Monthly Archives: August 2014

McMansions show disconnect between “worker[s] and automated tool[s]”

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A new book suggests McMansions are the result of automated home design:

The author of the new Building a Timeless House in an Instant Age is well-qualified to criticize. He’s a nationally recognized authority on historic design, and architecturally correct moldings and millwork. From 1991-93, he attended North Bennett Street School in Boston, the nation’s oldest trade school – one that’s evolved into jewelry making, bookbinding and museum-quality historic preservation…

“If you look at the Pyramids, you understand the Egyptians by what they were building,” he says. “McMansions are not really what we want to say about ourselves.”

They are the products of a mechanized disconnect between worker and automated tool, even between architect and computer. “Most architects draw by hand and then enter the drawing into AutoCAD, and there’s a separation between the hand and the head,” he says. “It’s the same thing with craftsmen looking at their computer while a router cuts the wood.”

What’s lost is the classical sense of scale and proportion – and a cultural heritage.

“There’s a separation that’s taking place that’s not good for us – we’re falsely assuming that were improving as we go to AutoCAD,” he says. “The beauty is in the human quality of the hand-cut piece, but a machine puts an impersonal imprint on that.”

It sounds like this is less about McMansions and more of a critique of automation and mass production. McMansions may be the symptom of mass produced homes but they weren’t the first. Similar complaints were leveled against the Levittowns and early mass suburbs which were viewed as too uniform. Those early mass homes were partly the result of changing technology: earlier American homes were built with beams, requiring heavier pieces of wood, and constructed mostly by small-scale builders or the homeowners themselves. The balloon-frame home opened things up to mass production since it relies on uniform pieces of wood.

At the same time, balloon-frame homes don’t necessarily have to be built to look like or to be the size of McMansions…

Mismatches in sociology grad student interests, job openings – 2013 edition

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The ASA reports more job openings in sociology in recent years but the interests of sociology PhD graduates and the specializations of the new jobs don’t always line up. Here is part of the full table from the report (page six):

 

ASAJobAreas2013

There is some overlap here with most categories represented on both sides. However, other areas have some bigger differences:

1. Methodology – research methodology with 50 jobs and quantitative methods with 47 jobs and only 5 students with an interest in quantitative methodology. 23 jobs with statistics and 5 students. The figures for jobs in qualitative methods or ethnography better match the number of jobs available.

2. Another area of difference is criminology or criminal justice: 89 jobs in crime/delinquency and 70 in criminal justice with 66 students in criminology.

3. Sex and gender is particularly popular among students (108 interests) while only 31 jobs. (Granted, certain topics – like race, class, and gender – can easily cut across other subfields.)

4. Education has 83 students and 9 jobs.

This isn’t a complete analysis and these are the areas that struck me. Looking at methodology, it is a reminder that being interested in methods goes a long way on the job market as departments need people who can teach these skills and work with students in these areas.

Architecture students also required to take sociology

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If pre-med students have to take a sociology course, why not architecture students?

FOA principal Jagbir Singh told TOI that the need for study of sociology was felt to inculcate sensitivity among students to better understand needs of the society.

“Students should not merely understand the needs of the client but also be sensitive towards the latter. The psychological aspect should also be covered while talking to the client,” said Singh.

The 50-mark paper is divided into two equal parts comprising session and main examination. The course will carry two credits. The objective is to familiarise students with basic concepts, theories and issues of sociology and its relevance to architecture. The course curriculum will have six modules covering the basic concepts and teaching students about the social aspects.

Architecture is more than just creating a beautiful space or a functional design. Real people use buildings and spaces so considering their beliefs and behaviors a bit more could lead to designs that work better for people’s lives.

It would be interesting to then see how architecture students use the sociological information in their architecture studies and in their careers. What exactly do they retain and put into practice? It would also be interesting to compare buildings and spaces constructed with explicitly sociological ideas versus those motivated by different ideas.

“The Suburbs Made [Americans] Fat”

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A new study suggests the design of streets in suburbia contributed to heavier residents and other adverse health outcomes:

In prior research, Marshall told me, they found that in the most extreme cases “older, denser, connected cities were killing three times fewer people than sparser, tree-like cities on an annual basis.” Of course, people walk and bike more in dense cities, but the research on actual ties to health outcomes is scant. So Garrick and Marshall took on and have just completed a large study of how street networks might influence our health.

