for lunch. I took at look at the new H2 Hotel, designed by David Baker + Partners Architects of San Francisco (my former employer):

Several doors down you’ll find the Healdsburg Hotel, and eariler David Baker project:

Heading north we checked out the Quivira Winery, a biodynamic wine producer that is a big proponent of raising chickens and using solar power. The wine in the tasting room was excellent.

The town of Mendocino sits on a wind-blown peninsula. It’s beautifully preserved wooden houses are out of another era (thanks to the entire town being a historic preservation district). Our hotel was out of another era too: 1985-1987, the years “Murder, She Wrote” aired. The show was occasionally shot on location in Mendocino, which stood in for the town of Cabot Cove, Maine. Our hotel, while not authentically old, was occasionally used for filming. Their sign even reflects the fictional location:

For anyone who might be willing to question the hotel’s role in the production of the television program, I refer you to the wall of fame in the lobby:

The Blair House, the home where Jessica Fletcher lived on the show, is now a bed and breakfast with a suite named after Angela Lansbury. If you’re interested in buying this house, it is currently on the market for $1.65 million.

The thing I liked most about Mendocino (aside from the ocean) is the design of many of the old homes. While it is known for its Victorians, the “tower” style houses are far more interesting. They have a variety of different sizes and forms, but most have similar general proportions:

Another design feature of the town is its rustic yet carefully considered style. I love this fence:

From Mendocino it was up the coast to Manchester. Manchester? Yes, just like the one in England I didn’t manage to visit while I was living there. The California version of Manchester is noticeably smaller and more rural. There is also a large state park that is full of deer:

Across the road from these deer is an incredibly high-security facility known as the Point Arena Cable Station. This is the landing point for the fiber optic cables that cross the Pacific to Japan. There are a number of other cable stations up and down the coast with cable to a number of countries and Hawaii. This one ended up in Manchester because it is the closest place in the US to Japan. I was a bit nervous standing in the trees snapping this photo:

What else was there to see in Manchester Beach State Park? The spectacularly empty (of people) beach, of course:

Then it was on the Point Arena, home of this lighthouse:

Join me in my next installment as I share tales of Sea Ranch and Guerneville.

But what about the opposite view? Instead of looking AT St. Paul’s, what about the view looking AWAY from St. Paul’s? The path that takes one to the Thames from St. Paul’s is a highly-designed affair that leads down Peter’s Hill to the Millennium Bridge and the Tate Modern beyond. It’s a beautiful axial relationship reinforced through a clever landscape design by Charles Funke Associates that creates a variety of well-used public spaces. The long straight sightline afforded by this relationship allows the sort of visual alignment not often seen in London’s organic street pattern. Let’s take a look now- what is in this view?

The View to the Tate Modern from St. Paul's, now with Strata Tower

Yes. Strata Tower is directly the Tate. Not just any tower but a building voted as Britain’s worst of 2010. I’m not sure how I didn’t notice this before but I was quite disappointed when I did.

Facing a weekend with nothing to do for the first time in ages, yesterday I set off to see the newly refurbished Thornton Heath Library by FAT Architects (or, more formally: Fashion Architecture Taste). It was also a good excuse to venture south of the Thames, something I don’t often do. Thornton Heath is close to Croydon’s town centre, accessible by rail after a long Tube journey from where I live in Northwest London.

Like many parts of outer London, Thornton Heath has a scrubby (yet bustling) high street that tapers off into nondescript semi-detached housing as one walks away from the station. The library is located in the fringe area where commercial has tapered to residential, yet is positioned so that FAT’s cast-concrete supergraphics are visible through the forest of shop fronts on the high street (see photo above).

The original building was constructed as a Carnegie Library in 1914. Like most of these libraries, it was built with a formal front entrance and raised off the ground by a flight of stairs. FAT’s design reorients the building around a new glass-enclosed entrance pavilion with a highly visible public reading room inside. The accessibility of the entrance is made into a design statement, as the new wheelchair ramp intentionally cuts off the original entrance which now sits behind it and is stranded above ground level (cue up a Colin Rowe-inspired discussion of phenomenal versus literal transparency here). If I had one criticism of this part of the building, the glass balustrade combined with white concrete makes all of the leaves and rubbish trapped between them incredibly visible from the street.

