I think that the "easy to clean" part of the list of descriptors here is among the most important. Among many other things, two of the things that have changed in the last couple of hundred years are:
1. The emergence of a cultural consensus that a full life is about having time to do things other than those necessary to keep living, and to maintain the required tools. Cleaning the kitchen is in the latter category, and so there's a cultural imperative now to reduce the time spent on this task (theoretically to open up time for other things).
2. The move away from a concept of home and family (and the associated economy) that assigns some subset of a household (historically, the non-childhood females) a primary role in cleaning and maintainence, and towards an economy that demands that most adults work outside the home. This also places a premium on kitchen environments that are easier to clean.
> I think that the "easy to clean" part of the list of descriptors here is among the most important.
Also caused by the lack of "servants".
Just employing a maid service frees up a remarkable amount of time. Having someone full-time dedicated to nothing but cleaning up after you is a big deal.
One of the things that gets lost is that employing someone was much cheaper in the past. There was an article recently talking about how the affluent couldn't afford a car in the early 1900s but could easily afford multiple servants.
Easy to clean is important, but we don't need to attach form and function so tightly in the age of modern tech. We have better plastic finishes, and in a fairly utilitarian modern lifestyle we just don't make as much mess, our meals are simpler.
Then again, I'm a vegetarian with no kids, so my experience of kitchen cleaning may be a bit different, since I don't do a lot of the more messy and hygiene critical stuff.
Older non-utilitarian design really fits pretty well with very modern lifestyles and technology, because there's not nearly as much pressure on the environment to be functional, when the actual things you're doing are more streamlined.
> and in a fairly utilitarian modern lifestyle we just don't make as much mess, our meals are simpler.
Maybe there's also something to be said about learning to accept some degree of "uncleanliness" in our kitchen and not only, not everything needs to be tidy/good-looking.
I like your points overall, but I do think there are tasks “necessary to keep living” that we do value. However with cleaning specifically, there is limited artistry (cooking) or personal growth (exercise) to it.
Cleaning can be a great way to relax your brain. It's menial enough to be effortless with just enough thinking to occupy the fidgety part of your brain so you can think deep in the background. Like a walk in the park. Meditative.
The modern kitchen isn't "utilitarian", lots of it could be simpler and more functional. Cement slab flooring with epoxy coat is what you see in industrial kitchens (and mine!) because its tough to mar and easy to clean. This place has some fake wood "laminate".
The cabinet doors are covered in frilly, unnecessary detail, bright work handles etc. The "center island" table this is a great idea but it should be an open frame table on casters.
I don't know what you'd properly call this aesthetic, but its there and it has screwed over the design of the space at the cost of much utility.
Those open storage tables and shelves that commercial kitchens¹ have are usable there because they have the main dry storage outside of the kitchen space. You keep some essentials there that are used many times every day, and the rest is moved into the kitchen as part of the prep phase and cleared out at the end of service. In big kitchens this is enough of a task that it's a role on its own: porter.
If you were to use those as your main ingredient and tool storage without clearing it every day it would be a mess both in terms of visual clutter and just flour and shit spilling out everywhere.
Is that more minimal than putting cabinet doors over it? I don't know actually, maybe. Which indicates to me that "minimal" is a subjective judgement based on certain criteria, and there are multiple valid measures of kitchen minimalism.
I grew up in and worked for decades in commercial kitchens and I am often saying this. Commercial kitchens have a different set of constraints than home kitchens, and commercial kitchen design adopted wholesale is not going to be more usable than a well-designed consumer kitchen. It's not more minimal per se either. That open storage demands a closet worth of plastic bins to keep ingredients in, for example.
BTW commercial kitchens pretty much all have terra cotta tiles for some reason. Must just be a good combo of cheap, durable, reasonably non-slip (which coated concrete definitely is not).
¹: Not industrial kitchens that's a different thing.
A kitchen is somewhere you live as well as work. Cement slab flooring is pretty uncomfortable to spend two hours working barefoot, especially in winter.
It’s also worth acknowledging the existence of show kitchens, which really don’t care about utility at all, and considering them separately.
Nobody in an industrial kitchen is supposed to work barefoot. :)
For homes, heated cement slabs are so much better than the regular stuff. Slabs embedded with hot water tubes have a fairly large heat capacity, so it stays warm all day and transfers heat directly into your feet and up through the rest of your body no matter where you're standing. A layer of soft organic material on top of the slab will make it more comfortable to stand on as well, as long as you choose something that's easy to clean.
