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CHAPTER SEVEN

Notebook

47. Notes on heat

Heat is always on the move. We find it convenient to say that the ways in which it gets around are by conduction, by convection, and by radiation. The greatest of these is radiation.

In one way or another, heat always flows from the warm thing to the cold thing. If you pour hot tea and cold beer into the same glass, the tea gets colder and the beer gets warmer. It never works the other way.

Heat is always trying to average out. If you sit on a hot rock, the rock gets colder and you get warmer. If you sit beside a warm rock, the same thing happens only it takes longer. If you sit on a cold rock, you will get cold in places, but after a while you yourself, being a producer of heat, will begin to warm up the rock.

Conduction: Touch a hot skillet and you get burnt. Conduction occurs when two things, solid, liquid, or gas, are in contact with each other and one is warmer. Rate of conduction is a matter of how fast the warm thing is willing to let go of its heat, and how fast the cold thing is willing to accept it.

If the handle of the hot skillet is made of iron, it will feel hot. If it is made of wood, it won't burn you. Though the two handles are the same temperature, the wood is less willing to let go of its heat, that is, it has a lower rate of conduction.

For housebuilding purposes, conduction is not very important. We spend most of our time either in air or on mattresses, both of which have a low conduction rate.

Convection: This word describes what happens when a fluid thing, liquid or gas, touches a warm thing, gets warm, goes somewhere else, touches a colder thing, and warms it. Convection is not really so much a different kind of heat flow as it is a method of transferring heat over a distance. It involves multiple conduction to and from a moving vehicle, the same as loading and unloading rocks.

If you admit cold air into a warm furnace, and then let the warmed air flow into your living room, you will be warmed at first purely by convection. After a while, when the walls have had a chance to warm up, they will begin radiating.

Radiation: This type of heat flow is quite different from conduction, or its big brother, convection. Radiation is the flow of heat from one thing to another, over any distance, with nothing in between.

Most heat transfer over a distance is accomplished by radiation. It's going on all the time, all around us, in all directions. Radiation is how all the heat from the sun gets here in the first place.

The sun, sitting ninety-three million airless miles away, and a producer of heat even as you and I are, is able to warm a rock faster than we can. If, as many people do, you find the idea of radiation difficult to understand, just ask yourself why it is warmer in the sun than in the shade.

Better still, find a hot stove and hold the palm of your hand toward it, say, ten feet away. Instantly your hand feels warmth. Turn your hand around and let the back get warm too. This is radiation, pure and simple.

Now play this game with yourself. You are in a lonely cabin, on a winter's night. There is a ruddy stove at one end of the cabin and a window at the other. There is, though I don't know where it came from, a piano stool halfway between the stove and the window.

Sit on the piano stool, please, close your eyes, and spin around. Stop spinning anywhere you like, and now, with your eyes still closed, you can point directly at the stove and directly at the window.

That you can find the stove will not surprise you as much as that you can find the window. You will say that you can feel cold coming from that direction. What is actually going on is that the stove, a warm body, is radiating toward you, while you, a somewhat less warm body, are radiating toward the window.

If you want to play the game some more, have an assistant walk between you and the stove, carrying a big piece of aluminum foil. The foil came from the same place as the piano stool, but a white sheet will work almost as well. In either case, the stove will vanish.

Have your second assistant repeat this procedure between you and the window, and it disappears too. You're lost.

If, being lost, you would like at least to be warm, try this one:

You won't be able to sit there very long, so I'll explain what's happening. The stove radiates heat to the black cloth, which accepts it quickly. The cloth re-radiates its heat on the other side toward you. The heat of your own body is radiating toward the foil, as is the heat from the black cloth which went on by. The foil is a poor accepter of heat, but an excellent reflector. Almost all of this heat comes back.

We have built a heat trap with you in the middle. Get out quickly before you cook.

Having conducted this experiment, you now know more about heat flow than nine-tenths of the furnace salesmen who will call on you. Radiation works both ways, to and from, with rate of radiation being the same either way. Before you sign a contract for your heating system, ask the salesman to explain this to you.

The tenth salesman will really know his stuff, and we had better get ready for him too. Simply, though not quite correctly, the rate of radiation is determined by color, with black accepting and re-radiating heat quickly; white slowly.

Re-radiation and reflection are not the same thing at all. If a thing is poor at radiating, in or out, it is probably a good reflector. It won't absorb the heat; the heat has to go somewhere; it goes back.

Take that half circle of aluminum foil at your left, for instance. With its light color and shiny surface, the foil won't accept heat. Almost all of the heat coming from your body is turned back, with nothing being re-radiated to the cold window. Though aluminum is an excellent conductor of heat, in this case it hasn't any heat to conduct, because it didn't accept any in the first place.

