This Space for Rent

Being rich makes you stupid

Susan Orlean's ugly house.  (Picture from the New York Times)

When you look at the bloated monstrosity that is Susan Orlean's "weekend house", it's so much of a target of opportunity that it's hard to get started. But the one thing that struck me is that after jet-setting all around the country (including hiring a private seaplane to go and look at houses in the Seattle area), then spending US$1.7 million dollars to have Bill Gates's architect design you a summer house, you'd sort of want to have something that doesn't look like a glass-sheathed warehouse?

This makes the US$500,000 "bargain" house the New York Times gushingly reviewed a month ago seem like it is really a bargain (and it certainly makes it look attractive; one of the things that Susan Orlean and her (senior executive in an evil HMO) husband said they wanted was "Frank Lloyd Wright", and if by "prairie school" they meant "flat roof and no personality", well, their architect gave them exactly what they wanted.)

And it's all windows, too. Their heating bill, even if it's weekends-only, must be about the same as my mortgage. But to look on the bright side, they probably don't even notice the US$64/trip gasoline costs when they drive the old H2 down to the farmer's market in NYC.

I'd think that if you were looking for a Frank Lloyd Wright sort of building, you might do better off talking to Wright's architecture firm. Some of his later buildings have the same sort of cold inhuman precision as this one, but at least even in his dotage the man had a sense of style.

It's houses like this that make me want to give up my computer career and become an architect or homebuilder. They probably spent US$300,000 on the architectural design, and it looks like something you would assemble out of glass unit blocks. Surely I could design a better looking and more human-scaled house for that sort of money, and I could probably even afford to hire someone to come out and gold-plate the whole thing and still spend less than US$1.7 million.

(link via (indirectly) Atrios)

Comments


Modern architecture seems to be infected with two serious problems. First there is the greed, bottom line approach, that strives to build the cheapest possible building with very little concern for things like aesthetics, long term durability, energy costs or humans. This approach has given us things like suburban tract housing, strip malls, the Amtrak station in Richmond, Virginia, and stucco.

The second problem is one of ego. Highly paid, world renowned architects think of themselves as “artists” first, rather than creators of human habitats. The expression of their egos becomes more important than the people who will have to actually interact with their creations on a daily basis. They don’t want to be limited by tradition and strive to outdo other architects with their unique “artistic expressions”. While this sort of attitude of free expression may work well for arts such as music, painting or sculpture, it is more often than not a disaster with architecture. How many people who love Picasso’s paintings would want him to be their architect… not me!

Mike Fri Jan 20 17:40:54 2006

I don’t know how much of a bottom-line approach there is to modern architecture; even the so-called economy buildings (like the Dwell kit houses) end up costing considerably more per-foot than the standard tracthouse. Some modern houses embrace the appearance of cheap components (I’ve seen some modern straw houses that use strawboard sheets for wall and ceiling panels, and those panels must be designed to look like ratty old ranch-house panelling because even when they’re new they look like they’ve been sitting there for 50 years) but I’ve never seen one (except for various personal houses from earthy-crunchy architects like Roald Gunderson, who used to be a friend of mine 20-odd years ago) which actually use cheap raw materials.

Agreed on the ego part. And it’s not so much that they consider themselves artists, but they consider themselves artists without actually showing any sort of artistic sense. The Orlean warehouse is a good example of it; there is certainly potential here, in that the line of the roof and the exposed rafters would look quite good if they weren’t placed on top of mysteriously corrugated glass walls (the ¾ths view here is the best view of this nasty house, so it doesn’t really show how the swoop of the flat roof is thwarted by the glass walls. And the little bumpouts in the glass, now that’s a complete and absolute waste; since it’s all glass, they aren’t semi-private alcoves, but simply something that breaks up the view from the inside of the warehouse. And the fieldstone facade on the foundation thing, well, that’s been done for many many years and there’s nothing new about it here except it makes the whole structure seem like an awkward pastiche of parts from the Big Book Of Architectural Mistakes.

I like modern architecture, but this is like a big hospital which has been extensively reworked by generations of battling design schools.

David Parsons Sat Jan 21 12:08:15 2006

By modern architecture I am referring to the mass of contemporary architecture, even if the design itself is not “modern”. This includes everything from faux colonial tract houses to strip malls. I see this move to disposable, soulless, utilitarian architecture as exemplified in public buildings. Drive across the midwest and you will see very small towns with quite substantial and beautiful public buildings built up through the 1930s. It is obvious that the residents of these small towns had a great deal of civic pride in the construction of schools, libraries, courthouses, and fire stations. Then look at the buildings built since then and you will see featureless expanses of glass and stucco, fire stations housed in cheap metal sheds, schools that don’t look much different than prisons, etc.

As for modern design, there are some structures built in the modern style that I like. But there is quite a lot of modern design where it seems the architect was more intent on “making a statement” than in designing a structure for human use.

Mike Sun Jan 22 11:59:16 2006

I have to say that “the rich” who pay just as much, if not more, for a developer built large McMansion far surpass this in stupidity.

hmmm Wed Apr 5 19:20:07 2006

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