Tag Archives: design

Normal people living in “America’s smartest homes”

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As part of Time‘s recent look at smart homes, they profiled a number of “regular people” in different types of smart homes:

At the start of her final semester, Spratley, a 29-year-old design student, spent 90 minutes every day driving between her apartment in the suburbs and her college classes in midtown Atlanta. “It was tiring,” she says, “and it made it really tough to meet people.” So she moved into a parking garage behind her school’s main building. Literally. Spratley, who graduated in May, was one of the first residents of SCADpad, a three-dorm compound built and styled by students, faculty and alumni of Savannah College of Art and Design to prove that underused public spaces–many U.S. parking structures operate well below capacity–can be repurposed into homes. Although the 135-sq.-ft. (12.5 sq m) space felt cramped at times during her weeklong stay (“I was like, Where’s the closet?!”), Spratley found plenty to love: the iPad-controlled lights could mimic a sunset, a nearby 3-D printer made free home accessories like coasters, and the compound fostered its own minicommunity. “I had friends over to watch The Fifth Element on the ceiling of the parking deck,” she says. “It was like living in a piece of the future.”…

After marrying her college sweetheart in 2007, Miller, then 22, happily took what her friends called the “normal next step”: putting down a payment on a 2,500-sq.-ft., four-bedroom house with her new husband. But when they divorced a year later, she says, “my financial torture began.” First, she failed to resolve a messy deed situation with her ex; then the economy collapsed, and the bank seized her home. At that point, Miller, an architect, had an idea: “What if I take the $11,000 I’d have to spend on a year’s rent and build a minihouse from scratch?” She wasn’t alone: more than 70 architectural firms now specialize in helping Americans ditch their large, pricey abodes to raise low-cost, low-energy tiny homes, and Miller found starter plans aplenty online. She bought a flatbed trailer ($500), rented a 0.125-acre lot ($200 a month) and within 18 months had built and moved into her dream home, all 200 sq. ft. of it. Now Miller’s monthly expenses are $400 instead of $1,200, and she’s dating her new landlord; the two had a daughter in March. Her next project is designing a 650-sq.-ft. abode for the whole family, including her Great Dane. “I’ve realized I don’t need a big house,” she says. “I never did.”…

When retired Marine Sergeant John Peck awoke from a medically induced coma in July 2010, two months after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan and losing all four of his limbs, his skin “was so hypersensitive that I would scream if someone touched me,” he says. But once his physical pain subsided, Peck, then 24, faced a much more daunting obstacle: adjusting to everyday life in a new body. The challenges at his Walter Reed housing complex were immediately clear. He couldn’t enter rooms with nonautomatic doors, because he didn’t have hands to grab them. He’d wanted to be a chef since he was 12, and now he couldn’t reach the food cabinets–let alone prepare meals. “It was incredibly frustrating,” he says. Today, however, Peck lives in a house built by the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation that was designed to serve his individual needs. Now 28, he has a bathroom with a bidet, so he can use it solo, and can adjust lighting, sound and even the height of his kitchen cabinets by tapping a tablet. To be sure, there are plenty of issues his home won’t solve. “I can’t put shampoo into my hair or put shorts on by myself,” he says. And unloading the dishwasher is nearly impossible, even when he’s wearing prosthetics. But Peck draws hope from a potential double-arm transplant–and his November wedding to fiancée Stacy Elwood. For now, he says, “my house makes the little things easier.”…

Like many other people living in America’s poorest neighborhoods, Giuria, a South Bronx native, grew up at risk for obesity. He ate junk food (it was cheap) and avoided playgrounds (the equipment was undermaintained and dangerous) and gyms (he was never taught the importance of exercise). By the time he was 27, he weighed almost 400 lb. (180 kg). “It was awful,” he says. “I sprained my ankles, I couldn’t buy clothes, and I didn’t sleep well.” His brother eventually took him to a nearby fitness center, where he learned to use the elliptical. (“It was so weird–I did it backward for a while.”) But to really get healthy, Giuria knew he needed a lifestyle makeover. That’s when he learned about Arbor House, a $37.7 million, 120,000-sq.-ft. (11,150 sq m) low-income housing project going up a few blocks from his then residence. The new site emphasized active design, an increasingly popular style of architecture that’s meant to encourage physical activity. (Think visible stairwells and bright, inviting indoor-outdoor gyms.) He immediately applied for residency and moved in last June. Now 30, Giuria has continued to lose weight–he’s almost down to 200 lb. (90 kg)–by running and playing alongside his wife and three kids (including Xzavier, right). “This will make it second nature to them to be healthy,” he says. “It won’t be foreign to them like it was for me.”

