LIVING ROOMS
A house is more than just a shelter from the storm. How we shape our homes, and how we behave within them, speak volumes about our history, our values and our way of life. Living Rooms explores the past, present and future of domestic life, with contributions from artists, journalists, design experts and historians.
Corine Vermeulen Lafayette Park is an enclave of modernist townhouses designed by the architect Mies van der Rohe.A few blocks east of Detroit’s downtown, just across Interstate 375, sits Lafayette Park, an enclave of single- and two-story modernist townhouses set amid a forest of locust trees. Like hundreds of developments nationwide, they were the result of postwar urban renewal; unlike almost all of them, it had a trio of world-class designers behind it: Ludwig Hilbersheimer as urban planner, Alfred Caldwell as landscape designer and Mies van der Rohe as architect.
Interactive Feature
See how residents live in their spaces and hear about what Mies’s design aesthetic does and does not mean to them.
The townhouses, plus three high-rise buildings, were built between 1958 and 1962 on land previously occupied by a working-class African-American neighborhood, Black Bottom. While much of Detroit began a steep decline soon after, Lafayette Park stayed afloat, its residents bucking the trend of suburban flight. Lafayette Park today is one of the most racially integrated neighborhoods in the city. It is economically stable, despite the fact that Detroit has suffered enormous population loss and strained city services. Read more…
Ellen Brownlee Like the post-Katrina streets of New Orleans, the refrigerator has become a ubiquitous symbol within the larger crisis.One of the ways we remember an economic crisis is through images. Think of the Great Depression, told through the black-and-white portraits of men in bread lines, or wearing placards that beg for work; of a Wall Street suit hocking his car to pay for food; of Hoovervilles.
We remember the oil crisis of the 1970s—technically two crises—not through dry statistics but through scenes of cars and trucks, and sometimes people, stuck in a line that snakes off a gas station’s lot and down the street, choking a city block. And with each sharp drop in the Dow, there’s the ubiquitous portrait of a stockbroker guffawing at the ticker, his hands half-covering his face in disbelief.
Slide Show
A growing number of photographers are using their craft to document the hidden side of the foreclosure crisis.
In a digital era, the outward signs of economic pain are often hard to capture. Unlike wars or natural disasters, more recent recessions have been largely invisible; government programs and higher per-capita incomes mean that bread lines and absolute destitution are rare occurrences. But if unemployment is less obvious and inflation is not yet an issue, there is one aspect of the Great Recession that has nevertheless caught the photographer’s eye: foreclosures. And while it remains to be seen if it achieves the social and artistic impact of the Depression-era work, foreclosure photography has already helped define an era that will mark American society for decades to come. Read more…
Christoph Gielen Everglades National ParkCity limits, property lines and state borders appear clear and inviolable on a map. But things are trickier on the ground, and even more so on the water, where such neatly drawn lines are bypassed by flooding rivers or wandering runoff. Water, particularly in ever-shifting wetlands, meanders between civilization and wilderness, reminding us that both are conduits in a larger circulatory system.
In April 2009, at the tail end of a drought, the photographer Christoph Gielen flew in a helicopter over one such ailing system, South Florida. He took shots of sloughs and hammocks, tear-drop islands and estuaries. Though often dozens of miles from the nearest planned community, the effects of sprawl were written all over the terrain: marshes reduced to a fraction of their former size; shrinking river-delta channels, known as sloughs; and the infamous “white zone,” a stagnant, hyper-salinated coastal area that has crept inland from the Atlantic since 1940. All of these are indicators of a dying ecosystem, driven to collapse by overdevelopment. Read more…
Chris Bickford for The New York Times Houses along the levee in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans.Five years ago the media was full of articles about the death of New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina, the pundits declared, had proved that the city was unnatural and unsustainable. The mass exodus after the flooding would leave it hobbled at a fraction of its former size, and some even advocated government policies to keep it that way.
It was a tempting idea, and one that is in vogue among beleaguered cities, which have let themselves shrink, demolishing damaged houses and abandoning entire neighborhoods. God knows the political and real estate establishment of New Orleans tried to follow the lead of already shrinking cities like Detroit, Buffalo and Youngstown, Ohio.
But New Orleanians resisted such ideas, just as residents of the South Bronx fought against Planned Shrinkage in the 1970s. In fact, the top-down attempt to shrink the city galvanized an enraged citizenry into a level of civic involvement that did not exist before the storms. Five years later it is paying off for New Orleans, just as it did over 30 years ago in the South Bronx. Sensing that spirit, thousands of new and returning residents have poured into the city—including me. Read more…
Where would the living room be without the sofa?
Over the centuries, the amount and the kinds of furniture people use have changed radically. Prior to the 17th century, for example, European homes were not heavily furnished, and most of the types of furniture found in homes today did not yet exist.
Then, in the half-century from roughly 1670 to 1730, virtually every kind of furniture now common in Western homes was invented. Some of these designs, like the armchair, had existed in antiquity or in Eastern cultures, but the anonymous 17th-century European craftsmen who re-imagined them undoubtedly had no knowledge of any precedent to their creations.
