Author Archives: legallysociable

Tracing the McMansion Palladian window back to 16th-century Italy

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A common design feature of the American McMansion is the Palladian window, often over the front doorway and showing off the expansive, two-story foyer. One writer suggests Palladian design features can be found throughout the Pittsburgh region:

Want to see more? OK, let’s take a walk in any local area. Aspinwall or Avalon? Highland Park or Shadyside? You’ll wear yourself out counting Palladian features on houses and apartments, occasionally a grand facade in one place, sometimes just a simple Palladian window ornamenting the attic of a modest home in another.

And then, before you’re totally exhausted, take a drive through Upper St. Clair or Peters and take in all of the Palladian windows you will find on what seems like every fifth McMansion built in those towns in the past 30 years.

Continuing, the same writer gives us some insights into how Antonio Palladio’s designs became popular and part of the American architectural vocabulary:

Palladio designed about 45 villas and palazzos (country houses and town houses) for wealthy clients in and around his adopted home town of Vicenza and nearby Venice, which is about 40 miles away. He also designed significant public buildings in both towns, including major churches in Venice — the best known being the church of San Giorgio Maggiore — which is directly across the water from the Piazza San Marco and the subject of thousands of picture postcards over the years.

But, what really brought him fame is his published work “I Quattro Libri dell’ Architettura” or “The Four Books of Architecture.” These books, when translated into English at the beginning of the 18th century, captivated English architects, who eagerly copied his works and his style. Palladianism coursed like a river through the architectural styles of the Georgian Period — the approximately 120-year reign of the Kings George I through IV. As the prevailing styles in England at the time of the flowering of the American colonies, they were copied here in public buildings, churches and houses.

Thomas Jefferson, as a gentleman architect, was infatuated, and based his designs for Monticello on Palladian ideals. He even proposed a near-copy of a famous Palladian villa as his unsuccessful bid for the design of a presidential mansion in Washington. (Today’s White House is a somewhat more Anglicized version of Palladianism.)

What makes the Palladian features of McMansions problematic for critics (an example here) is that it is not seen as being “authentic.” For example, the Palladian window might sit beneath a French gable roof. Thomas Jefferson may have popularized the style but he did so in a more “true” structure that incorporates a number of a Palladian elements rather than simply picking one part out and slapping it up on the facade because it looks nice.

Even though I have heard about Palladian features many times, I was unaware about its roots in 16th century Italy. Is there anywhere in the general American education (grade school through college) where more modern architectural features comes up? I know students learn about Greek columns and temples but what about more modern buildings, like the steel skeletons of skyscrapers, the balloon-framed house, roof styles, and more. Is this a deficit in general knowledge that encourages architectural pastiche like McMansions? Is this generally left to history and art classes? What if all college graduates had the knowledge of a basic architectural field guide that they then could mentally carry around for the rest of their lives?

Tracking President Obama’s “God talk”

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Decades after the sociologist Robert Bellah introduced the term “civil religion,” academics are continuing to track how politicians talk about religion in the public sphere. Here is an overview of how President Obama is increasing his use of religious language in recent days:

President Obama is “ramping up his ‘God talk’ for the re-election campaign,” says political scientist John Green, senior fellow at the Pew Forum for Religion & Public Life.

But Green and two other experts who track religious rhetoric in presidential politics speculate this strategy to connect with evangelical voters may not work for Obama…

These kinds of God mentions won’t move the dial for conservative evangelicals but, Green says, they could be just right for ambivalent voters who “don’t want a hard-edged faith shaping national politics.”…

Questioning someone’s religious sincerity is totally a factor of whether you already like that person. Baylor University sociologist Paul Froese says,

If Obama held a prayer rally, it would never work. People who don’t like him won’t believe him.

I wonder how the average American would react to this article. On one hand, the argument here is that appealing to audiences with the “right” religious language matters for votes. On the other hand, is this simply ammunition to make some people more cynical about the use of religious language in election seasons? Politicians have to walk a fine line of appearing sincere but not too exclusive so as to alienate potential voters.

More seriously, this will continue to matter in the months ahead as Americans get longer looks at Republican challengers (and the article contrasts Rick Perry’s approach to religious language). I hope we will continue to get updates on this from these same academics.

Does sex also sell sociological research?

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A common assumption is that “sex sells.” Could this also apply to sociological research? I have watched as two stories about sociological research have made their way through the media.

1. Do a Google search for “erotic capital” and you will find reference to sociologist Catherine Hakim’s term. Read a quick overview of the term here.