Some interesting options with several common themes:

1. Homes more customized to individual dwellers. Some of this can be accomplished with technology but design can also help. People living in the home get the benefits of using the space better as well as having the home reflect well on them.

2. Smaller spaces. This could be the case because people want less space (limiting consumption, more green) or they can afford less space (often in more urban areas).

3. Greener, more sustainable building starting with lowered utility costs to houses that encourage more activity and are built using different materials.

My big question for all of these options is whether they could be produced and lived-in on a mass scale.

Using ethnographic techniques to study how office space is used

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According to Cubed, architects and designers have had a lot of idealistic approaches to office design but companies have pursued more ethnographic approaches in recent decades:

In other words, interior designers are struggling, hard, to be relevant and so are architects. And so are space planners and so are product designers. Both Steelcase and Herman Miller have intensified their use of anthropological techniques – participant observer, video ethnography, object testing – to understand office workers’ behavior and to design around behavior rather than attempt to influence or change it. (p.308)

In other words, some have moved from top-down designs borrowing from trendy ideas about office behavior and design to actually studying the people at work in offices to see what might or might not work. What you likely gain are the small but important pieces of information that might be lost with other methods of data collection. Imagine the all-important serendipitous short conversation between two employees who pass in the hallway. Designers and others often think these are really important as they generate social connections and innovation. But, if you asked on workers on a survey about such short encounters, they may not recall them or think much of them at the time.

Lots of businesses could benefit from ethnographic approaches as they would get the viewpoint of the workers instead of the interpretations of management.

McMansions as “weapons of mass construction”

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One writer resents having to put up with McMansions, labeled in the headline “weapons of mass construction,” for the sake of the economy:

I hate being all in this thing together. Or let’s just say, I hate being all in this thing together with the home-construction industry. Right now, a McMansion the size of the Louvre is going up directly across the street from my house. Nine other monstrosities are also being deployed in what was once a beautiful, empty meadow. The field has been filled with backhoes and earth movers and building materials on and off for at least two years.

The projects, once begun, take forever to finish. The crew starts work on a house, then gets dispatched to finish another project in a different town, and then comes back. So it takes months to get the micro-chateaux built. It’s like watching someone set fire to your neighborhood, then douse it, then come back and start the fire again six weeks later. You’d rather they just ruined things once and for all and got it over with. If you’re going to sack Rome, sack it. Drilling, digging, dust and leveled trees have been our reality since 2011. It makes it very, very hard to root for the home builders.

I am constantly reading that young people are not buying houses at the pace needed to get the economy percolating. Well, maybe someone should tell the developers to stop building lurid, vile houses that no one can afford. Or to stop building lurid, vile, prefab, ticky-tacky houses even if people can afford them.

When the economy cratered in 2008 and my 401(k) got massacred, I wasn’t as upset as I should have been because it meant that the McMansions scheduled to be erected across the street wouldn’t get built until the recession was over. Four happy years ensued, without bogus cathedral windows and four-car garages and faux-Belgian cobblestones and Philistines for neighbors. This situation put me in the uncomfortable position of having to root against my own country. As long as the housing industry was flat on its back, life was good.

I really wish that the economy were not so dependent upon the health of home builders. I would love to root for these guys. I really would. But they build trash. They tear down adorable bungalows and build McMansions in Princeton, N.J. In Chicago, in Boston, in Los Angeles and even in little old Easton, Pa., they are bulldozing whatever stands in their way and throwing up their eyesores. Throwing up being the operative term.

What does he really think? I wonder if this is closely tied to what he suggests is a personal experience with nearby houses. It is one thing to dislike McMansions on the whole and argue they are bad for society – like Thomas Frank suggested a few months ago – but then not live by them. In fact, a lot of social problems are like this: we know there are bad things happening in our county, state, country, and around the world but it is different when they are removed and abstract. There is some of that argument here: such homes are ugly, he doesn’t want to have to rely on the housing industry so much, etc.

It is another thing if a new McMansion under construction greets you every morning when you walk out your front door. Or if construction projects take a really long time. Are these concerns the result of teardowns where a historic neighborhood is threatened?

Micro-housing that is too expensive to solve the problems of affordable and sustainable housing

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Micro-housing may lead to some cool design opportunities but it may not solve important problems: providing more affordable and sustainable housing.

Which is, of course, the problem with zeroHouse: Nobody needs micro-housing in places where plots of prairie, mountain, and sea (!) are available in plenty.

Now, the zeroHouse might not be designed for the urban dweller at all. Several of the home’s signature features seem as though they’re meant for another type of buyer altogether. The design specs note that the house is entirely secure, with tempered “Sentry-Glass” windows, Kevlar-reinforced doors, and fully mortised locking systems. (Shocking that a house that looks like a Transformer could double as a bunker!)

