I have a sense of style. I have an eye for design. I don’t have an eye for knowing instinctively what design here will work with that design there. I tend to just throw it all together and hope it’s not too jumbled… and then I find out it is, but it feels like it takes me forever to figure out why. For months now, the arches I did have been bothering me. Five of them spanning the wall between kitchen and dining room, and I thought: it’s because they’re uneven. The foyer hallway is 52″ wide; the one solid wall (which hides the fridge behind it) is 45″, and the three spans open to the kitchen are about 35″ each, measurements center-to-center. With arches and drywall in place, those doorways are 31″, one inch shy of the code spec of 32″ in/out of kitchens (although with two doorways, we probably have some leeway).
But that’s not it, I finally realized, after literally months of staring at them. It’s because, somehow, they end the kitchen. The arches are such a distinctive feature that they annouce, here is A Wall. And walls are what break space, separate it, and thus when my eye sees the dining room and then the arches (because they’re damn hard to miss, and I’d originally designed them that way), the eye says: that is where the dining room ends, and the kitchen begins.
The problem is, that doesn’t work. It means the kitchen feels like it’s on the other side of a dividing line, and our kitchen is only 9×13. If it’s to feel anything less than U-shape miniscule, it must borrow as much line-of-sight from elsewhere as possible. Failing that (since the fridge is in the way, damn it), the kitchen must push into the dining room, somehow. That means either redoing the arches, or modifying them in some way so they feel like they’re not part of the wall, but part of the kitchen and are spreading out into the dining room.
I’m just not sure how. Have some ideas, but right now I’m in the pondering stage. I don’t want to undo what I’ve done, although it’s not like I’d be undoing a full wall of expensive handmade tile. As I told CP, that section is just drywall, 2×4s, and some posterboard and a lot of drywall mud: all of which is pretty cheap, compared to what we’ve spent elsewhere for the kitchen (which is still on the cheap, compared to estimates I’ve seen for kitchen redos by professionals). Then again, a professional wouldn’t be redoing this or rethinking this, but I don’t have a thousand kitchens or even houses in my head — and pictures are one thing but you don’t really comprehend a space until you’re in the space, interacting with it. (Though I’m getting better at that, with practice.)
Reading Susanka’s Not-So-Big House series, and I’m ambivalent about her work, because while I agree that we don’t need 3500sq ft for a family of four (let alone just two), I’m not sure downsizing to less square feet just so you can upsize in cost per from $80 to $160 is really all that much of a happy trade. (Although smaller houses do tend to be more per sq foot even when not too fancy, for various other reasons unrelated to what’s visible.)
Some ideas rock, like the one of shelves along the ceiling line. I may do that in the dining room; the open arches/uprights between dining and foyer/walkway will then support open beams. That means two things: the backs of the books are exposed to air which’ll cut down on risk of mold etc, and they’ll all be kept away from direct sunlight. Right now a lot of those books are stored in CP’s front study, which gets southern light coming straight through the windows smack down on these elderly books.
It just took me a few days, is all, to come up with a way to support open shelving that spans a 3′ arch. I think I’ve got it licked, but need to show my ideas to a few carpenters and get their input. Same with the shelves that’ll run along the one closed wall in the dining room (shared with the garage) — finally figured out I can do airplane wings on support for those, so it’ll appear coved beneath the shelves.
In other news, my idea of the perfect bedroom is simple, celadon-gray. CP’s idea of an awesome bedroom is early bordello meets harem. Maybe we’ll just do multi-colored shoji screens.