2. A New York Times article from the weekend titled “Another Reason to Avoid His Friends” briefly discusses a study in the July 2011 issue American Journal of Sociology titled “Network Position and Sexual Dysfunction: Implications of Partner Betweenness for Men.”

If these two pieces of research could be distributed to a broad representative sample of American sociologists, here are a few things that I would want to ask:

1. Do you think research that covers a topic like sex (or celebrity or political scandals, etc.) is more likely to get a positive reception and more coverage from the media and the American public?

2. Does publicity about a sociological research finding make the research more or less important within the field of sociology?

3. Do you think it is good for sociologists to promote any research that would appeal to the public rather than research that might be more consequential? In other words, is all publicity good publicity?

For the record, I have not looked closely into either pieces of research and therefore could not assess the quality myself. A sociologist from the London School of Economics and a piece published in AJS might get attention anyway since they have already come from respected institutions. But I think these pieces could lead to interesting discussions about how research within the discipline matches what might be popular among the American public and whether these two interests should match up and whether this helps the academic discipline of sociology.

The norms of college protests in court

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Arguments in a California courtroom revolve around this question: what are the norms governing college protests?

Sociologist Steven Clayman took the stand on Thursday, the final day of testimony. He is an expert in “speaker-audience interaction,” and has written a scholarly article titled, “Booing: The Anatomy of a Disaffiliative Response,” which examines environments such as presidential debates, TV talk shows and British Parliament. He believes audience participation cannot be prevented because members of the crowd are “free agents,” able to express approval or disapproval of what a speaker is saying.

Having watched a video of the Irvine 11 incident, Clayman affirmed that the audience response seemed to be a “normal and unavoidable” part of Ambassador Michael Oren’sspeech.

Lead prosecutor Dan Wagner then fired, “It’s unavoidable that 10 people would stand up with planned statements that have nothing to do with what the speaker is saying? . . . Are you saying that the only way to prevent [protests] is to put a straitjacket and muzzle on them?” The questions were stricken by the judge.
Ten UC Irvine and UC Riverside students have been charged with misdemeanor conspiracy to commit a crime and misdemeanor disruption of a meeting. To be convicted of the latter, one must commit an act that violates the “implicit customs” or “explicit rules” for the event. The defense team claims the defendants did neither, arguing that they were merely following the norms and customs of protests on college campuses.

So what exactly is “normal” college protest behavior? A number of colleges have faced these questions in recent years as protests have moved from just being outside the event to occurring during the event. Think the “Don’t Tase Me Bro” incident of 2007. Or witness the various pie-throwing attempts involving politicians. I wonder if this trial is then less about whether such actions are harmful but rather how these norms have changed over the decades and whether there is widely understood agreement about these changes.

Of course, this particular trial in California involves a number of contentious political and social issues.

I wonder if this case, and other similar ones, will lead to more schools creating more explicit rules about what is allowed and not allowed in on-campus protests and to make this information widely known.

Comprehending the office and retail space in an edge city

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After explaining the concept of an edge city to my American Suburbanization class, a discussion arose about how much space these places really have. When defining the edge city, Joel Garreau had these as two criteria (out of five total): “has five million square feet or more of leasable office space” and “has 600,000 square feet or more of leasable retail space.” This is a lot of space, as much as a smaller big city, but can still be hard to understand.

For example, there is much more commercial and retail space in the exemplar of the edge city: Tysons Corner, Virginia.

Around 2007 Tysons Corner had 25,599,065 square feet (2,378,231.0 m2) of office space, 1,072,874 square feet (99,673.3 m2) of industrial/flex space, 4,054,096 square feet (376,637.8 m2) of retail space, and 2,551,579 square feet (237,049.4 m2) of hotel space. Therefore Tysons Corner has a grand total of 33,278,014 square feet (3,091,628.7 m2) of commercial space.

How do we put this in more manageable terms?

1. Garreau compares this suburban space to the office and retail space in existing cities. The 5 million square feet of office space “is more than downtown Memphis.” While we may have traditionally associated this much office and retail space only with the downtowns of big cities, now concentrations of this space can be found right in the middle of the suburbs. This is unusual because suburbs are often portrayed as bedroom suburbs, places like people live and sleep but have to work elsewhere.

