Music and Cats

If you were awarded the architectural commission for W’s presidential library, what would you design?

That’s the question that the Chronicle of Higher Education asked its readers, inviting them to send in design ideas on the backs of envelopes. This week, it published several of the approximately 120 entries submitted. As discussed in a short accompanying video, the submittals were “good, bad, serious, humorous, abstract, or really angry.”

My favorite? This mix of humor and anger, which extends beyond the proscribed confines of a single envelope back. As justification for this, its designer describes a discussion with the president, in which he “told me that he didn’t get to the White House by ‘following the rules’, so neither should I. Consider it a ’signing statement’.”

Do you have a favorite? Or an even better idea?

Today I made a decision that will change my life… sometime next month. Because I don’t blog about the details of my job, I’m not going to tell you more than that.

Today I got some great news. My father will be the 2008 recipient of one of the American Institute of Architect’s highest honors, the Edward C. Kemper Award for service to the profession. Yay, Dad! He’ll receive the award at the AIA’s convention in May. Hooray! We’re going to Boston!

Today I read an article that made me so mad I could spit. If the city council of New Orleans allows it, the Department of Housing and Urban Development will begin bulldozing several of New Orleans’ public housing projects this weekend. And they’re planning to replace the buildings, some of which are WPA-era, high-quality construction that could be restored, with this sort of shoddily built, poorly designed crap.

Did I say three things? I guess I’m done, then.

To open the Advent calendar window for Day 19, click here: (more…)

I have never claimed that this blog is about architecture. However, I am an architect, and once upon a time I wrote fairly frequently about buildings I designed, the construction site in which I lived, and the sad state of housing for the less fortunate in this country.

A couple of months ago, The Architect, who writes the blog Maison Camy about the construction of the house he designed, linked to Music and Cats, which he described as being “really about architecture.” When I read this, I laughed… sad, wistful laughter.

Recently, I haven’t written much about architecture. Why not? Because I’ve been so damn busy being an architect. I miss writing about architecture. I’m going to get back to it soon, I promise.

But in the meantime, I’ll share something that has been clogging up the inboxes of architects this week. Annie Choi’s “open letter” was published a while back in Pidgin, the grad school journal of the Princeton School of Architecture. I don’t know who started it zinging its way around the Internets, but I’m glad they did. This letter made me laugh, too… the sort of laughter that comes with painful recognition. Not everyone is laughing; Ms. Choi has received hate mail from some architects. As she notes, “not all architects understand irony or humor”… which is sad, because sometimes that’s the only thing that gets an architect throught the day… and night.

Once, a long time ago in the days of yore, I had a friend who was studying architecture to become, presumably, an architect. This friend introduced me to other friends, who were also studying architecture. Then these friends had other friends who were architects - real architects doing real architecture like designing luxury condos that look a lot like glass dildos. And these real architects knew other real architects and now the only people I know are architects. And they all design glass dildos that I will never work or live in and serve only to obstruct my view of New Jersey.

Do not get me wrong, architects. I like you as a person. I think you are nice, smell good most of the time, and I like your glasses. You have crazy hair, and if you are lucky, most of it is on your head. But I do not care about architecture. It is true. This is what I do care about:

* burritos
* hedgehogs
* coffee

As you can see, architecture is not on the list. I believe that architecture falls somewhere between toenail fungus and invasive colonoscopy in the list of things that interest me.

Perhaps if you didn’t talk about it so much, I would be more interested. When you point to a glass cylinder and say proudly, hey my office designed that, I giggle and say it looks like a bong. You turn your head in disgust and shame. You think, obviously she does not understand. What does she know? She is just a writer. She is no architect. She respects vowels, not glass cocks. And then you say now I am designing a lifestyle center, and I ask what is that, and you say it is a place that offers goods and services and retail opportunities and I say you mean like a mall and you say no. It is a lifestyle center. I say it sounds like a mall. I am from the Valley, bitch. I know malls.

Architects, I will not lie, you confuse me. You work sixty, eighty hours a week and yet you are always poor. Why aren’t you buying me a drink? Where is your bounty of riches? Maybe you spent it on merlot. Maybe you spent it on hookers and blow. I cannot be sure. It is a mystery. I will leave that to the scientists to figure out.

Architects love to discuss how much sleep they have gotten. One will say how he was at the studio until five in the morning, only to return again two hours later. Then another will say, oh that is nothing. I haven’t slept in a week. And then another will say, guess what, I have never slept ever. My dear architects, the measure of how hard you’ve worked and how much you’ve accomplished is not related to the number of hours you have not slept. Have you heard of Rem Koolhaas? He is a famous architect. I know this because you tell me he is a famous architect. I hear that Rem Koolhaas is always sleeping. He is, I presume, sleeping right now. And I hear he gets shit done. And I also hear that in a stunning move, he is making a building that looks not like a glass cock, but like a concrete vagina. When you sleep more, you get vagina. You can all take a lesson from Rem Koolhaas.