You are describing extreme industrial utility. The blog author is describing pastoral whimsy. The modern American kitchen is probably about 2/3 of the way towards your version on a 1-d spectrum.
I think that's an ungenerous term for what was merely normal for thousands of years into the past.
I'd argue we're still recovering from the brutalist ugliness of 1960s fashion and ideas -- the notion that despite our humble origins, man could transcend nature and do better than it.
The widespread adoption of baby formula over breastfeeding is perhaps the saddest outworking of this notion, but it showed up everywhere else -- in brutalist architecture, cold metal furniture, metal Christmas trees, linoleum floors...
Not that new synthetic materials are bad, but I would have hated to live through a time when natural beauty was at such a cultural ebb. I think we're still recovering from it, and we need more design leaders to help us remember natural beauty.
Here are a couple of quotes from William Morris: "everything made by man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent."
He also wrote, "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
If you look at what fills cabinets like the ones in your own kitchen, it is a collection of objects that never beckon to be thrown away. The 5 different BBQ spice mixes that you pick up every time you host a BBQ. The Avocado oil you bought but never use. The various kitchen gadgets that once seemed like a good idea.
All of the "enchantment", the food that spoils, the food that was once actually alive, now lives in a special dark, cool cabinet called the refrigerator.
The modern kitchen is a response to this paradox. If you've ever lived in a house without lots of kitchen storage, the clutter that accumulates in all the nooks and crannies is overwhelming.
Strongly disagree with the authors choice of conflating what they call high modernism with utilitarianism or lack of interest in aesthetics.
Personally this cozy, homely, "clay pot on the floor", pastoralism does nothing for me. I'm a big fan of industrial design and I don't think characterizing it as 'low-maintenance', even though it may be that as well, does it justice.
>"Spatially, the minimalist and glossy-modernist trends have the unfortunate habit of moving toward a void"
What's wrong with voids for example? One of the most interesting design choices that I came across recently were the designs in Denis Villeneuve's Dune that he made for the interiors. Very empty, but also very awe inspiring.
I agree with you that it's not about utilitarianism or lack of interest in aesthetics. Kim Kardashian's home is an extreme example (google it) and she was clearly concerned with aesthetics when making decisions about how to decorate.
However I don't think the opposite of the "industrial design" that you appreciate is "pastoralism" (the images in the article are, but they're also ugly). The opposite is hard to describe but the French do it well. Hannah Arendt:
> Modern enchantment with "small things," though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among "small things," within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today's objects, may even appear to be the world's last, purely humane corner.
It's not the "lack of interest in aesthetics" the problem in high modernism, and the author doesn't say so. It's a lack of interest in lived/organic/patina/messy-because-of-life aesthetics, and a tendency towards pure/empty/conceptual aesthetics.
>Personally this cozy, homely, "clay pot on the floor", pastoralism does nothing for me.
Well, that's a choice. And like any choice, there are tradeoffs, and ways of thinking and cultural consequences that are associated with it (not just regarging messy vs clean-looking kitchens).
> It's a lack of interest in lived/organic/patina/messy-because-of-life aesthetics, and a tendency towards pure/empty/conceptual aesthetics.
I think he's cheating, then, by comparing a real estate listing with his own lived-in home. Modern architecture and design spaces are just as conducive to lived-in-ness, when people actually live in them. You can hang art on the wall and accumulate whatever decorative touches and knick-knacks appeal to you or carry sentimental value.
Wanting the architecture and built interior design of a home to reflect the personal life and "mystery" of its inhabitants is classist as well, because only a limited number of people can afford professional architecture and design services to customize a home to reflect their personality. Most people customize a home themselves, via their own decoration, furniture, books, and other cherished objects.
In fact it seems bizarrely oppressive to assume that the professional designers of a domestic space need to stock a home with life before it is inhabited, as if the people moving in will otherwise suffer a deficiency of it. Whose life do you expect to see in an uninhabited house? What kind of Frankenstein's monster version of life do we expect the expert professionals to synthesize in their modeling programs, to create the illusion of a space being shaped by a living presence that has never been there?
Producing brand-new spaces that have the same aesthetic as lived-in spaces strikes me as something the machines will do after we are gone, manufacturing houses and adding childish crayon scribbles inside because there are no real children left to draw on the walls.
I welcomed and enjoyed the author's deconstruction of the painting, but it almost seemed orthogonal to the point they were making. A near-complete tangent, heh.
Needed to make another comment. When I was growing up I became fascinated/obsessed with the counter-culture in the US, especially the architectural side of it. I still own copies of both of the two "Domebooks", along with Lloyd Kahn's "Shelter", Ken Kern's "The Owner Builder and the Code: the politics of building your own home" and other classics of that era.