2. Compare this space to large buildings. The Willis (Sears) Tower in Chicago has 4.56 million square feet of space, 3.81 million rentable. So an edge city would have at least slightly more space this notable office building though perhaps it is difficult to visualize this space since it is a skyscraper and each floor seems smaller. An ever bigger building, The Pentagon, has 6.5 million square feet, more than the lower threshold for an edge city. Therefore, Tysons Corner has nearly 4 Pentagons of office space. Comparing this edge city space to shopping malls, Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, Illinois (an edge city itself) has 2.7 million square feet while the Mall of America has a total of 4.2 million square feet.

3. We could measure edge cities in terms of square miles or acres and then compare to bigger cities. Square miles make some sense: Tysons Corner is 4.9 square miles while Memphis, a city Garreau says has downtown space similar to that of an edge city, is 302.3 square miles (on land). Acres are a little harder to interpret: a common suburban house lot is an eighth of an acre, a square mile has 640 acres (hence the dividing of the American frontier into 160 and 640 acre plots), and an acre has roughly 43,500 square feet. Then, an edge city with 5 million square feet of office space has about 115 acres of office space. Perhaps acres are best left to farmers.

In the end, I think Garreau made the right comparison to demonstrate the office and retail space within an edge city: we have some ideas about the size of downtowns of smaller big cities and the image of this amount of space existing in the suburbs is jarring.

Sociologist uses Twitter for class but are the students learning more?

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Stories like this are not uncommon: professors utilizing technology to engage their students (and here is another one about clicker use).

Wendy Welch is incorporating the use of the social networking site Twitter into her cultural geography class this semester. The adjunct instructor said she decided to use the social networking site in her class after having problems with students using their phones in class for less-than-appropriate purposes.“If you can’t beat them, get ahead of them,” Welch said. “That’s the way the world works now.”…

Each student was assigned a country in Africa and asked to tweet facts about their country, such as languages and population, using designated hash tags, or categories. That way, each student only has to research one country but has access to all the information they may need from other students.

Welch also plans to have students use their mobile devices or laptops to research information during class sessions, she said…

She said she hopes to “get students to understand and participate in their own education.”

Perhaps this does increase the engagement level of the students. All professors want their students to be engaged and we don’t want to be seen as being behind the times. But, I think there is often something missing from discussions about student engagement and the use of technology in the classroom: does this actually lead to higher levels of student learning or student outcomes?

I suspect professors will always try to keep up with technology as it changes and each of these changes will be accompanied by hand-wringing. However, we need to be able to distinguish between engaging students with technology versus helping them learn. Take this Twitter example from class: do students do better on tests? Do they retain the knowledge better? Can they apply their knowledge from this particular class to other settings, particularly if the technology is not present? Does technology itself help students think more deeply about the big questions of our world?

If technology alone becomes the answer in the classroom, we will be in trouble.

McMansions are too costly in terms of money and relationships

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In another article about McMansions in Australia (and I have been seeing more and more of these  – perhaps due to the recent news that the country has the largest new homes on average), one writer suggests McMansions cost too much and have a negative impact on relationships:

Australians live in the world’s biggest homes but new research shows our trend to upsize our living space is reversing. The average size of new houses being built in this country is getting smaller as people start to realise that living in a McMansion does not make sense. While the financial implications of owning a large home have surely been considered, there are other costs that are not as obvious…

The reasons are obvious- it costs too much. Far from being energy efficient, the financial burden that comes with a bigger pad can weigh too heavily on a household already struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living. There are bigger gas and power bills and mortgage repayments not to mention the hassle of having to spend time and money maintaining and keeping the whole thing clean … no wonder we are thinking again.

Another problem of the larger, have-it-all home is that we have less need to leave it to meet our daily needs. Social interaction is being replaced by home-based activity for our convenience. It is easier to get on the treadmill, ‘chat’ to someone on Facebook, play tennis on the wii and shop online instead of getting out into our communities.

There is no substitute for real communication and the lack of it can affect our sense of well-being. Mental health issues such as depression and the feeling of isolation that many people experience is the reason some programs are being developed, specifically aiming to get people out of the house, talking to others and active in their communities. ‘The Shed’ for men and ‘R U OK’ Day are a couple of examples.

The financial costs of McMansions are clear, particularly if you include costs beyond the price of the home and consider the impact on other areas like cars, roads, infrastructure, and filling/furnishing a larger home.

The relational impact of McMansions has also been covered by others, particularly since they seem to encourage more private lives. But, my mind jumped to the next step in the argument illustrated in this article: how small would houses need to be in order to encourage interaction even among family members? If a McMansion is roughly 3,000-6,000 square feet, it seems like it would be fairly easy for family members to avoid each other. But, if a home is 2,000 square feet, would families necessarily interact more? Perhaps if we went back to the era of Levittown sized homes, around 900 square feet, this could induce some interaction.