Life is hard for me, please understand. Architects are an important part of my existence. They call me at eleven at night and say they just got off work, am I hungry? Listen, it is practically midnight. I ate hours ago. So long ago that, in fact, I am hungry again. So yes, I will go. Then I will go and there will be other architects talking about AutoCAD shortcuts and something about electric panels and can you believe that is all I did today, what a drag. I look around the table at the poor, tired, and hungry, and think to myself, I have but only one bullet left in the gun. Who will I choose?

I have a friend who is a doctor. He gives me drugs. I enjoy them. I have a friend who is a lawyer. He helped me sue my landlord. My architect friends have given me nothing. No drugs, no medical advice, and they don’t know how to spell subpoena. One architect friend figured out that my apartment was one hundred and eighty seven square feet. That was nice. Thanks for that.

I suppose one could ask what someone like me brings to architects like yourselves. I bring cheer. I yell at architects when they start talking about architecture. I force them to discuss far more interesting topics, like turkey eggs. Why do we eat chicken eggs, but not turkey eggs? They are bigger. And people really like turkey. See? I am not afraid to ask the tough questions.

So, dear architects, I will stick around, for only a little while. I hope that one day some of you will become doctors and lawyers or will figure out my taxes. And we will laugh at the days when you spent the entire evening talking about some European you’ve never met who designed a building you will never see because you are too busy working on something that will never get built. But even if that day doesn’t arrive, give me a call anyway, I am free.

Yours truly,
Annie Choi

Well. At least she likes my glasses.

So, you wanna get dinner tonight after work? Hey, it’s Friday, so I’ll get off early… let’s make it ten-thirty, OK?

Some time ago, I promised before and after floor plans for our kitchen. We are about to take possession of the kitchen (it’s all over save for a walk-through, a few touch-ups and one last big hit to our bank account), and I figured I should post the plans before the final photos. For those of you who’ve been checking out the remodeling photos, and are somewhat spatially inclined, these drawings will hold few surprises.

Here’s the kitchen before:

The most outstanding “feature” of our old kitchen, from a designer’s point of view, was that it had four doors. Four! Where did all of those doors lead? The door on the bottom wall into the living room, the door of the lower left onto the stair to the second floor, the door on the upper left onto the basement stair, and the doorway on the right into the laundry room (and to the powder room and back door). The traffic pattern created by all of those doors limited the space available for the kitchen itself; the room was really a big hallway, with a kitchen tucked in around the edges. The L-shaped cabinets, with sink and range, fit into the one corner not part of the circulation space. The refrigerator sat up against the wall between the two stair doors. And the microwave was on a butcherblock next to the chimney (the gray box between the two stair doors) for the boiler in our basement.

With help from my architect father, I fought with the layout of this kitchen for the first three years that Paul and I owned the house. We were trying to keep all of the doors, so our initial redesigns were attempts to shift and/or minimize the existing circulation paths through the kitchen. After generating one too many unsatisfactory ’solutions,’ I finally talked Paul into giving up one door into the kitchen.

By closing off the door to the second floor stair (at the lower left), we turned a cross-shaped circulation path into a T. We would have more wall space for cabinets and appliances. The existing L of cabinets could be changed to a simple, straight run with the sink in the middle. All we had to do was work around the chimney. For several months, I worked on a design that wrapped the chimney in kitchen cabinets. It was rather fussy (not in a good way), and would have been complicated to build. Then one day, after I’d been thinking about and drawing and redrawing this kitchen for four years, I suddenly knew what to do to solve the kitchen layout easily and elegantly. I added one wall.

Here’s the kitchen after:

The new wall runs along the face of the chimney, parallel to the stair wall. Not only does it create a straight wall on which to put cabinets, the refrigerator and the range, but the spaces between the new wall and the stair wall are useful. At the lower corner of the plan, the new wall creates a closet off the stair landing. Our house had no hall closet, so even a small closet with room enough to hang a few coats and store the vacuum cleaner seems luxurious. To the other side of the chimney, the alcove between new wall and stair wall is just the right size for pantry shelves.

Those of you who know something about kitchen design will recognize that the work triangle (a triangle drawn between the kitchen sink, range and refrigerator) is a little oddly shaped, but it still works. We’ll cook with the kitchen we have, and be much happier than in its predecessor. We also moved the washer and dryer to the basement, freeing up that space, with its northeastern exposure and abundant morning light, to become a small breakfast nook.

