What I’m reading
I'm trying to kill two birds with one stone by reading through a collection of Gustav Stickley's house plans from about 100 years ago. The first bird is, of course, the earthy-crunchy cottage, and the second bird is undoing some of the more appalling modifications that were done to the big yellow house.
It's interesting to see how little some things have changed. Stickley didn't have the two-bathrooms-for-every-bedroom disease (except for one "california-style" design that looks vaguely Greene & Greene-ish; that house has 4 bedrooms and 3 full bathrooms, plus a toilet on the ground floor), but he did have the classic (upper-class) American obsession that the only proper place to live was either in the suburbs or out in the country (where someone else gets to reap the unintended consequences of your commuting habits.) But one thing has changed; look at some of the house article titles and try to imagine them in a modern architecture or design magazine:
- A Small Cottage That Is Comfortable, Attractive, and Inexpensive.
- A Plain House that Will Last for Generations and Need but Few Repairs.
- A Cottage of Cement or Stone that Is Conveniently Arranged for a Small Family.
- A Small Shingled House that Shows Many Interesting Structural Features.
- A Roomy, Inviting Farmhouse, Designed for Pleasant Home Life in the Country.
- Two Inexpensive but Charming Cottages for Women Who Want Their Own Homes.
The nice thing about these house plans is that many of them are only slightly larger than the earthy-crunchy cottage, and they may actually make better use of the space they take up. And it's a bonus that the magazine was _not_ laid out with Microsoft Word or Adobe Framemaker; all one font, hand-hinted, with photos and plans peppering the article. The only real problem with them is that, for some odd reason, none of the floorplans actually have the footprint measurements listed, so you get to try and piece them out by adding room dimensions together.
Comments
There’s a nice online synopsis of A Pattern Language, too (I’ve got it in the House Porn section of my bookmarks); it’s a pretty compelling book, even if I (obviously, if you look at the earthy-crunchy house) don’t agree with all of its conclusions. I haven’t looked at much of the community design; there’s nothing I can do about designing communities as opposed to houses, so all it could do is make me more annoyed about the way things are set up today.
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My favorite book about house design (as well as community design) is A Pattern Language.