But among my favorite books from that time is "Handmade Houses: a guide to the woodbutcher's art". You can find many images from the book here:
The architecture and design is much, much more aligned to the second two examples from Simon's article: hand-made, unique, touch friendly. One might even subsume all these under the term "funky" (though this word has more than one meaning). When I was 18, these were the sorts of houses I thought I would live in as an adult.
40 years later, the idea of living in any of theses houses fills me with a certain kind of dread, because I now understand how much work it would be to keep them clean and to maintain them. I feel conflicted about this: the aesthetics are far more appealing to than any contemporary "standard" buildings. Nevertheless I do feel very aware that I would likely develop a daily growing resentment towards the way every uneven, non-smooth surface would represent a new obstacle to cleanliness. And these sorts of structures and designs really will just accumulate dirt over time, no matter the efforts put into slowing that down.
This inner conflict raises all kinds of questions within me about the actual value of cleanliness, and about the balance that architecture creates and enforces between certain feelings we might want to have within our homes and the nature of our day to day lives within them.
>40 years later, the idea of living in any of theses houses fills me with a certain kind of dread, because I now understand how much work it would be to keep them clean and to maintain them
Having lived in several rural houses, not dissimilar to those, not that much.
So, I happen to be planning a kitchen remodel right now, and I happened to have up a picture of my kitchen while reading and comparing. And while I can agree with the aesthetic argument the author is going for, I think that it misses something too: primarily, what kitchens are for, which is cooking food, and sometimes the eating of it. In my kitchen, if I have to chop something, I have to shove something aside. Sometimes I use my stove top as counter space. What would I give for some of that void the author critiques, just so I could chop the onions, or turn around and not knock something off the counter, or trip over the can. And trust me, "easy to clean" is no bad thing. I'm sure some might think that the aesthetic joys of cleaning food from between cracks and beneath appliances gives the richness to life that the rich cheat themselves out of somehow, but no. Its an awful soul sucking waste of the one life you've got to live.
Real-estate isn't interested in making things personal, because they are trying to sell something for others to personalize. Go look at real lived in kitchens if you want to make the critique; not real estate ads which are selling a dream.
For what it's worth, I designed my own kitchen (and house for that matter), and me and my wife spend upwards of 2 hours a day in this room because we cook almost every single day, making and baking and preserving a large number of foods from scratch.
I simply think that using the kitchen doesn't just have to be easy, it has to be joyous. If it's one of the rooms we use the most, and entertain guests in too, it should be beautiful as well as useful. I am not against counter space!, but against a material drabness that seems to make spaces less than alive.
I get what you're saying. For a bunch of reasons my wife and I also spend a lot of time preparing meals. Real-estate folks describe ours as a "galley kitchen", not well-endowed with counter/work space. Having dinner guests is a real challenge. It resolves to KISS principles, but with some planning it's amazing what can be accomplished.
As to design, we've gravitated to a relatively spare approach. Though not at all imitating "industrial" space, after all, we actually live in our home. Linoleum flooring, quartz composite countertops, stainless sink/range, laminate cabinets, etc., are "homey" enough but also durable materials.
One thing is crystal clear: in small kitchens storage is a precious resource. Dedicated cooks prefer buying supplies in larger quantities, spices, flours, etc. That means a tightly managed pantry with little empty space. Sometimes having "too many" cabinets can be a good idea.
But understandably tastes and needs vary, so no doubt others would do something entirely different with the space our kitchen occupies. Then again, if I was designing our kitchen from scratch, well, it would be so MUCH better, but WTH, when wouldn't that be the case.
All the kitchens I see have a fridge covered in magnets from holidays, photos of children, and children's paintings. Items on every surface, signs of life. Except when they're emptied to take photos for selling the house.
Readit News
I think that the "easy to clean" part of the list of descriptors here is among the most important. Among many other things, two of the things that have changed in the last couple of hundred years are:
1. The emergence of a cultural consensus that a full life is about having time to do things other than those necessary to keep living, and to maintain the required tools. Cleaning the kitchen is in the latter category, and so there's a cultural imperative now to reduce the time spent on this task (theoretically to open up time for other things).
2. The move away from a concept of home and family (and the associated economy) that assigns some subset of a household (historically, the non-childhood females) a primary role in cleaning and maintainence, and towards an economy that demands that most adults work outside the home. This also places a premium on kitchen environments that are easier to clean.
Also caused by the lack of "servants".
