as a man , heavy watcher of HGTV, I dont get the appeal for open floor plan.. My dad is the same, My mom is all about it. Cant wait to use the argument of the article on her
This article is so bad it may have been written by a 14 year old. Open floor plans are a thing because cooking is now a communal activity and not something servants and housewives do in the back closet of the house. A lot of parties are now hosted out of the kitchen it just makes sense.
cooking is still done by women twice as much as by men Average hours per day: Food preparation and cleanup:
Average percent engaged in the activity per day: men 0.39 women 0.79 men 48.3 women 70.3
Dude you have no idea how bad it used to be. And again - "ugly open plan architecture" is a Toll Brothers/Quadrant/Centex/Lennar thing, and they all got their start in the '80s. Compare Hepburn/Bogart in Sabrina to Ford/Griffith in Working Girl for a Zeitgeist taste. This wasn't a "ha ha we'll take away that poor woman's last refuge - the KITCHIN!" (twists moustache) issue. It's a shitty design for shitty people issue.
My wife's friend gave her a book about babies when she was pregnant for the first time. It had a checklist of things to bring to the hospital, annoying which, nestled between ,"pajamas" and "toothbrush" was "sandwiches for father". It was a new edition of an old book, so I guess they missed that update.
This discussion is relevant to my interests. Americans did a ruthlessly efficient job of purging our culture of traditions. We're nomads, we're on stolen land, we're a nation of immigrants where homogeneity is required. The closest thing we have to a universal coming-of-age ceremony is the driver's license and those are becoming less and less universal. Americans also did a ruthlessly efficient job of destroying birth practices. For nearly all of history, birthing has been women doing women stuff while men stay the hell out of the way but after WWI it became clear that a hospital bumped your survival rate from 80% to 95% or so which turned a rite of passage into a surgical intervention and surgery simply isn't a part of our cultural fabric. There's been backlash against this because every woman knows that "having a baby" is different from "having your tonsils out" no matter how hard hospitals want it otherwise. Meanwhile men have a tradition of being manly and celebrating their vitality which you totally don't get to do anymore. I've managed to duck out of bachelor parties by saying "bachelor parties are lame unless there's strippers and coke" or "a good bachelor party is one that you are embarrassed to participate in" and baby showers by saying "baby showers are for women and any man who disagrees is a simp." This attitude is prevalent which is why we now have this blight of "gender reveal" parties involving tannerite and forest fires but the basic problem is - I want a ritual - I have three girlfriends and my husband - and my family lives 300 miles away - what do. Take it from the guy who owns a birth center: what you do is drag your hubby along to all sorts of shit he has no business and less interest in participating in. American birth is basically "we're going to talk to the woman, do everything with the woman, assume total primacy of the woman and also assume she's dragging her chump husband/boyfriend/partner/whatever along with." I can attest that the non-bearing partner in a lesbian relationship is every bit the third wheel conventional husbands are because there's simply no fucking room for them in the process. But fuckin' hell she'll be there because we aren't sexist dinosaurs passing around cigars anymore, Brenda. So pretty much every guide to pregnancy you will find includes the perpetual, tired, tongue-in-cheek trope of "your husband is there to be in the way, be confused, be worried and be clueless yet we love them so much don't we girls lol." We literally wrote a 190pp guide to get around this bullshit. You have a baby with us you get a mutherfucking 1.5" binder full of shit we wrote. Because "what to expect when you're expecting" is ridiculously terrible and in a conventional American childbearing relationship you will end up with at least two copies.
(Trash article. But the topic of open plans is interesting...) I've always loved open plan homes, and have lived in several. My current home would be MUCH more open, but my wife loves her pocket door in between the kitchen and living room, so I can't demo that wall until after she passes away. :-) Open plans are how my Southern California upbringing was lived: Mom and Dad both worked, and I came home after school to an empty house. So in the evening, making dinner, doing homework, etc., we all lived together in the big open space that was the kitchen, dining, and family room. This was true in two houses in California, and three in Washington state. The kitchen was the heart of the home, and all activity centered around it. When I moved overseas, homes and apartments were MUCH smaller and more efficiently designed. So an excess of walls took up valuable space, separate rooms required separate heaters (more costly), and you needed room to expand the dinner table when family came over. (Which happened all the time, in Eastern Europe which is VERY family-focused.) So anyway, the article is complete bullshit. And I love open plans and the type of living you can do in them.