Even the most minimalist living room today includes two pieces that these craftsmen invented: the sofa and the occasional table. Until then, seating had been limited. Only trunks, benches and beds provided room for more than one person to sit. And even wealthy families used one large table for everything from eating to writing. By the early 18th century, however, many small tables had become available, each designed for a particular activity. And sofas in dozens of styles had been invented. Read more…
Christoph Gielen A Phoenix-area retirement community.In his novel “The Crying of Lot 49,” Thomas Pynchon describes a suburb that is “less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts — census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.” The novel’s protagonist, Oedipa Maas, “looks down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth,” Pynchon writes, “and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.” The architectural system unfolding in front of her held, according to Pynchon, a “hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning.”
Slide Show
See Christoph Gielen’s images of communities in Arizona and Nevada.
Christoph Gielen, a German-born photographer, has been documenting similarly hieroglyphic settlements from a helicopter — including prisons and suburbs, seen here — for the past five years. His chosen sites are distinguished by their clarity: they are boxes, loops, labyrinths and half-circles, exaggerations of the desert topography around them. Read more…
The living room has long been the basic set of the American sitcom, from “I Love Lucy” to “Everybody Loves Raymond.” Most of them are unmemorable, transitional spaces; every front door seems to open directly onto a generic sofa. Many of them are all but repeated from show to show (quick: what’s the difference between the living rooms on “Raymond” and “King of Queens”?). They’re invariably decorated in a neutral palette, acting as a quiet, passive backdrop to the action.
ABC’s hit sitcom “Modern Family,” which recently won the Emmy award for outstanding comedy series, is different: the living rooms are active parts of the storyline, reflecting and counterpointing and interrupting their inhabitants—and, in doing so, eloquently commenting on today’s domestic condition.
The show, produced by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, is about three intertwined families living in the Los Angeles suburbs. We meet them in the pilot, each in a moment of stress, with no mention of how they are connected. The Dunphys, a husband and wife with three children, are at home, arguing over the length of their teenage daughter’s skirt and how to get their son’s head out of the banister (baby oil). The Pritchetts are at a soccer game, where Jay, played by Ed O’Neill, is mistaken for the father of his wife, Gloria, played by Sofia Vergara. The Pritchett-Tuckers, a gay couple, are on an airplane, headed back from Vietnam with their new baby, Lily. Their differences are underlined by crisis, but I could have understood their respective characters with mute on, just by looking at their living rooms. Read more…
Jim Stroup, Virginia Tech Virginia Tech’s solar home won the 2010 Solar Decathlon Europe.With the world quickly using up its fossil fuels and driving itself further toward irreversible climate change, it’s easy to fall into despair about the future of domestic life. Cheap energy, land, water and building materials have made the last century of American homebuilding a story of ever-expanding luxury. Arguably, all of these will become scarce and expensive over the next 50 years. Will our children’s homes be anything as comfortable and expansive as our own?
Interactive Feature
See the features of the house and hear from Virginia Tech faculty member Joe Wheeler about how it will shape the way we live.
The answer is yes—though it depends on how you frame the question. Our children probably won’t be able to afford to run conventional air conditioners all day long. Nor will they likely have access to unlimited water supplies, particularly in the parched Southwest. But that doesn’t mean they have to live without the same quality of life that their parents and grandparents have grown accustomed to. The key is to use smart planning and technological advances to not merely adapt the home, but rethink its most basic design and function. Read more…
What explains the attraction of the recreations of historic rooms found in so many museums?
Photo Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art Grand Salon from the Château de Draveil, French, c. 1735, Philadelphia Museum of Art.In the Philadelphia Museum of Art recently, a group of elementary school students was learning about life in an 18th-century French chateau. They were surrounded by the reconstructed shell of a drawing room from that period. Their teacher was doing a great job of making the material accessible to them, and they listened with absolutely rapt attention. I couldn’t help wondering exactly what that interior was saying to the students. Read more…
Carl Gossett/The New York Times A boarded up home on West 105th Street was just one of the many on the Upper West Side in 1967.In 1967, my husband and I bought and fully renovated a four-story brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, creating a duplex for ourselves and two floors of rental apartments. Despite its Manhattan address, our friends envied neither our money nor our luck; at the time, it didn’t take much of either to buy in the neighborhood.
If anything, they thought we were a little nuts — in the late 1960’s the Upper West Side was one of New York’s fastest-declining neighborhoods, rife with drugs, crime and decay. Yet where others saw risk, we saw opportunity: affordable housing, racial and economic diversity and a vision of a sustainable, vibrant community not yet on the urban demographer’s radar.
The author’s former residence on West 87th Street between Columbus Avenue and Amsterdam Avenue.Historians and observers of the 1970’s love to discuss the “return to nature” movement, in which hordes of hippies, political radicals and people simply tired of urban life moved to the country to set up shop in communes, on farms and in small towns. Less well-observed was the “return to the city” movement, in which urban pioneers like my husband and me went the opposite direction, putting down roots in places like the Upper West Side. We were statistically insignificant, but no less historically significant — because it was here, not in the Wall Street boom of the 1980’s or the get-tough mayoral policies of the 1990’s, that New York and other American cities began to turn around. Read more…
