Complex Numbers

Open and Shut

Nothing intellectually challenging today. Just an interesting bit of trend reporting.

https://www3.bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/03/06/miss-walls-cry-for-help-from-woman...

People in open-concept homes are realizing the walls were there for a reason

When Star Trek premiered on TV back in the 60s, camera equipment was bulky as hell. Ever wondered why the corridors were about five times as wide as they needed to be? It was so they could track with the cameras. It doesn't make sense that there would be wasted space on a starship, but that show, more than any other, has informed our ideas of what a spaceship should look like. Contrast that with the 1960s reality of space capsules smaller than the cars of the period.

I mention this because I'm pretty well convinced that open-concept housing became so popular because it's easier to display on TV.

“In our old house,” said Didonna, a financial analyst, “I’d come home and make dinner and my husband would be watching TV in the other room, and a good portion of the evening we’d be apart.”

She got her togetherness, all right, in a glorious new house in Millbury. Now when she cooks and her husband watches TV, he’s in full view. Relaxing. While she works. “Frankly it’s annoying,” she said. A real estate agent has been called.

“I miss walls,” she said.

You probably also miss actually communicating with your spouse. Real estate agent? You lot need to call a marriage counselor. I say this with great hypocrisy; I've been known to sit back and smoke a cigar on the front stoop while watching my wife mow the lawn (in my defense, I had a bad back). Now I don't have a wife. I don't fail to see the connection.

I think our ideas of how we're supposed to live pretty much come from popular culture. And like I said above, some of these things just track better on TV. It's easier to film a scene where one person is cooking and the other is sitting on the couch if you can do it in one shot. It's also cheaper to do set design with fewer props, and so the "uncluttered" look became the ideal.

Is it "life imitates art" or "art imitates life?" I can never remember which was the original platitude and which was the parody.

Honestly, I vacillate, myself. I've lived in the same house for something like 25 years now - much longer than I lived in my childhood home - and not only do I like the house, but I like the neighborhood and I like the city. Every time I think of living somewhere else, I think of all the things I have here and go, "...nah." And yet I yearn for the unfamiliar at times, which is why I travel, and it's also why sometimes I think about what it might be like to live elsewhere.

If I did, though, would I want an open-concept design, or a partitioned one? I don't have kids, so family time isn't a consideration. I do have friends, and I've been known to host parties at my place, and open-concept would work for that. I'm also quite a lousy housekeeper; I like my stuff (I say again, fuck you, Marie Kondo), and I have a lot of stuff. I'll never conform to the Spartan ideal of minimalist living. So having extra rooms just to keep all the stuff in would be nice.

One thing I'd never do, though, that I find extraordinarily amusing: the "show kitchen." It reminds me of the WASP habit of carefully furnishing a living room, say, and then never letting anyone so much as set foot in it for fear its museum-quality pristine shine would be tarnished by an errant footstep denting the carpet. I remember visiting such people when I was younger, and they were always quick to show me the precisely arranged "living" room whilst barring entry to its sacred space. Seemed to me like a waste of money and room. So it is with the show kitchen.

But hey, whatever works for you. I do reserve the right to snark about it.