The argument is bullshit, though. Patient zero is this poorly-researched article in the Atlantic two years ago, which doesn't just refer to Frank Lloyd Wright as a "then-obscure American architect" in 1901 (lol) it describes Neutra and Schindler as "desciples" of Wright. Look. The phrase used most often to denigrate Frank Lloyd Wright houses, particularly the Usonian era ones, is "claustrophobic." He wasn't an open-plan guy, unless you consider his open hatred of closets and storage space to be "open plan." For that you can blame two forces: the Case Study Houses, which are universally open diorama cases for furniture nobody wants to sit on, and Herman Miller, which decided that offices were for chumps in 1967. I mean this was just yesterday Frank Lloyd Wright's Zimmerman House: Case Study House 22, the Stahl House by Peter Koenig It's kinda dumb to blame modern architecture on either Wright or the Case study houses, though. Far better to blame it on the Toll Brothers. Basically, tastless yuppies wanted things that looked grand but had no history because they wanted to look grand but they had no history. It's worth a visit to Hearst Castle to really get it: when you have money but don't have taste, what you do is spackle the trappings of wealth all over your slimy body like a caddis fly and that's exactly what started happening the minute the Reagan tax cuts went through. This is why I have such beef with Kate Wagner and McMansion Hell - the term was coined by realtors in the late '80s (and popularized by Newsweek's weekly jargon column) to describe all the cookie cutter bullshit homes being developed on virgin land by publicly-traded shitbox development firms by Toll Brothers and was widely known and understood by every architecture student and enthusiast for 20 years and then Kate took it upon herself to miseducate an entire generation of internet cranks whose attention span is also gnat-like. Homes are ugly now because LaCoste-wearing yuppies in the '80s knew that money counted more than taste. It still does. It's the misogyny of Wall Street, not the misogyny of Frank Lloyd Wright, who was more of a misanthrope than a misogynist anyway.
Why? Open floor plan let’s someone cook and monitor kids at the same time. It makes cooking a communal activity and not something to be done in the back and it allows for more than one person to use the kitchen at the same time. Closed cramped kitchen really kind of suck and relegate cooking to an activity that’s essentialy done in a back room. The process of cooking becomes unimportant and all you have is the results. As a man that does most of the cooking I would absolutely hate to have a back room kitchen so I don’t really understand why this would be different if a woman was cooking.
As it says in the article, the kitchen kinda provided an escape for the woman; her own space separate from the family. Now she doesn't even get that. Of course, the point - and the article in general - is total bullshit. But it does say it right there...
Yeah but the rise of open plan coincided with the rise of women in the workplace... And the decrease of space per employee over the same time period. It totally says it. Nobody is contesting that. But it says it fallaciously, with bad data, for disingenuous reasons. The whole article is Cracked looking for a reason to rewrite a Vice article for clickbait.