It wouldn’t be accurate to say I’m crazy about Eastern architecture. What I adore most about Ming styles isn’t just the simplicity (compared to Qing, that is), but the colors, too. Instead of the overbearing red/black schemes in Qing, and the elaborate curlicues and whatnot, Ming lets the wood do the work. Okay, so what I love best is country design, the kind of thing people made to please themselves, decorating by hand. Heh, I look at my grandparents’ work of the same ilk/intention and call it kitcsh; I wonder if some Chinese family out in the boonies thinks of seeing their old China-version’d-Hoosier cabinet in someone’s living room and says to each other, “what kind of moron would pay all that money for an old cabinet, anyway?” while they roadtrip to China’s version of Ikea to buy a spiffy new pressboard-and-laminate set of kitchen cabinets.
Geometry is the key, but it’s also that done right, the geometry of intersecting squares both allows and blocks line-of-sight in equal amounts. Doors to the private part of the house shouldn’t completely cut off your line-of-sight, or light from the corridor, but be just enough of a “shall not pass” mark that you know the home’s private areas are down that way.
Although it’s amusing to look at ‘my’ bedroom versus his, in one sense, this is where our aesthetics merge, in the value of screens. Morroccan and middle eastern design are hugely emphatic on screens (a biggie before the days of AC, when you wanted a private house but no breeze was the kiss of summertime misery); China is equally so, with variations from simple squares to the craziest ’shattered-glass’ screen designs imaginable. The key between all of them is that they’re an ancient method of blocking some view, and some light, but not all, not enough that you feel like you’re looking at a blank wall.
I used to read design books & zines and just pass over the bits about “texture and richness” because it didn’t make sense. It’s taken a lot of actually thinking about the materials — not the color nor presentation but the materials themselves — to get some sense, maybe, of what designers mean.
In a recent picture I found online of a modern foyer, in that one image I could spy: wood on walls, painted gypsum, brick-laid tiles, granite, concrete, plywood on the ceiling. Colors: taupe, yellow, bronze/copper, celadon, gray. And visually, it’s also eyecandy just in the shapes: all in the way the various planes protrude and recede. What gets me is that the entire foyer’s not deeper than 5′; the photographer is using wide-angle lens (like they all do in architectural photography) but if you swing the door open wider, you’d see it’d only have about 2′ more to pass, roughly. (Front entrance doors are 36″ minimum by code in the US.) It’s not even ‘richness’ in the sense of ‘boy you spent money!’ because concrete and plywood and gypsum are probably the least expensive construction products available today. It’s that these are all together in one place, but they’re all smooth: so they blend but don’t. Which means the copper-encased window sill (the biggest expenditure in there, I’d bet, outside the windows), really pops out for its warmth but it doesn’t clash because it’s equally smooth.
Not saying I know how to duplicate it myself, but imitation is where we all start, from words to design.
This just in: CP says, “No, honey, I think our library’s fine.”
Next in lineup: asymmetry. The human eye can see something off-plumb or off-level as finely as down to 1/32nd of a degree; we sense it, even if we can’t identify it. (One more amazing trivia I’ve learned in the past few weeks of research.) There’s a huge difference between imbalance, where you know the person/designer wanted it all to line up, but it didn’t or wouldn’t, versus asymmetry where it’s in balance even if not identical from an identifiable center point. What I find most curious is the difference between western and eastern asymmetry in design.
A Western architect’s idea of balance via asymmetry: everything else is lined up perfectly, most often around the fireplace (or tv stand), so if the fireplace were identical on both sides, we’d instinctively feel it too static.
But true asymmetry isn’t a factor of “we’ll put something different on either side of the fireplace” but within each feature itself, and then taken as a whole. I’ve known since we moved in (and before that, in looking at CP’s townhouse over three years) that symmetry and asymmetry can each have balance (or not), but I never really got why the Western style feels unsatisfactory to me, but the Eastern sense of balance/weight does. It’s because the Western style is, more often than not, to introduce asymmetry into symmetry. I’m not say that’s can’t work — clearly, it does, and it is what saves an otherwise flat design from the horrendous fate of being ’static’ — but it doesn’t necessarily make our environment dynamic.