We’ll be moving back into the kitchen this weekend. There will be photos. There will be cooking. There may even be photos of cooking. It’s going to be good.

Oooh, look! A pretty shiny chrome thing! Do you know what it is?

Here are some clues:
1) It’s in the kitchen.
2) It’s attached to the wall.
2) I’ve mentioned it in a previous post.


While you puzzle over that, or smile the satisfied smile of one who knows, I’ll tell you the ‘one step back’ story from the end of last week.

Way back when we began discussing this kitchen remodel with our contractor, we told them that we wanted honed black granite countertops. What I really wanted was soapstone countertops, but they were way too expensive. Honed granite has a matte finish, and absolute black has a fine grain, so we could get a somewhat similar look at a much lower price. After the contractor questioned our choice (”you know honed granite stains,” they said, “we know,” we said, “and we don’t expect it to stay perfect”), we went on to discuss in great detail the layout of the large countertop on the sink side of the kitchen. This is the most complicated countertop, as it wraps over the half-height wall between the kitchen and the breakfast nook. We had a couple of long conversations about the intersection between the cabinets, the half wall and the countertop. We worked it all out. And we discussed that the countertop would be cut as a single slab of granite. The counter is exactly 10 feet long, and a straight run; there is no need for splicing. We agreed. All was fine. We selected granite slabs 129″ long, just to be sure the usable area was long enough.

The night before the stone fabricators were scheduled to make templates for the countertops, we discovered a problem with the half-height wall: it had been built 1 1/2″ too long. (There is photographic documentation here here & here.) The next day, after some wailing and gnashing of teeth on my part, and rending of garments and careful thought on the contractor’s part, a solution was proposed and accepted. The countertop templates were made on schedule, and the fabricators went back to their shop to fabricate.

Last Thursday, our countertops arrived on site. I was so excited that I drove home at lunchtime to see them. The countertops were installed, and our carpenter was attaching wood cove molding under their front edges. My first thought was oh how pretty! …and then I saw the splice. The splice where no splice had been planned. Or discussed. Or, most importantly, approved by us.

I hit the roof.

Now, my version of hitting the roof is fairly well contained. I didn’t yell, but our carpenter certainly knew I was angry. The exchange went something like this:

Me: “Why did they splice the countertop?”
Him: “The fabricator said that the granite slab you chose was too short to make it out of one piece.”
Me: “The slabs weren’t too short; we selected them specifically for the length of this countertop.”
Him:”The salesperson called me the day the templates were made and said there would be a splice.”
Me: “That was two weeks ago. Why did you not tell us? Why am I just seeing this now?”
Him: (silence)
Me: “Don’t do any more work on this countertop until we’ve resolved this.”

I called one of the contractor brothers, and left an irritated message. I spoke with the salesperson at the fabricator’s office. It turns out the slab was long enough, but they wouldn’t guarantee a countertop that long. She said that our carpenter had approved the template, which showed a splice. When pressed, she did a song and dance about the strength and brittleness of certain types of stone, but could not tell me how long a countertop they would cut from absolute black granite. Eventually, the contractor called, listened, apologized, and said he’d take care of it.

And then we waited. This, my friends, is the part I find strange and difficult about being “the client.” As an architect, I am part of the problem-solving and negotiation that go on whenever issues come up during construction. I help mediate between the contractor and the client. I make suggestions. I see the inner workings of the process. Not so this time. Instead, we waited while the contractor “took care of it.”

Today, the penultimate step in that process happened. Two folks from the fabrication company, three from our contractor, and Paul met in our kitchen to look at the problem. (I was at work, preparing for a client meeting.) After much discussion, a decision was reached: we are getting a new, unspliced countertop. It will be installed on Monday.

The most frustrating part to me of this whole story is that it stems directly from a lack of communication. Had our carpenter mentioned to anyone - either his boss, or me, or Paul - that the fabricator intended to put a splice in the countertop, the issue could have been addressed then. Now, our project, which was supposed to be completed next Thursday, is behind schedule by 1 1/2 weeks. After almost three months without a kitchen, what’s another 10 days? It’s a lot. Grrrr.

After all that, here’s another photo of the pretty shiny thing. It’s a pot filler faucet, located on the wall where our new gas range will be. I am frankly a bit embarrased by this little luxury item, which I chose to install not because we eat lots of pasta, but because of my little obsession with making preserves. Yes, I am capable of lifting a canner full of water out of the sink, lugging it across the kitchen, and hefting it onto the stove. But now - rather, soon - I won’t have to do so. Both that thought, and the pretty shiny chrome, make me smile.