Given the design features, land-parcel requirements, and other aspects of the building’s design—it can go into an energy-conserving “hibernation” mode for extended period of times—zeroHouse sounds like it might be better suited for Cliven Bundy country than for downtown infill construction. But then, that Manhattan Micro-Loft isn’t a much better model for addressing the lack of affordable housing in major U.S. cities.

I don’t mean to pick on Specht Harpman Architects, a New York- and Austin-based firm that’s mostly in the business of designing interiors and elegant single-family homes. Tiny-house offenders are everywhere, from the pages of any shelter magazine to the real-estate section of the New York Times, where per-square-foot costs and land allotments are out of sync with what (say) most New Yorkers need from micro-housing.

From what I’ve seen, much of the interest in tiny houses is driven by two market segments: (1) architects, designers, and other creative types who relish a new puzzle (how do you fit a lot of desirable features into a smaller amount of space) and (2) “downshifters” (to borrow a term from sociologist Juliet Schor), people deliberately trying to limit their consumption by limiting their living space as well as how much stuff they can accumulate.

Of course, there are some interested in micro-housing for its ability to address affordable housing and sustainability issues but several things still hold the micro-housing market back: zoning issues, a lack of large-scale building of these units thus far which would make them appear more normal and more practical to build with economies of scale, and price points that may not be cheap enough for the affordable market.

Remodeling dated and garish McMansions

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Some buyers of McMansions do quite a bit to update the homes:

The towering (and disintegrating) stucco walls, pretentious interior columns, two-story great room, and four vinyl garage doors that greeted visitors didn’t do much to distinguish it from its neighbors.

“We knew it was, inherently, a version of a McMansion. So one of our challenges was: How do we bring a new identity to it?” said Seip, vice president of Chase Building Group, based in Doylestown.

As the region’s stock of oversize – but often under-designed – suburban tract houses ages into its teens and 20s, some homeowners are looking to reverse the gravest missteps and most ludicrous larks of prerecession developers. They’re ripping out never-used master-bath Jacuzzis, lowering space-wasting cathedral ceilings and replacing builder-grade finishes with more personalized selections…

“If you have a house that was cheaply built with bad materials, with a short-term development mentality . . . it will always plague whatever you do,” he said. “We can solve for a badly planned house. But we can’t change a badly made house into a well-made house.”

This is one answer to the question of what will happen to McMansions several decades later: some of them will be remodeled to fit new trends. New owners often want the latest features and want to avoid the appearance of dated finishes.

There are several possible responses to this:

1. Not all McMansions are likely to be significantly remodeled. What happens to them and how many will there be?

2. The last quote in the passage above is interesting: the changes can only go so far to fix earlier features of the house.

3. Critics of McMansions might suggest no one should buy these homes in the first place but it is interesting to note that there are homebuyers who think McMansions can be “fixed” or changed to better meet their needs. Even if significant remodeling is desired, is square footage still a key drawing point of these homes?

4. The stucco McMansion finishes in Pennsylvania seem to draw quite a bit of attention. Are there no stucco McMansions further in the Northeast? Perhaps builders got a little carried away with this exterior finish in an area that has more roots in northern European architecture.

The origins of the American split-level home

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Where do all the American split-level homes come from?

Split-levels can be found in many regions, especially in neighborhoods developed after World War II.

The homes borrow a bit of the horizontal profile of a ranch – if the ranch was sliced down the middle, with the bedroom wing bumped skyward half a story to create space underneath for a garage and family room.

It’s not clear when they were invented, though a version of a split-level can be found in Sears, Roebuck & Co. home plan books from the 1930s, according to Minnesota architects Robert Gerloff and Jeremiah Battles, who wrote an online guide to renovating splits called “Split Visions.”

“Splits offered a unique separation of social space, with bedrooms perched a half-story above the formal living space and the informal living space found a half-story below,” the authors say. They shake up “the traditional American pattern of formal rooms on the main level with bedrooms upstairs and a full basement below.”

My interpretation: they are a pragmatic American solution in housing that might just rank up there with the ranch house and the McMansion. Such homes take a basic design and develop multiple living levels as well as spaces that can be connected to various degrees (depending on whether walls are fully intact between spaces or levels). They are relatively cheap to build. They are not necessarily aesthetically pleasing; they tend not to evoke traditional architectural styles (making them easy to plop down anywhere) though are usually not ostentatious.

Side note: I spent most of my years growing up in a split-level. I can attest to their advantages, particularly the multiple social spaces. At the same time, I’m not sure I would buy one myself in the future except for the fact that they seem to be cheaper than homes of a similar size.