And what’s really fascinating about the dynamic in asymmetry, is that done well, it still has a sense of balance and peace. That single beam is dynamic, yet it’s not interruptive. I don’t know why this appeals to me more than the asymmetry of the “fireplace with shelves on one side and door on other” Western approach. I’ve not yet developed the verbiage to articulate (another reason for so many pictures). I think I started to clue in on it when I realized I’d kept coming back to one picture of a kitchen.
Things I didn’t like: the too-narrow/small island, the green is my idea of ill, the near-right countertop is too sharp-an-angle, the stretch of metal faces on the subzero fridge followed by stainless steel double ovens are too clinical-feeling, the big honkin’ vent over the stove feels out of proportion, and the general sense that this isn’t a kitchen where you hang out (though there’s room) but a pass-way from one place to the next.
Then I realized: if I look at it as a passway then I can see why I like it, because I’m constantly looking not at the foreground but at a curve in the distance, of a joist/large bent beam that acts as distant grounding over the dining area. The entire scene, for me, is about that curve in the distance.
So I went back and looked at the kitchens/rooms/designs that kept pulling me back, and I finally realized what I’d never grokked before, in home design, possibly because a lot of those circular/elliptical kitchens aren’t my style but I looked anyway. Hrm, that is, I think in the past I’ve always gravitated towards a visual style, of things and textures and materials, and didn’t realize I wasn’t exposing myself to alternate designs because some designs are inherent in the material. (Does that make sense?) This time, though, I was looking for the general bones and didn’t censor myself whether the design’s muscle/skin was metal, wood, plastic, whatever.
Now, granted, I’ll never care for a metal kitchen. That’s too operating room for me, and brings back memories of industrial kitchens to boot. A kitchen is the hearth; if there is any place in the house where clutter and color on the shelves is not just acceptable but welcome, it’s the damn kitchen. You want the appearance of overflowing and excessive and extravagent, I think: as you set your table, so should you feed your body/soul. Wildly, without restraint… so, no minimalist kitchens for me, but I studied their designs regardless.
This is what I realized in comparing why I liked the “everything wrong but I still like it and don’t know why” with the “so much right but it just doesn’t… please me completely” pictures of the lime-green-pass-through kitchen above and the circular kitchen after that. It’s really all about that one curve in the distance, and it was seeing that (and the entrance to the EcoNest home) that made it click for me: it’s because the curve doesn’t complete.
It’s a goddamn cliffhanger at the end of a chapter, is what it is!
The circular kitchens are all well and good (and from a design standpoint, though CP doesn’t believe me, they’re actually one of the most efficient shapes you could use in a kitchen, honestly), but they’re static. They finish off the edges and you can see where the curve ends. They don’t imply anything beyond themselves; they’re self-contained.
Again, there’s a lot I don’t like in the designs I find online, but I keep coming back to that curve (and CP’s comment that it appears at first glance as though the wood — a material we instinctively think of as ‘bendable’ or ‘flexible’ in some ways — is skewering the concrete, a seemingly inflexible and impenetrable substance). It doesn’t complete. It doesn’t embrace the entire kitchen, though it does; it’s that it’s embracing more than just the kitchen. Now I know why I find the rows of Morrocan or Chinese courtyard arches so disatisfying. It’s not because I don’t like their shape (I do), but that on their own, they speak only to that immediate space and don’t relate to anything else: and the smaller your space, the more you must relate to other spaces, or you feel like you’re standing in a 9×13 foot bubble and then moving to another 9×13 bubble, a series of small independent shoeboxes, instead of segmented areas within one large 18×13 shoebox.
Years ago when my sister was at RISD, she had an assignment in her pottery class to make “two items in dialogue.” She gave me several sets of the candles made from that mold, and I recall just kind of shrugging at her explanation about dialogue. Okay, so you take the two candles and put them together, and their curves fit into one regular-looking candle stand; you separate them and place them at either end of the table and now they’re talking, or something, whatever, it’s artist-talk. (Which is only one step removed from crazy talk, sometimes.)