The extension of the reading room allows the interior of the building to feel much more spacious that it must have in its previous incarnation. People were actively using this area, taking advantage of the comfortable and well-selected furniture to enjoy a newspaper and watch the world go by. The windows themselves are huge and divided by wood mullions that are sympathetic to the oak furniture and hardwood flooring. They are much nicer than what it typically installed on public design-build projects.

While the original entrance has been permanently sealed, the interior finishes and skylight have been restored to their original glory over what was originally the entrance lobby and is now a reading and browsing area. The incorporation of the original detail within the context of a vastly improved plan and circulation strategy shows the value of a carefully-considered renovation over a new-built library.

Aside from the well-chosen stand alone furniture, the furniture integrated into the shelves in the library stacks was a fantastic touch and very much in-tune with the way people look for books. I’m surprised this sort of arrangement is not more common, because it is ideal for browsing.

The children’s library and public meeting room are both located on the lower level, accessible by a delightful light-filled stair that hugs the original exterior wall. The children’s reading room opens on to a deck with a grassy yard beyond. Rather than simply denoting the space for children with primary colours and a ‘fun’ carpet, the room is well-proportioned and the access to the outdoors makes it a special space separate from the rest of the library. It was incredibly well-used on the day of my visit. I did not photograph the children’s library because, being an adult man with no child in tow I was certain it would raise some sort of alarm.

The one strange thing about the rear of the building was an American suburban-style picket fence that I can only guess was a Health & Safety inspired addition to keep kids from climbing the lush and inviting hill beyond:

Many older public buildings do not meet modern needs, but the sort of careful (yet not timid) approach shown by FAT both reinforces both the importance of building re-use and of the necessity for the involvement of talented architects in making great public buildings. Education Secretary Michael Gove’s attacks on architects for creaming off ‘huge’ fees on school design and refurbishment projects seems particularly off-target when one encounters a public building such as this that has benefited immensely from good design.

The Museum of Croydon

The Museum of Croydon is tucked away inside the Croydon Clocktower, a Grade I listed building built in the 1890s and designed by Charles Henman Jun. It holds a variety of cultural amenities and is adjacent to the Croydon Town Hall.

The museum tells the story of Croydon as told through objects. It doesn’t have many timelines, pictures or detailed maps (aside from one introductory display on land ownership and key roads) but instead is organised into rooms by era with corresponding items from the collection. FAT humorously labelled the entrance ‘then’ and ‘now’ which implies (unlike many museum displays) that there is no correct order in which you should view the displays.

The interior of the museum is very dark, which is accentuated by the grey matte plastic surfaces that mimic a variety of other materials like gilded picture frames or fabric. The objects are typically displayed in single item clear enclosures with a small and very difficult to read tag on each item. The descriptions border on cryptic in many cases. There is also a touch-screen display that accompanies each small group of objects, but the information on the computer mimics the minimal content of the wall tags.

The displays are well-designed, and as an ensemble the interior of the museum is gorgeous to look at. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like I learned much about Croydon from my visit. While there was some information about the Blitz, it was very general and didn’t go beyond the information you could learn about many other British cities during World War II. Similarly, the Commodore computer from the Croydon library looks remarkably like every other Commodore computer sold around the world during the same era. While I conceptually get the point about telling the story of a place through objects, I think its unfortunate that so little of the story of the place is really told here. Croydon’s high-rise skyline makes it a peculiar place and I’d like to know more about why it turned out that way.

The collection of the museum is not a shortcoming on the part of the architects, I think the Museum staff should have considered more effective ways to tell the story of the city through these objects. The abundance of computer technology within the exhibition spaces could allow for a much richer experience if more information was provided.

Additional photos for both the library and museum can be found on my Flickr stream.

Each is designged to challenge preconceptions about modern architecture and, with luck, win over sceptical Brits in the course of a weekend break.

Living Architecture didn’t go for half-measures: known as  ”The Balancing Barn,” one of the first buildings available for rental is a shiny-metal clad house cantilevered over a hillside by the world-famous Dutch firm MVRDV.  At £725 for a 4-night break (the Living Architecture website cheerily points out it only costs £23 per person per night), the house offers people the chance to try out a comfortable yet strikingly modern lifestyle. I’m not so sure that de Botton’s goal of luring the British public to live in modern homes will be very well-served by this tactic: it seems only those already enthusiastic about staying in a modern home designed by a famous architect will rent this house. At present, the company has four properties and  they are planning to build more, but it seems like a drop in the bucket if there is any hope for a mass conversion to modern tastes.