Is it, though? What's the evidence? The Frank Lloyd Wright quote Cracked leans on, which they borrowed from The Atlantic, comes from California Design: Living in the Modern way. Here's the full text. Here's where it gets dumb. That's not a Frank Lloyd Wright quote. If you hunt down the footnote it's a Winthrop Sargeant quote ABOUT Frank Lloyd Wright from Life Magazine in 1946. Frank Lloyd Wright was in full Usonian tilt by 1946, and so was everyone else. Here's more of the quote, which again, isn't Frank Lloyd Wright, is about Frank Lloyd Wright, and is taken from an article about California (Case Study) Architecture: You know the Hanna house? It's a trip. It legit has sanctums separating the bedrooms from the living room. Here's the kitchen, by the way: Little fact: Frank Lloyd Wright hated kitchens. He only did open-plan kitchens when his clients were too cheap for the good ones. Fallingwater, where he went over budget by a factor of six, has the kitchen hidden away from everything else: ...which is the way he tended to do stuff. But never mind that. Because the Cracked article basically mentions that shit in passing while hoping you aren't paying too close attention because they don't know what the fuck they're talking about. No, the basis of the article is right here: Which, sure. Swinging hammers and breaking shit is basically the money shot of half of the double-digit cable channels. You can't do a remodel without taking out a wall because we all know that remodeling basically means saying everyone who lived in the house before you didn't know what the fuck they were doing, the simps, let's paint the brick, pull out the fireplace and tear down the shear wall so we can put a post in the middle of the living room the way God intended. But that's not architecture. That's simps with sledgehammers. And it's not sexist, it's stupid. I watched my last home improvement show in the late '90s. It was like house swap or some shit and these choads decided to "remodel" their neighbor's rumpus room by turning the dad's easy chair a different color. So the producers gave them eight boxes of Rit dye and a weed sprayer and told 'em to go to town. Looked... passable from 40 feet away. Turned everyone's ass green, no doubt, but they didn't show that part because really, they're here for the swinging sledgehammers and have been since Bob Vila got kicked off of This Old House. Spraying a recliner grass stain green is closer to interior design than swinging a sledgehammer at a wall is to architecture. No matter how badly Cracked wants it to be Frank Lloyd Wright's sexism.I appreciate the lecture on architecture, and the Wright defense, but the point I focus on is : open floor plan is bad for women
“Schindler and Neutra had both worked with Frank Lloyd Wright, and even though their own visual languages quickly diverged from his, they shared with Wright - and passed on to the many who in turn trained with them - his fundamental belief that architecture was “a powerful instrument of social progress capable of bringing about a better world through radical changes in mankind’s habits of living.”
Wright himself took that idea of architecture as a social agent right into the California home, with a house in Palo Alto built in 1937 for Paul and Jean Hanna. The Hannas were pioneers in the new science of child development, with a “whole philosophy of living.” They saw the household as a “small society”, in which privacy and community were carefully calibrated, where spaces would flow easily between sanctuaries of solitude and settings for conversation and from indoors to out.
Ironically, open floor plans are still a highly gendered feature, but it's not women clamoring for them. In the modern era, they were popularized by HGTV shows that wanted to appeal to men who like to watch the big walls get knocked down with the heavy hammers.
open floor plan is bad for women the article follow some logical steps we can argue on them: 1- in 2019 women are still the one in charge of cooking, (0.8h / day vs 0,4h/ day for men) 2- there is NO wall: the one who spend less time cooking (men & child) use the place for other activities 3- more mess to clean 4- there is NO wall 5- you're incentivized to clean since the "kitchen" is also in view of the entertainment/reception room 6- in 2019 women are still the one in charge of that cleanup (0.8h / day vs 0,4h/ day for men) 7- with a wall you eliminate 3 & 5 2 & 4 : 100% 3: 80% (more people access = more mess, seems a solid correlation observed in many situation ) 5: 50% (depend on the users taste for clean place, and submission to peer pressure /taste for representation , I evaluate it in the middle) 7: 80% (there is still a door, so 3 & 5 still happen but way less)Is it, though? What's the evidence?
Here are my percentage of trust in each step, I'm happy to hear yours to see if we are too far away to argue, or if we can find some common ground: 1 & 6 : 95% (those government stat might be biased, or I could misread them)
Oh, I know. This stuff matters, though. If you're going to live there you oughtta enjoy it, and the best way to know if you enjoy it is to know why you enjoy it. Ours is an unremodeled mid-century modern, built 1950, still has the mahogany trim strips ("character") and the three-sided fireplace. It would probably be described as "open plan, except for that annoying partition wall between the kitchen and the living room" which HGTV would have demolished before they put their camera cases down. I understand why they did it: the living/dining feels open and expansive while also separate from the kitchen and if that wall wasn't there the place would feel like a wanna-be loft (which is definitely what the renovators are going for). There was a cabinet that separated the kitchen from the hall until 2001; we took it out because we decided "more cabinets" was more useful than "breakfast nook 12 feet away from the dining room" so it's not like The Ancients Knew Everything but if you're building 30 of them you've probably put more thought into it than Johnny Sledgehammer. And the article calls Johnny Sledgehammer a sexist architect.