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.