You would think that if only de Botton’s company could roll out the program on a larger scale, the cottage-loving public would change their minds about domestic architecture, but I don’t think it is that simple. While in graduate school I examined a very similar phenomenon that took place in post-WW2 America in a paper titled “Modern Motel Architecture: Your Night in the Future.”

While the motor inn had existed in a variety of formats since as early as the 1920s, it took its clearly defined form as the motel after World War II. With the expansion of the U.S. interstate network, staying at these roadside establishments became very commonplace: 59% of Americans stayed at motels while on vacation in 1955 versus only 36% in traditional hotels. How were these new motels marketed? With modern architecture.

The Tod Motor Motel in Las Vegas (2006)

While the signs announcing these businesses are often the most dominant feature, the motel buildings themselves were a drastic departure from the tourist cabins and traditional hotels that preceded them. Owners of these businesses needed to shake the “no-tell motel” image of the pre-war era that had been reinforced through popular culture. Hitchcock’s Psycho plays off of the public’s associations with run-down motels as a set up for the film’s plot with Norman Bates’s character living in a creepy old Victorian house that looms over its surroundings. Proprietors would use garish colours, large sheets of glass and modern methods of construction to set the modern motel apart from all forms of accommodation previously known to most Americans. Subsequently, the modern motel would be the first time most ordinary Americans would be invited to spend the night in an Architecturally modern building.

Motel in Reno, Nevada (2003)

Venturi, Brown and Izenour discuss motels in Learning from Las Vegas and categorize them as “Pleasure Zone Architecture,” a category with qualities that include “lightness, the quality of being an oasis in a perhaps hostile context, heightened symbolism, and the ability to engulf the visitor in a new role.” (1) LFLV also points out the role that this type of architecture plays in allowing people to imagine the future, claiming that “for three days one may imagine oneself a Centurion at Caesars Palace, a ranger at the Frontier, or a jetsetter at the Riviera.” (2)

Outside of Las Vegas, the buildings were smaller and a little less grand, but still communicated the idea of a better life through modernism as motels spread across the United States, following the new interstates. Steven Izenour wrote about this phenomenon in short workbook in 2001 titled “Learning from Wildwood” about blue-collar resort motels in Wildwood, New Jersey. Families unable to afford a trip to the Carribean could instead spend a few nights at a beach-themed modern motel on the side of a New Jersey highway with a flat roof and large picture windows.

Did Americans clamour for modern homes after experiencing the future in these motels? The short answer is no. While modern-lite ranch homes did become somewhat popular, they still retained many traits of  traditional American homes. Communities like Levittown in New York and Lakewood in Southern California were the real look of the future, rather than space age motels. Modern methods of production brought the factory to the job site, but the end product was more Cape Cod than Buck Rogers:

Levittown, 1948: the post-war American Dream

Modernism was a fashion of the 1960s, and it fell out of favour. In an interview I conducted in 2005, Victor Newlove (the third partner at famed Googie architecture firm Armet & Davis, later known as Armet Davis Newlove) pointed out that people tired of modernism just as they had tired of tailfins on their cars. Architectural historian Alan Hess ties the death of modern commercial architecture to the rise of  highway beautification and the environmental movement of the early 1970s. (3) In any case, the era was definitely over when McDonald’s started to build brown brick restaurants with over-scaled Mansard roofs in the latter part of the decade. (4)

I doubt the situation in Great Britain in 2010 will play out much differently, especially now that the recent modern-ish housing in most British urban centres has become associated with the bubble economy of the last decade. With the new government comes a focus on localism in planning policy, which doesn’t look good for those wanting to build modern houses not “in keeping” with their surroundings. It is hard to change what is perceived as a centuries-old tradition of housebuilding with a few nights’ stay in a modern rental property.

1 Robert Venturi, et al. Learning from Las Vegas revised ed.(Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998) 53.