They looked at the three fundamental measures of street networks—density, connectivity, and configuration—in 24 California cities, and compared them with various maladies. In the current Journal of Transport and Health, Garrick and Marshall report that cities with more compact street networks—specifically, increased intersection density—have lower levels of obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart disease. The more intersections, the healthier the humans…

Garrick and Marshall have also previously found that people who live in more sparse, tree-like communities spend about 18 percent more time driving than do people who live in dense grids. And they die more readily—despite old research that implied otherwise. Studies from the 1950s looked at safety in cul-de-sacs and found, as Marshall put it, “You’ll have fewer crashes in the cul-de-sacs. Sure, you’re safer if you never leave the cul-de-sac. If you take into account the entire city, your city might be killing more people.”…

They also found that wide streets with many lanes are associated with high rates of obesity and diabetes. That’s most likely indicative of, as Garrick and Marshall put it, “an inferior pedestrian environment.” Similarly, so-called “big box” stores in a neighborhood indicate poor walkability and are associated with 24.9 percent higher rates of diabetes and 13.7 percent higher rates of obesity.

Dense cities promote walking and biking, so the push for healthier cities fits with the vogue push for active lifestyles—as opposed to gym routines smattered across an indolent existence. Physical activity is not just concerted exercise time and deliberate recreation. It’s about ways of life. For some people, that’s best accomplished by making things inevitably more difficult on themselves in everyday life.

This seems to make some intuitive sense though there are lots of factors likely involved. I’m thinking of Putnam’s Bowling Alone which highlighted a whole range of factors that contributed to decreased civic engagement including sprawl and the rise of television.

But, if such research holds up – and even if it takes some time to confirm things and reach a consensus – such findings could lead to a new/forgotten dimension of selling places and new developments. Part of the appeal of emerging suburbs in the mid-1800s was getting away from the dirty city, a place that was increasingly seen as physically and morally corrupt. Developers sold the suburbs as getting back to cleaner settings that were closer to nature. This research would flip this idea: cities and more urban places promote more movement and better overall health. I imagine anti-sprawl advocates like the New Urbanists would want to jump all over this and add it to their lists of reasons why American sprawl should be halted.

Chicago Lucas museum to have to deal with garbage underneath

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Chicago may have a beautiful waterfront but plans for the Lucas museum provide a reminder of how that land was acquired: garbage.

“Any design will account for existing environmental issues and be built accordingly,” an Emanuel spokesman said. “The mayor has been clear. No public dollars will be spent on construction of the Lucas museum.”With Emanuel’s backing, Lucas is proposing a five-acre museum nestled on 17 acres of Chicago parkland just south of Soldier Field. But what’s buried below the surface of the site is nasty stuff. An analysis for the renovation of Soldier Field and the land around it more than a decade ago found potentially cancer-causing chemicals in the soil near the stadium, according to a site inspection report filed with the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency…

The contamination discovered around Soldier Field is believed to be the byproduct of burning wood, coal and other materials. Embankments, parking lots and other paved surfaces around the stadium serve as barriers eliminating human exposure to the buried pollutants. Plans call for some of that area to be dug up as Lucas proposes moving 3,000 parking spaces underground. The project’s proximity to Lake Michigan also is a factor for environmental planning.

I remember seeing a small exhibit of some of this garbage at the Field Museum about 10 years ago. On a small plot just outside their building they had found a wide range of items including utensils and tea cups and saucers from hotels.

Since there are environmental concerns at this particular site, I wonder how close residents and visitors are to these dangerous materials at other points along the lakefront. Just how deep would one have to dig to find the garbage? How much work does it take to contain the problems when constructing new buildings?

Renovating a McMansion: “Help! I want Country Understated Natural and it screams Mcmansion”

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One McMansion owner is looking for help in redesigning their home:

I did not build the house and I want it to be lodgy, understated country? It is Tony Soprano in its bones…If I changed the siding to the cedar color– would it be too monotone? I would like to use that grey cedar for the door. What can I do about the square panel details which have the red rosettes? I thought a trellis/lattice design there could work there but…not really. The hardware should be copper for the door handles and the light fixtures-any suggestions for the exact kind/type or go with vintage or gas lantern look-but which one and how large? Any suggestions overall, any advice…APPRECIATED!

The subsequent suggestions range from from changing the exterior color to a different kind of siding and roof to changing windows.

