Your house is a garage

I’ve already commented on the lack of colour and imagination in my neighborhood but among the things that are right in the area where I live are easy access to green spaces, some innovative front yard gardens, more dogs that you can throw a stick at, and very few home designs like that in the picture above.

This can no longer be considered a trend but an imposition, a cancer, a pox on the eyes. But for the sake of fairness let us first consider why this type of design might serve a purpose. After all, home design seems to be a continuing negotiation between the demands of aesthetics and utility.

First of all, there may be no back alley and the garage needs to be in front. Second, putting the garage in the back uses up valuable recreational area.

I think Jane Jacobs, were she still about, would agree with me that this design is not a positive element. When I think of community togetherness I often think of old Frank Capra films, and scenes of New York tenements with people hanging out on the front stoops and spending time with their neighbors. Those stoops are right up on the street. The house fronts are inviting.

Not only have we pushed the houses back from the street but when the garage and driveway dominate, the result is a further retreat from the street, a shunning, a turning the back on the community. I would take that further and say that I feel that the house is mooning the street.

I’ve always felt that if the parts of the house were the parts of the body, the garage would be the colon. Its the ass of the house. Trash seems to move toward the garage, and to carry the analogy where it naturally goes, the cars are, well…you can fill that part in. And if you buy that, then what this design expresses to me is the celebration of the accumulation of waste. Not so much different from bragging about the size and frequency of your bowel movements.

If there were only a few of these houses around it would not be that annoying but they tend to populate entire subdivisions and tend to co-occur with colour restrictions as well, so we have the unvarying onslaught of not only these domestic posteriers but also the slightly off white to beige boredom. The one above is a little more risque with the pale blue but you can see that it exists within a sea of similar houses.

Take another look at the picture, the garage is actually wider than the rest of the house. The whole aspect pushes you away. It really is a garage with a house attached. (I have seen small garages which face the front and are attached to the sides of the house, and they can seem an afterthough, hardly drawing the eye at all, and those can even be pleasing in overall effect).

I will return to this tirade in the future but if there is any justice in this world, the rising eco awareness as well as the rising cost of fuel will undermine the future of this template. We might actually move away from this counterintuitive trend toward larger and larger homes, larger and larger garages, and larger and larger vehicles.

Clock

I like this. Its an unusual adornment and seems to evoke a sense of the official -like a townhall in an old European town. The one drawback I see is that once you put a timepiece on prominent display, you are responsible for making sure it is accurate.

On not seeing red

As I’ve already mentioned I live in the grayest of neighbourhoods. For example..

It seems as though a competition began years ago, to create the least exciting exterior, and if you missed it, no worries, a front runner has yet to emerge. Its much too close too call at this point or perhaps we should say in this race to the bottom, everyone might be a winner. Except for the owners of that house in the centre, the pale yellow one, the one so wild and crazy considering the environs.

It does seem that when I walk around the only deep and strong colours I do see are some of those deep rich browns resembling wood. But primary colours? When you do see yellows, reds, blues and greens, they are most often rather pale or if brighter, a pastel of sorts (and I will collect these and post some later). But nothing like below, which are among the photos my brother took on a recent trip to Playa del Carmen in Mexico.

or this one:

Yes, it is a tropical country, a Latin country but should that matter? Anybody walking by these buildings feels a lifting of the spirit, a spring in the step which takes you right into happy hour where you celebrate these walls with every toast whereas here you are more likely to keep drinking just to blunt the senses for the visually stunting walk home.

Of course, these are generalizations; there is some colour here and there are certainly some boring streetscapes down there but the point is that in general they are miles ahead of us when it comes to understanding that simply by using a bit of paint, life gets a little better.

Even Warsaw makes us look pretty sad in this respect, not that they don’t have those dismal Soviet concrete block flats of ennui as well:

And it is much too depressing to bring Barcelona into the discussion:

Think I’m wrong on this? Send me pictures and I’ll put some up. Let’s advertise the bright spots in this town. As I gather them I will post, as well as those examples of half hearted colour. I still think this general drabness is because people think less about their own living experience, the years they will spend in their house out of tune with their own surroundings, than they do of the hypothetical fickleness of potential owners.

Designing this site

If I had more time, and someday I will, I would just set up a website instead. I am finding the limitations of the wordpress templates not quite suitable for my purposes, but when something is free you cannot complain too loudly. So be forewarned that there will be a certain amount of flailing about until a look is settled on. The one in play right now is a little too sedate but worst of all it restricts the size of photographs on the page. The designs that allow that sort of flexibility are fixed in other respects and for the most part have rather anemic colour schemes.