Just employing a maid service frees up a remarkable amount of time. Having someone full-time dedicated to nothing but cleaning up after you is a big deal.
One of the things that gets lost is that employing someone was much cheaper in the past. There was an article recently talking about how the affluent couldn't afford a car in the early 1900s but could easily afford multiple servants.
Then again, I'm a vegetarian with no kids, so my experience of kitchen cleaning may be a bit different, since I don't do a lot of the more messy and hygiene critical stuff.
Older non-utilitarian design really fits pretty well with very modern lifestyles and technology, because there's not nearly as much pressure on the environment to be functional, when the actual things you're doing are more streamlined.
Maybe there's also something to be said about learning to accept some degree of "uncleanliness" in our kitchen and not only, not everything needs to be tidy/good-looking.
Cleaning can be a great way to relax your brain. It's menial enough to be effortless with just enough thinking to occupy the fidgety part of your brain so you can think deep in the background. Like a walk in the park. Meditative.
The cabinet doors are covered in frilly, unnecessary detail, bright work handles etc. The "center island" table this is a great idea but it should be an open frame table on casters.
I don't know what you'd properly call this aesthetic, but its there and it has screwed over the design of the space at the cost of much utility.
If you were to use those as your main ingredient and tool storage without clearing it every day it would be a mess both in terms of visual clutter and just flour and shit spilling out everywhere.
Is that more minimal than putting cabinet doors over it? I don't know actually, maybe. Which indicates to me that "minimal" is a subjective judgement based on certain criteria, and there are multiple valid measures of kitchen minimalism.
I grew up in and worked for decades in commercial kitchens and I am often saying this. Commercial kitchens have a different set of constraints than home kitchens, and commercial kitchen design adopted wholesale is not going to be more usable than a well-designed consumer kitchen. It's not more minimal per se either. That open storage demands a closet worth of plastic bins to keep ingredients in, for example.
BTW commercial kitchens pretty much all have terra cotta tiles for some reason. Must just be a good combo of cheap, durable, reasonably non-slip (which coated concrete definitely is not).
¹: Not industrial kitchens that's a different thing.
It’s also worth acknowledging the existence of show kitchens, which really don’t care about utility at all, and considering them separately.
For homes, heated cement slabs are so much better than the regular stuff. Slabs embedded with hot water tubes have a fairly large heat capacity, so it stays warm all day and transfers heat directly into your feet and up through the rest of your body no matter where you're standing. A layer of soft organic material on top of the slab will make it more comfortable to stand on as well, as long as you choose something that's easy to clean.
"somewhere you live" is exactly the point. Our house has been a kennel as much as a house. Few people want that, we're just weird.
I think that's an ungenerous term for what was merely normal for thousands of years into the past.
I'd argue we're still recovering from the brutalist ugliness of 1960s fashion and ideas -- the notion that despite our humble origins, man could transcend nature and do better than it.
The widespread adoption of baby formula over breastfeeding is perhaps the saddest outworking of this notion, but it showed up everywhere else -- in brutalist architecture, cold metal furniture, metal Christmas trees, linoleum floors...
Not that new synthetic materials are bad, but I would have hated to live through a time when natural beauty was at such a cultural ebb. I think we're still recovering from it, and we need more design leaders to help us remember natural beauty.
Here are a couple of quotes from William Morris: "everything made by man's hands has a form, which must be either beautiful or ugly; beautiful if it is in accord with Nature, and helps her; ugly if it is discordant with Nature, and thwarts her; it cannot be indifferent."
He also wrote, "Have nothing in your house you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful."
All of the "enchantment", the food that spoils, the food that was once actually alive, now lives in a special dark, cool cabinet called the refrigerator.
The modern kitchen is a response to this paradox. If you've ever lived in a house without lots of kitchen storage, the clutter that accumulates in all the nooks and crannies is overwhelming.
Personally this cozy, homely, "clay pot on the floor", pastoralism does nothing for me. I'm a big fan of industrial design and I don't think characterizing it as 'low-maintenance', even though it may be that as well, does it justice.
>"Spatially, the minimalist and glossy-modernist trends have the unfortunate habit of moving toward a void"
What's wrong with voids for example? One of the most interesting design choices that I came across recently were the designs in Denis Villeneuve's Dune that he made for the interiors. Very empty, but also very awe inspiring.
However I don't think the opposite of the "industrial design" that you appreciate is "pastoralism" (the images in the article are, but they're also ugly). The opposite is hard to describe but the French do it well. Hannah Arendt:
> Modern enchantment with "small things," though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among "small things," within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot, extending to these things a care and tenderness which, in a world where rapid industrialization constantly kills off the things of yesterday to produce today's objects, may even appear to be the world's last, purely humane corner.