But, this brings up an interesting question: how much can and should homeowners remodel McMansions? Critics would argue that the homes shouldn’t have been built or purchased in the first place but plenty exist. The same critics may go on to note that renovation projects might be difficult and expensive with McMansions because of inferior build quality or a lack of design. However, it is likely that many McMansions would undergo significant changes over the decades. This is what happens to single-family homes – just look at some of the original Levittown homes and how they have been altered. There may be a huge potential market for firms to offer McMansion renovation services, to come in and spruce up the dated portions and/or overhaul the more garish features (two-story entryways, large great rooms, many gabled roof, etc.).

Can a former McMansion be converted into a non-McMansion with a reasonable amount of money and time?

Fight McMansions with Modernist homes

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You don’t need a tiny house to fight McMansions – Modernist homes can also fit the bill.

The reaction is much the same as the humdrum McMansions along Mr. Farrow’s Oakville street tick past the car window in a blur of beige.

Halfway down the long avenue, a first-time visitor to the Farrow Residence gasps at the sight of the sleek, low-slung Modernist abode.

Designed in 1962 and completed in September 1963, the Breuer-esque home hasn’t changed much since Mr. Farrow completed the last addition in 1973, when a summer porch and pool were added to the back. Before that, in 1970, when the couple’s two young boys were closing in on their teen years and needed more space, the original carport morphed into a bedroom wing, and a garage was tacked onto the other side. Not that you can tell: An architect rarely uses a heavy hand when rejigging his own vision and, in this case, it’s the same “old Dutch” bricks, same window configurations, same massing…

Peppered throughout the 3,000-square-foot home are Mr. Farrow’s intricate and amazing carved birds, a hobby that has kept the 1958 University of Toronto graduate “out of trouble” and “away from the television” (and perhaps out of wife Diane’s hair?) – when he wasn’t designing hundreds of hospitals, schools and churches.

There are numerous lines of attacks on McMansions but this one is a good example of solely criticizing the architecture. This Modernist home is not small (3,000 square feet) and not necessarily cheap (though the construction cost or the current value are not noted). Its key advantage over the McMansion is that is was carefully designed by an architect. Because of this, it is not like the “humdrum McMansions” and it has remained stylistically consistent even with additions and modifications over the years. Whether the architecture is enticing to many is not the issue – the article mentions one women who wondered why the home had no windows on the front – but rather than it is architecturally coherent.

That McMansions are dull and repetitive is a continuation of the long-running critique of suburbs that suggested similar houses (see the limited Levittown models) leads to boring people and neighborhoods. I haven’t seen any study that confirms this but rows of similar-looking houses can present quite a contrast to vibrant urban neighborhoods with a mix of buildings. Of course, you can also find repetitive urban neighborhoods like the new rows of apartments going up in Chinese cities or modernist housing projects built in the mid-1900s that didn’t turn out too well…

The two basic floor plans in the original Levittown

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One important aspect of the influential Levittowns were the houses: simple, cheap for buyers, and could be efficiently built.

http://www.ushistory.org/us/53b.asp

The Levitts mass-produced these homes in a way that would become fairly standard among large builders. The process involved manufacturing a number of the pieces off-site and having different crews tackle each home site at different points of the home’s construction. This process differed quite a bit from the rest of the housing industry which was largely comprised of small builders who took more time with each home. While this mass process led to more uniformity (and suburban critics jumped on the architectural similarity as a metaphor for all of suburbanization), it also dramatically reduced the cost of houses. A number of initial buyers noted that they could purchase a new home in a Levittown with a cheaper monthly cost than they could rent accommodations elsewhere.

Two additional thoughts about these floor plans:

1. A fascinating aspect of these basic house models is the number of modifications made to the homes over the decades.

2. The square footage of these new homes, roughly 1,000 square feet, is unthinkable today in new homes as the average new American home is now over 2,500 square feet.

“The ideal commute is not actually no commute” relies on the separation of home and work

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Eric Jaffe looks at some evidence that suggests Americans want a bit of a commute to detox from work:

To want a longer trip to or from work may seem strange, if not pathologically self-loathing, when considering all that’s known about the stresses and health hazards of commuting. Still, I’m not entirely alone here. You might think the ideal commute is no commute, but when you actually ask commuters, that isn’t always what they say. In a memorable Washington Post piece from years back, tracking the affection some commuters have for their home-to-office-and-back trip, one man “cursed with a three-minute drive to his job” wished he had some “time to detox”…

A classic study from 2001, conducted by Lothlorien Redmond and Patricia Mokhtarian, asked roughly 1,300 workers in the San Francisco area to report both their “actual” and their “ideal” commute times. The researchers found that the average one-way ideal was actually 16 minutes. Nearly a third of the respondents reported an ideal one-way time of 20 minutes or more. Less than 2 percent reported an ideal under 4 minutes, and only 1.2 percent reported an ideal commute of zero commute...

