~ On Madrid's Plaza Mayor. It's been too long.
~ I love basically everything Alan Jacobs writes:
The general failure to understand this point leads to a pathology of thought that is extremely common but rarely acknowledged for what it is. You see it when people say that they’re all about empowering women’s voices, but of course pro-life women aren’t really women at all. You see when people who advocate for true freedom for black people in America say that a black person who supports Trump isn’t reallyblack at all. You see it when Republicans call other Republicans RINOs. You see it when people say that Catholics who don’t support the Pope against ancient tradition aren’t really Catholic, and when others say that those who don’t support ancient tradition against the Pope are the ones who aren’t really Catholic. You see it when people want to celebrate the beautiful unity of Christianity, but those who don’t hold our views about sexuality aren’t really Christians at all. “Of course we mean not tolerated ——, that we extirpate.”
~ I love basically everything Alan Jacobs writes. (On the public and the university.)
~ "Motherhood in the Age of Fear"
~ Must read Elizabeth Hardwick
~ Watched the first episode of Making It while in labor and thought it was great.
~ Fascinated by this nationalized response to loneliness in England.
~ I love Kate Wagner (and rooms!):
Nothing is more maddening than trying to read or watch television in the tall-ceilinged living room with someone banging pots and pans or using the food processor 10 feet away in the open kitchen.
The best thing about the closed floor plan? It offers what it has always offered: aural, olfactory, and spatial privacy. Humans have always needed the sense of comfort and refuge that defined rooms provide. That may explain the rise of “man caves” and “she sheds”—closed spaces that rebel against the open concept.
Instead of these—space-wasting, specialized rooms that are used relatively sparingly—why not just build common rooms with walls and doors? If you want to escape something unpleasant, you can do so without feeling banished or isolating yourself from everyone else. Sometimes, true freedom means putting up a few barriers.
6 comments:
I totally disagree with the rooms argument. The open kitchen is a godsend to parents of young children, who can cook dinner while keeping an eye on their kids playing in the living or dining rooms, and can walk over and help them reach something or change their stuffed cat's diaper (real) while also watching dinner to make sure it doesn't explode. Who still "reads or watches television" while someone else is cooking? Now both parents prepare dinner and monitor the kids during dinner prep together.
I don't understand the environmental argument she makes at all. Who has a room-based heating/cooling system? That requires either a fireplace/radiator and window unit a/c in each room (does anyone long to return to this?) or multi-level heating/cooling, which is a great, but quite expensive and only floor- or level-based.
Also, generally, who is this argument for? People who have two separate kitchens and like 4000 sq ft, or people who have a 1500-2500 sq ft house with an open first floor plan for their living/dining/kitchen space? The latter don't have specialized mess kitchens or whatever. They just have an open public space and then all the usual private spaces - bedrooms, office, basement. When you have a small house in the first place, heating and cooling it is easier regardless of room layout, and hiving everything off into its own room ends up wasting more of the limited space in walls and fixtures. And if your house is 4000 sq ft, who even cares whether you have rooms or not? It won't be cheap to maintain or clean either way.
Ha. We have opposite intuitions on this. The house I grew open had the open floor plan without doors and it was the bane of my existence as a kid--i just wanted to shut a door and be alone. Granted, we had a relatively large family by today's standards. My parents never complained, so maybe it's better for them?
And I want to close the door and cook when I'm in the kitchen--and make Francisco take care of the kid (s). Or have him cook with kid:)
When we lived in DC, we had window units and would hang a curtain over the kitchen door when we had guests for a meal--it made for one sweaty kitchen and cool-ish dining room.
When we look at houses now, we just imagine building in walls. The things I love most are European apartments where every room has a door. So much privacy!!
That said, room based heating, which we have in IN, has a lot of downsides, too!
Yes, I don't care at all about my children's preferences at this point, just my own. Toddlers also do NOT prefer to be alone, ever. But even if this changes when they're older, the houses that Wagner is describing also have private rooms, usually upstairs or on the outer edges of the open common area, right? It's not like the whole house is door-free. So the privacy-hungry older child can go up to his room, or down to the basement rec room, or outside to the yard to be alone. I guess if you have more siblings and share bedrooms, the bedroom may be less useful in this function, but there are still other private spaces, short of "man-caves" and "she-sheds." I don't even understand why you'd want privacy in a living or dining room (or even kitchen, frankly). Is cooking shameful?
I think we looked at a lot of versions of your dream home while house-hunting. We thought about knocking out all those walls.
How does room-based heating work? Is it something other than radiators?
Yes, unless, as you note, there are more people than rooms with doors. (Also--a one-floor living space means sound travels far too well. I have nightmares about my childhood in which I desperately plugged my ears and could still hear my young siblings learning to play instruments.) I know, I know--these are the most severe hardships anyone has ever faced:)
Our room-based heating in IN now is terribly expensive electric heaters in each room. I think we had that in one of our houses in Philly, too. But yeah, in DC it was radiators. I clearly haven't lived in real places with centralized heating and cooling, which admittedly would be a big upgrade.
Also--real thank you note to come some day but what a fantastic surprise!!
Wowwwwwww we read these comments, you know.
Haha, well, sadly, the instrument practice problem persists even when you have walls, unless they are made of cinderblock, which is *very* space-consuming.
No worries, just wanted to thank you for hosting us!
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