But even in smaller homes, there are other factors at work. At the end of the article, the writer suggests that perhaps the real problem isn’t the size of the home:

I am conscious of creating an environment where communication is encouraged and valued so we know what’s going on in each other’s lives. There are no computers, TVs or other electronic entertainment in the bedrooms. Our living space is used for meals, games, entertainment, homework and handstands. It’s a bit cluttered but it’s homely and there’s always someone to talk to.

Technology could play a role as could cultural ideas about the need for “time alone.”

In the end, a smaller home probably increases the number of times people have to run into each other but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will have deeper, more meaningful relationships. There are larger issues at work here beyond the number of square feet a home has or whether the home has a porch close to the street.

Considering the humanity of our leaders

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Here is a fascinating essay that reveals some of the humanity of a polarizing figure: George W. Bush.

Do we even want to know the more human side of our leaders? It is easy to build them up, as a paragon of virtue and strength, or to tear them down, as an enemy who must be defeated. Even though we are more than two years out from the end of his presidency, how many people can read a piece like this with somewhat objective eyes?

The real America can be found at Wal-Mart

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I vividly remember what one professor told us one day in a sociology of religion class in graduate school: “If you want to find real Americans, just go to Walmart.” Several members of the class gasped – could the real America really be at Walmart, that exemplar of crass consumerism, low wages, and the loss of community life in America? This story from NPR makes a similar point:

The Wall Street Journal spotted the phenomenon recently. The headline: “Today’s Special at Wal-Mart: Something Weird.” “Almost any imaginable aspect of American life can and does take place inside Wal-Mart stores, from births to marriages to deaths,” observed the Journal‘s Miguel Bustillo. “Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin once officiated a wedding at the Wal-Mart in her hometown of Wasilla.”…

What is it about Walmart? As a species, we are fascinated by the place. The Web is awash with sites that scrutinize the Arkansas-based retailer’s every move. Walmart Watch, funded by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, says its mission is to challenge the multibillion-dollar retail chain “to more fully embrace its corporate responsibilities.” The now-infamous and snarky People of Walmart posts photos of shoppers. Hel-Mart offers anti-Walmart merchandise, such as T-shirts that say, “Resistance Is Futile.” Videos of people praising, mocking, pranking, walking around, dancing in Walmart are continuously posted on YouTube…

Officially, Walmart explains the apparent zaniness this way: “Over the years, Walmart has become a microcosm of American life,” says company spokesman Lorenzo Lopez. “With stores serving millions of customers in communities nationwide, it’s not uncommon for us to see our share of what happens every day in cities and towns all across the country.”…

* Of the 3,822 Walmart stores, 2,939 are Supercenters, which means they are open 24 hours a day. So in virtually every county, 500 people work at Walmart, and there is a Walmart open every hour of every day, and every one of those Walmarts is being visited by 37,000 people a week — that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.

So how come there are not more sociologists doing studies at or about Walmart? I suspect many do not like the place – even though some may even shop at Target and other big box stores. But just because sociologists might disagree with the practices of Walmart does not mean that it shouldn’t be the focus of much research.

This story also illustrates something Joel Best likes to talk about: the scale of numbers. Some of the statistics about Walmart from the article include half of American adults visit Walmart each week covering 70 million hours and the company has 1.5 million employees. This is hard to visualize because these are big numbers. We know what a couple of hundred people looks like but to understand 1.5 million, we might need to make some comparisons such as this is about the population of the City of Philadelphia or is around the same size as the metro area of Nashville or Milwaukee. Another way to understand these big numbers is to break it down into how often something happens per hour or minute or second. In this article, this translates to “that’s 220 people an hour, in every Walmart, in virtually every county in the whole country, every hour of the day.” We know what roughly 220 people looks like so we can then grasp a little better the enormity of the figures.

Crowd Counting 101

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Every now and then, often connected to politically contentious events like the “Restoring Honor” or “Rally to Restore Sanity” in 2010 or Egyptians taking to the streets in early 2011, you will see articles about how officials and media sources estimate the number of people who attend. Here is a primer on crowd counting. Some of the possible new methods could help give us accurate and not politically-driven counts:

And, as Yip said in a statement about his study, a good way to count crowds could cut through the politically motivated stats we put up with now. “In the absence of any accurate estimation methods, the public are left with a view of the truth colored by the beliefs of the people making the estimates. The public would be better served by estimates less open to political bias.”

I look forward to improved crowd counting.

h/t Instapundit