IKEA is Soylent Green

Firstly, towers of ilium would like to apologize for not posting in the past two days.

The big news is that the Market Basket standoff has ended, and the good guys seem to have won. The challenge for Arthur T. Demoulas is the restoration of his business model and management of debt. I regard the whole affair as an example of how the wisdom of Peter Drucker can prevail over the stupidity of modern business practice. Arthur T. has demonstrated an understanding of the purpose of a business--that it must create and sustain a customer. Too many firms today assume that the customer already exists, and that the purpose of the business is to extract rents and profits that are funneled to a small group of people.

I was reading a blog yesterday that claimed that 75% of the images in an IKEA catalog are computer generated. Although I might be tempted to feel bad for the photographers who aren't getting the work of shooting staged sets of home decor, I know that the labor associated with good renderings takes a lot of time and effort. Design on a computer is still design--only certain tedious tasks are streamlined so that the focus can be on more options.

fashion edition

This weekend I got a flyer in the mail from a furniture company called "Room & Board." I'm familiar with them because they recently undertook an extensive renovation of a building at the far end of Newbury Street. I was not impressed by the offerings I saw in the flyer. To my eye, it looked like upscale versions of standard Ikea products. I can't quite explain why, but instead of seeming fresh, all their stuff looked dated.

I wonder if turnover in home furnishings is accelerating in wealthy economies. The Ikea stuff usually doesn't last long. Its obsolescence is an essential part of their design and manufacturing philosophy. They know that people will come back for more flat-packed junk that can be loaded into rental vans. The urban masses need sofas, couches, end tables, and dining room sets ad infinitum. 

And who will prove to have a better business model? Room & Board, Restoration Hardware, or Ikea? Whatever happens, I don't expect any revolutions in furniture design.

paul krugman on housing

Isn't that just the cutest little house? It was built at great expense and is probably used infrequently.

In a recent editorial, Paul Krugman pointed out that much of the economic and population growth in sun belt states is the result of lower housing costs. The fact that these places have "conservative" governments is less important than the fact that large developers can build suburbs at a blistering pace. People are willing to work for less because their housing dollar goes further.

It's a proposition I agree with, and I'll toss out a speculation that the housing stock in warm, right wing places is also linked to the fact that states, aided by the federal gummint, are able to build road networks more efficiently than in places like metro Boston. I'm not sure how much this has been studied, but the big stretches of flat land that exist in Georgia, Texas, Florida, and Arizona make highway planning really easy. Subdivisions and box stores need transportation infrastructure that makes supply chains reliable, fast, and cheap. Here in Massachusetts it takes us 15 years to build a few miles of underground highway--with marginal improvement to rush hour commutes.

art deco and neoclassicism

Is the evolution of architectural style an abrupt or gradual thing? Today, I'm going to make an argument in favor of abrupt change--and change that is mandated by select individuals who can wield considerable influence in the design profession. The picture above shows the boundary between two large buildings that were/are/might be part of the John Hancock complex near Copley Square. The street they share is thoroughly dead--dead because of the monumentality imposed by these icons of corporate logic. They were built within in twenty-five years of each other, and designed by architects who don't have to be mentioned by name.

The building on the right is a solid example of early twentieth century neo-classicism. The detailing is of average quality and I have no idea what the interior spaces are like. In the 1980's It was considered as a candidate for demolition, but economic logic prevailed over the idea of creating a compromised, semi-public plaza.

The building on the left is a deeply conservative example of the Boston art deco, but an art deco that was flirting with the vocabulary of modernism. The horizontal divisions of the window strips speak volumes about the ambiguity and confusion of its designers. But, and I say this with complete lack of irony, it has more character than nearly every modern building in Boston.

In the span of two decades, the neoclassical model, was supplanted by the art deco modern. But whereas neoclassicism feels like a solid part of the architectural landscape, the art deco comes across as a fringe movement that enjoyed less than thirty years in the architectural spotlight before getting steamrolled by the International Style.

thoughts on the idea of the firm

I'm standing in Peter Drucker's long shadow here, so everything I say will be derivative and incomplete. But hey, half formed is better than no-formed, yes? Like a cake that is missing sugar and eggs, or a car without a gas tank, or any other bad analogy I could come up with if I was being paid by the hour to write this blog.

Once a firm is established by a group of people it is invested with a sense of reality that can be remarkably effective at fooling everybody--including legal systems. Since we live in an age of easily retrievable data, the symbol of a firm can persist indefinitely. The Atari trademark is still a real thing. I would not doubt that some lawyer is working hard on some idiotic brief about the matter. Someday, some other lawyer will be doing the same things for the Apple logo: "From now on all fruit, unbitten or not, shall belong to Base R...all hail Jobs, all hail Jobs"

The slow, hidden death of a firm can occasionally inoculate people against reality. But this is a good thing, because if a person invested in the idea of the firm maintains that sense of commitment, then the firm can persist. One good client can come along and change the course of things. One bad check, on the other hand, doesn't spell doom. The firm exists as long as at least one person shows up.

graphic excellence

I'm impressed by this photograph by the exceptional Peter Gruhn.

the plural of anecdote

A Boston Globe article about the boom in residential home remodeling in the state is consistent with what I've been observing over the last year or so. People are interested in changing the character of their dwellings. In most cases these changes result in significant improvements, but I'm not sure if the longevity of these renovations will match history. If a fifty year old bathroom is replaced in the 1970's I would wager that it will see at least two or three renovations in the next fifty years. This increase in renovation frequency, if a real thing, doesn't imply that things were built or designed better in the past--the opposite is often true.

Construction costs seem to be outpacing inflation, but like many other aspects of the economy, it's not reflected in improved labor compensation. The pricing advantage seems to be with mechanical products; everything from doorknobs to windows to HVAC. I feel like there are some groups of people who are in the middle of the supply chain who are making a killing on selling stuff at extreme markups.

But hey, I'm just a paranoid, misinformed architect.