>Personally this cozy, homely, "clay pot on the floor", pastoralism does nothing for me.
Well, that's a choice. And like any choice, there are tradeoffs, and ways of thinking and cultural consequences that are associated with it (not just regarging messy vs clean-looking kitchens).
>What's wrong with voids for example?
It's sterile and clinical.
I think he's cheating, then, by comparing a real estate listing with his own lived-in home. Modern architecture and design spaces are just as conducive to lived-in-ness, when people actually live in them. You can hang art on the wall and accumulate whatever decorative touches and knick-knacks appeal to you or carry sentimental value.
Wanting the architecture and built interior design of a home to reflect the personal life and "mystery" of its inhabitants is classist as well, because only a limited number of people can afford professional architecture and design services to customize a home to reflect their personality. Most people customize a home themselves, via their own decoration, furniture, books, and other cherished objects.
In fact it seems bizarrely oppressive to assume that the professional designers of a domestic space need to stock a home with life before it is inhabited, as if the people moving in will otherwise suffer a deficiency of it. Whose life do you expect to see in an uninhabited house? What kind of Frankenstein's monster version of life do we expect the expert professionals to synthesize in their modeling programs, to create the illusion of a space being shaped by a living presence that has never been there?
Producing brand-new spaces that have the same aesthetic as lived-in spaces strikes me as something the machines will do after we are gone, manufacturing houses and adding childish crayon scribbles inside because there are no real children left to draw on the walls.
Do we want the interior (or the exterior) of our homes to be very awe inspiring? Obviously, there's more than one answer to that question.
Perhaps you wanted an abstract presentation of the point instead?
But among my favorite books from that time is "Handmade Houses: a guide to the woodbutcher's art". You can find many images from the book here:
https://www.google.com/search?q=handmade+houses+a+guide+to+t...
The architecture and design is much, much more aligned to the second two examples from Simon's article: hand-made, unique, touch friendly. One might even subsume all these under the term "funky" (though this word has more than one meaning). When I was 18, these were the sorts of houses I thought I would live in as an adult.
40 years later, the idea of living in any of theses houses fills me with a certain kind of dread, because I now understand how much work it would be to keep them clean and to maintain them. I feel conflicted about this: the aesthetics are far more appealing to than any contemporary "standard" buildings. Nevertheless I do feel very aware that I would likely develop a daily growing resentment towards the way every uneven, non-smooth surface would represent a new obstacle to cleanliness. And these sorts of structures and designs really will just accumulate dirt over time, no matter the efforts put into slowing that down.
This inner conflict raises all kinds of questions within me about the actual value of cleanliness, and about the balance that architecture creates and enforces between certain feelings we might want to have within our homes and the nature of our day to day lives within them.
Having lived in several rural houses, not dissimilar to those, not that much.
Real-estate isn't interested in making things personal, because they are trying to sell something for others to personalize. Go look at real lived in kitchens if you want to make the critique; not real estate ads which are selling a dream.
For what it's worth, I designed my own kitchen (and house for that matter), and me and my wife spend upwards of 2 hours a day in this room because we cook almost every single day, making and baking and preserving a large number of foods from scratch.
I simply think that using the kitchen doesn't just have to be easy, it has to be joyous. If it's one of the rooms we use the most, and entertain guests in too, it should be beautiful as well as useful. I am not against counter space!, but against a material drabness that seems to make spaces less than alive.
As to design, we've gravitated to a relatively spare approach. Though not at all imitating "industrial" space, after all, we actually live in our home. Linoleum flooring, quartz composite countertops, stainless sink/range, laminate cabinets, etc., are "homey" enough but also durable materials.
One thing is crystal clear: in small kitchens storage is a precious resource. Dedicated cooks prefer buying supplies in larger quantities, spices, flours, etc. That means a tightly managed pantry with little empty space. Sometimes having "too many" cabinets can be a good idea.
But understandably tastes and needs vary, so no doubt others would do something entirely different with the space our kitchen occupies. Then again, if I was designing our kitchen from scratch, well, it would be so MUCH better, but WTH, when wouldn't that be the case.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881363
Definitely a good read!
I'm a lover of buildings where the wooden ridgelines have sagged a little over time.
I adore the imperfections in Georgian glass. Replacing old glass with float glass jumps out instantly to me.
I suffer some weeds and wildflowers to grow in the cracks in my patio.
It looks comfortable, and humane.