Now, that’s the exception, not the rule. Redmond and Mokhtarian did find that most respondents, nearly 52 percent, preferred a commute at least 5 minutes shorter than their actual one (which, on average for these folks, was 40 minutes). But 87 people in the sample, or nearly 7 percent, had an ideal commute that was at least 5 minutes longer than their actual commute (which, in this case, was 10 minutes, on average). For the 42 percent of participants whose actual and ideal trips were more or less the same, the average commute was 15 minutes, one way. It seems a quarter hour is something like a preferred commuter constant…

More recent attempts to understand commuter desires have uncovered plenty of nuance. Mode obviously matters. Some work suggests that drivers find their commute more stressful than others, on account of traffic, unexpected delays, and the existence of other drivers. Transit riders can feel some stress, too, especially when the train or bus is delayed, and they also have to worry more about boredom (though that’s quickly becoming obsolete). Walkers and cyclists report the most relaxing and exciting trips.

The type of day you’ve had matters, too. One study, published late last year, recorded trip diaries of 76 commuters over a five-day period. When the demands of the work day were low, the detachment commuters felt during the trip home didn’t influence their anxiety levels once they got there (accounting for travel time). But on days with lots of stress at work, the opposite was true: more detachment on the commute meant less anxiety—and more serenity—upon getting home.

All of this makes some sense within the current system where many people work in a more corporate setting (don’t underestimate the connections between large social changes and the rise of the modern white-collar office) and live within more sprawling metropolitan regions.

Yet, this is based on a social system where work and home are typically separated. This hasn’t always been the case throughout human history. Centuries ago, many people lived and worked within the same building or property. In other words, this idea that you go somewhere to work didn’t really exist. In Crabgrass Frontier, historian Kenneth Jackson describes how even as late as 1815 49 out of 50 workers lived within a one mile walk of their place of employment. Home and work continued to get pulled apart during the Industrial Revolution as well as the urbanization that affected developing countries.

Talk of having no commute for most workers has existed for several decades due to the possibilities for telecommuting. (Granted, this option is more restricted for certain kinds of jobs, particularly in service and manual labor sectors.) Still, many businesses and workers continue to want to go to an office and so we’ll continue to participate in and analyze commutes.

Estimate that 8.3% of Americans changed racial or ethnic identity between the 2000 and 2010 Census

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A new study provides a reminder of the fluidity of racial and ethnic identities as a number of Americans reported different identities on the 2000 and 2010 Census:

The report showed that 1 in 16 people — or approximately 9.8 million of 162 million — who responded to both the 2000 and 2010 censuses gave different answers when it came to race and ethnicity.If extrapolated across the entire population, that would mean that 8.3 percent of people in the United States would have made a change in their racial or ethnic identity in that decade, according to the paper authored by Sonya Rastogi, Leticia E. Fernandez, James M. Noon and Sharon R. Ennis of the U.S. Census Bureau and Carolyn A. Liebler of the University of Minnesota.

The largest change was from Hispanic (some other race) to Hispanic white, with 2.38 million people making that change on their census forms. But the next greatest change was from Hispanic white to Hispanic (some other race), with 1.2 million people deciding that designation fit them better. Put together, these two changes make up more than a third (37 percent) of the race/ethnicity changes in the report…

The groups most likely to change were people who were children and/or living in the West in 2000. That region also had a higher rate of interracial marriage, and multiple race reporting, the report said. The census defines the West as being Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.

The most stable groups were single-race, non-Hispanic whites, blacks and Asians, with those who checked those boxes staying with them in both censuses. People were also consistent with their Hispanic/non-Hispanic choices.

Those who make strong predictions about the demography of the United States in the coming decades have to contend with changes like this. It isn’t as easy as suggesting that the proportion of whites will continue to decline. What if more Hispanics see themselves as white? White as a category changed quite a bit in the past to include new immigrant groups and will likely continue to change in the future. All of this introduces uncertainty in thinking about how this could play out with contemporary debates, like with immigration.

It would also be interesting to compare the responses provided to the Census versus an everyday understanding of one’s racial and/or ethnic identity. The Census categories have their own history and may not always match lived realities.