2. Veturi, et al. 53.

3. Alan Hess, Googie Redux (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2004) 178.

4. Philip Langdon, Orange Roofs, Golden Arches (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986) 140-141.

Photo by Chris Juden on Flickr (Some rights reserved)

In the heart of the Cotswolds, there is a new disaster brewing every day.

Adding to the growing worldwide trend of building works by famous architects long after their deaths, Glasgow has a relatively recently-built version of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s “House for an Art Lover.” Designed in 1901, and built between 1989 and 1996, the project was originally designed for a German ideas competition but was disqualified for being submitted late.

With many of the interiors built from perspective sketches done by Mackintosh, the building presents an opportunity to experience a famous historical building that never existed (until now). What I found most interesting about the project was its context. While it is set in a lush park, the most obvious feature of the site is the artificial ski hill across the parking area.

Snowboarding on fake plastic “snow” at the side of a damp car park within the city limits of Glasgow is no more strange than touring a building constructed from competition sketches 60 years after the architect’s death. Both experiences require a similar suspension of disbelief and a willingness to admit that authenticity is not necessarily important if one accepts the limitations of the simulation.

Bruce Sterling lays out atemporality- we are at the transition into a new era. At the close of postmodernism, advanced societies are slowly collapsing (Gothic High-Tech) and others are chaotically rising (Favela Chic). This passage sums it up perfectly:

The situation now is one of growing disorder. A failed state, a potentially failed globe, a collapsed WTO, a collapsed Copenhagen, financial collapses, lifeboat economics, transition to nowhere. Historical narrative, it is simply no longer mapped onto the objective facts of the decade. The maps in our hands don’t match the territory, and that’s why we are upset.

Society is treading water. People will look to a variety of pasts, which Sterling points out we can see in fashions today like steampunk, and collage them with the present and the future. Atemporality will last ten years, and then expire- as something new will come along to replace it. Sterling’s point in this essay is that we should have fun with the era while it lasts. Why not live out your own future? Why not decorate your house like it’s 1750 or pretend you are an astronaut? You’re probably going to spend time unemployed as the economy goes through a massive restructuring and the jobs never come back anyway.

Sean Griffiths’ essay looks at 2024 and the state of housing in the UK. This prediction conveniently happens after the 10 years Sterling has allocated for atemporality are up. His predictions are based on a very similar scenario of advancing network technology and the partial collapse of the systems we have grown used to: travel has become prohibitively expensive, privatisation has taken over all aspects of government, and those that can afford to flee the city have done so as they no longer need to be there to work. Climate refugees have arrived from other parts of the world that have become uninhabitable.

Local communities become more tightly knit as people spend more time socialising in their neighbourhoods. The English front yard becomes a more social space, thanks to traditions borrowed from immigrant groups. The suburbs become far more diverse, and at the same time the loft developments and open plan living spaces built in inner cities in the 1990s and 2000s become filled by recent immigrants with multigenerational families who run home-based businesses: favela chic comes to the urban bachelor pad. Everyone is plugged into the network, yet technology doesn’t define peoples’ lives or surroundings. In fact, the housing of the 2020s incorporates many historical English traditions like half-timbering, shingles and bay windows while still accommodating subtle hints of immigrant cultures. Network culture is collaged with architectural ornament that references the Middle Ages.

What does all of this mean for your life? For architecture? We are already in middle atemporality now, as the pre-crash era was the first phase (Kazys writes about this here and it includes a video of Sterling’s talk). With the “age of austerity” already upon us, we are seeing the effects of massive unemployment and underemployment. Tonight the chairman of the US Democratic Party was on Jon Stewart’s show trying to spin the idea that we we’re in an economic recovery while Stewart repeatedly pointed out that unemployment is still over 10%. California, New York (and many other US states) are on the verge of insolvency, and a large part of Europe is still facing financial crisis. Dubai is littered with abandoned construction sites and record-breaking heat caused massive forest fires that rendered Moscow uninhabitable for most of the month of August. We are in for an interesting seven years, at least.

Griffiths’ predictions are interesting because they are so contrary to what we’re used to see architects predict for the future, yet they are also incredibly plausible. I can’t help but agree that the future will be filled with far more half-timbered suburban houses than it will be with descendants of the Burj Khalifa and the Guggenheim Bilbao.