Mid-century modern ranches as the anti-McMansion

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If you don’t want a McMansion, one Pinterest user suggests looking into a mid-century modern ranch:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t buy this argument about modern ranch homes winning out against McMansions. Here are a few reasons:

1. I don’t think most Americans would choose a modernist home over a McMansion.

2. These ranch homes look they still have a decent amount of space. How much smaller than a typical McMansion does an anti-McMansion have to be? Others have argued a better opposite end of the spectrum is a micro-apartment: significantly smaller and located in a much denser context.

3. McMansions get criticized for poor architecture but ranches are fairly limited in this arena as well. Of course, there are degrees of modernist homes and a “normal” ranch may not have many of these features such as stark lines and simple designs. Or, ranches may go all in regarding their modern design while McMansions dabble in various styles. But, authentically undesirable architecture may not be that different from inauthentic undesirable architecture.

4. The interiors of these ranches look tastefully decorated. Can’t the same be done for McMansions? I would also guess ranch homes can be made to look bad and those are the ones that don’t make it anywhere near Pinterest.

Bad options: “grand McMansion” vs. “cookie cutter townhouse”

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This description of a Season 87 House Hunters episode suggests the homebuyers have two less than stellar options:

Ryan and Stacey have $300,000 to buy their first home outside Baltimore, but they want very different things. He dreams of a grand McMansion, but she wants a cookie cutter townhouse with a uniform look. And since they’re both a bit stubborn, neither one is willing to give an inch. Can they find a place that they can agree on, or will this house hunt become a Battle in Baltimore?

This sounds like a typical House Hunters episode: the couple have different visions on what they want and perhaps they will compromise on a third option that gives them each a little of what they want. But, the choices set up here are interesting. McMansions are disliked by numerous critics. Does Ryan himself say he wants a McMansion or is this description using this as shorthand to describe a large suburban home? Then, is a “cookie cutter townhouse” a superior alternative? Critics of McMansions might note that at least townhouses are denser developments and tend to not be as large. Yet, townhouses aren’t usually known for their fine architecture and a uniform look doesn’t help anyone distinguish themselves. Both McMansion owners and critics tend to buy into the idea that a home is supposed to express yourself – though they disagree on what should be expressed and how – and a townhouse with this sort of description wouldn’t fit the bill.

A McMansion that can be built within Austin’s McMansion Ordinance

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One Texas home designer shows off what he can build under Austin’s McMansion ordinance. Based on all 69 pictures of the house under construction, how different is it from a McMansion?

1. It looks relatively large. At the least, it is not a small house.

2. It is built in a more traditional style: no two-story entryway, no Palladian window, there is some lawn around the whole house (though not much on the sides of the house), there is a limited number of roof gables. There is a real front porch where residents can actually sit. At the same time, the siding is not too distinctive, there don’t appear to be too many windows on the sides of the house (the neighbors are fairly close), and the kitchen is fairly typical dark cabinets, granites countertops (including an island), and stainless steel appliances.

3. The first floor has an open floor plan where the living/family room to the right of the front door opens right up into the kitchen. There are at least two bathrooms. Oddly, there are photos of two laundry rooms.

Zillow suggests the home has 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, is 2,248 square feet, and is in a neighborhood with a range of home values. This particular house seems fairly muted compared to some of his other designs. It is hard to know exactly how much the Austin McMansion ordinance changed what could be done with this particular house but the McMansion designs elsewhere seem more stereotypical.

One last question: the designer appears to have labeled the home a McMansion. Given the loaded nature of this term, is this the best strategy?

Piling on to the argument we’ve sacrificed everything for McMansions

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Going through Thomas Frank’s recent argument that we’ve sacrificed quite a bit for some to have McMansions, one Co.Design writer adds a few choice phrases about McMansions:

The soul of the McMansion is as ugly as its faux-classical facade…

The result? Sprawling suburbs made to accommodate larger and larger homes that tend to be a ugly mishmash of architectural sensibilities. McMansions present a unique design challenge that, sadly, is rarely overcome with dignity…

There’s a domino effect that has profoundly affected the way all of America lives to accommodate the desires of those wealthy enough to afford such gargantuan and opulent residences…

Long live our McMansion overlords.

Think there are any redeeming qualities in McMansions? While Frank emphasized the economic sacrifices and conditions necessary for McMansions (financing sprawl, cheap mortgages, wealth funneled to the well-off), this argument relies on a common McMansion critique: they are lacking in architectural quality and design. The subtitle to the article sums this up: “Hideous houses are ruining America.” Is the bigger problem their lack of soul and architectural authenticity or the system that exists to make McMansions possible for the relative few? I side with Frank on this one.