Maybe I should call her, now that I really get it, in my bones. It’s not that you look at one candle and think, “that’s not done,” or that it’s imbalanced; the candle is, in and of itself, balanced in an asymmetrical way, but that you sense it could be completed. The key is that if it’s balanced within its own environment, then you don’t have to go looking for its completion. It’s that when you do find its completion, there’s the odd pleasure of having somehow ’solved’ something.
Elswhere, recently, I came across an architect’s note that while it’s good to have a theme for a house, don’t go into overkill. I thought, well, of course; it’s like people who collect cows or frogs or old vacuum cleaner hoses. If it’s everywhere, guests (and eventually the residents, too) will feel like there’s no escape. It’s too much. It’d be as bad as taking a contemporary ranch home built in the late 60s and done in the fake-spanish-med-style on the exterior and trying to turn it into some shoji-laden westernized version of a Japanese home. Don’t work, and it’s too jarring, too much.
[Which had keyed into my original concept of having a Name for this house, some kind of pattern, that placed our stamp on it, though I'd not realized at the time just how much work I'd be putting into seeing where CP's stamp, and my stamp, converge or diverge. I'd thought of cranes, which are birds that've always held a particular meaning for me, but after two seasons of cedar fever, I think we should call it the Juniper House, and use that as the design element. Sort of like how the ancient egyptians put snakes on their beds: as a way to console the god of snakes so he wouldn't send one of his minions over to bite the person in their sleep. Except we'd be consoling the cedar tree in the backyard, so it wouldn't send its pollen in to leave CP in misery...]
But, again, I’d been thinking about the cake decoration and the architect meant the bones, and thinking about that incomplete curve in that otherwise-icky kitchen, and the concrete ellipse-part in the other kitchen, and I realized it’s not that you don’t overdo the design, it’s just like writing: don’t show it all at once. It’s exactly like writing, come to think of it, or my sister’s candles. You see only one, and it implies there’s more, just like a cliffhanger does: it says, keep looking because this is not where it ends. It’s not self-contained.
Designs speak to us best when we can see the long view — if you look straight into the center, you see the curve comes around but the space travels beyond — but at the same time, the eye follows the curve of the countertops (which isn’t a perfect curve in and of itself, either) and there’s the instinctive push to follow that circle to see what’s off to the left. That’s what introduces the dynamic element: two competing lines, and the circle’s incompleteness is what sets you at edge between the two, but because the line of sight isn’t interruppted, this isn’t a negative. It just is. It draws you in, draws you forward.
You know that old line about an essay being like a woman’s skirt — long enough to cover the topic but short enough to keep your interest? (Hah, hah, yeah.) But it’s still true: cover the topic but leave a lot out, too; it’s what’s left out that intrigues us. It’s what we can’t see, when we know there’s more to see, that makes us move forward.
If you get a chance (and are interested in modern architecture), go look up any of the Stenger houses. There’s a whimsy in the architecture that I just adore; the sense that you can get quick glimpses but nothing complete. It’s pulling you to the outside, keeping you aware of it via that incompleteness, but it’s also providing privacy… it’s another version of those geometric screens. (In this case, it’s a rather famous detail of a kitchen wall, in which small square windows are inset in the brick, from above the average head down to shin-height, in a slightly-random diagonal pattern.)
Having some of the windows down near the floor just amuse me to no end. It’s kid-level windows, and kid-sized. Yes, the windows march in a rhthym right down the wall, but not entirely lined up symmetrically, just regular enough to have a pattern… and at the same time, not give you everything. There are other things in that kitchen I don’t like, and while I do like some modern design much of it’s too stark for even me, but now I know: it’s not that I want curves. I want something that doesn’t tell you everything right away. I want to live somewhere that even I find surprises when I come around the corner, get a little more revealed with each glimpse.
Tagged: geometry, modern, occupying space, style