The half circle of black cloth at your right is accepting the stove's heat greedily. It is an excellent radiator, both coming in and going out. Though it is not a good conductor (you can pick up cloth almost ready to burn without getting burnt), it is thin, and both sides become equally warm. Now some of the heat is being re-radiated away from you; most of it toward you.

Not only has the experiment indicated how to heat a house; it has even suggested what clothes to wear. If you want to be warm on a cold but sunny day, you will wear a coat which is black on the right side and white on the left side, and always keep your right side toward the sun. Since this idea isn't very practical, the compromise rules are these:

If you are galloping like Arabs across the desert, wear loose white robes, as they do, to keep cool. The sun is hotter than you are; the white robe keeps the heat out.

When hunting seals with your Eskimo friends, also wear white. Up there the sun isn't hot enough to make any difference, so the balance is again in favor of white clothing, which is slow to radiate your own body's heat.

While sunbathing on your front porch, if you're too warm, wrap up in a white bathrobe; if you're too cold, wear a black one.

Comes twilight, and you're still sitting there. Now, if you're too warm, use the black bathrobe. It will get rid of your own heat faster. If, as is more likely, you're chilly, put on the white bathrobe.

Heat gets me into no end of discussions. Though heat follows its own rules precisely, its behavior seems (but only seems) to be full of contradictions, such as that black and white bathrobe, business.

We spend a mountain of money for heat: a towering amount for the installation, and over the years another towering amount for fuel. Naturally all this money to be spent brings in the advertisers and the salesmen, few of whom understand the principles behind what they are selling, and none of whom is moved by any interest other than to peddle his own product.

The "misnomer," which I discussed earlier, runs rampant in the heat business. A "radiator," that chambered hunk of iron sitting against the wall, is in very small part a radiator. It's designed mostly as a convector. The more modern "convector," a piece of pipe with fins on it, is closer to the truth in that it is mostly a convector, though something of a radiator as well.

The prolonged arguments about the difference between a "hot air system" and a "hot water system" are meaningless. Both refer simply to the means of conveying a warmed fluid (either liquid or gas) from furnace to destination. Both wind up warming a convector and in that way surrounding you with warmed air.

In order to be an effective radiator, a small surface has to be very hot, while a larger surface can be cooler. Carried to the ultimate perfection, radiant heating would warm floor, walls, and ceiling to exactly the temperature you yourself want to be. In this situation, you would care nothing about the temperature of the air.

The first reason we don't all build houses in this perfect way is because the installation cost for heating walls and so on is a lot more than the installation cost for heating air. Unhappily, in this case maximum comfort also represents maximum expense.

There is a second reason which I hate to mention, but in honesty I must. A lot of folks don't know when they're warm. The laws of heat flow are immutable, and our bodies are all constructed along much the same lines, but if you don't think you're warm, you're not. Many people of my acquaintance are conditioned to believe that they are not warm unless they feel a blast of warm air blowing in their faces.

Having equipped ourselves with the necessary theory, we are in good shape to arrive at specific decisions. I find that more people trot around asking advice about heating systems than any other feature of a house. This conveys the impression that heating equipment is controversial.

It isn't, except in terms of who you are and where you are. Right answers can emerge from an analysis of any given situation.

First, do you want central heating or don't you? To answer, we have to look at fuel supply. Of the four principal fuels available, coal, oil, gas, and electricity, the first two are suitable to central heating only; the last two are better suited to area heating.

Central heating came along when people wanted to reduce the nuisance of fire building by having one big fire and then conveying the heat there from all over the house. Conveying heat is troublesome and expensive, but for a hundred years the equipment for building many little fires, safely, was not available.

In central heating sketch, we have built one big fire and then pumped warm fluid through pipes or ducts. In area heating sketch, we have piped or wired fuel to the points where heat is

required, then built little fires. In the latter case, the fuel will probably be more expensive for each energy unit, but your increased ability to control heat use will result in a lower annual fuel cost. Certainly the installation will be much cheaper.

I am inclined to consider first cost as more important than fuel cost. Fuel cost is an installment payment, with no interest charge. First cost carries interest charges as long as you live.

I rate area heating as an improvement in all respects over central heating. Over a year and over a lifetime, fuel cost will be somewhat less, installation cost much less. Maintenance is easier, the heating system is much more adaptable to change, space requirements are lower, the whole structure of your house becomes less costly. This judgment assumes, of course, the availability in your area of some kind of gas, whether manufactured, natural, or refined, or of electricity priced at no more than two cents a kilowatt.

Area heating is not to be confused with what the newspapers insist on calling "space heaters." The so-called space heater is a portable kerosene stove, without controls, carburetor, or safety shut-off, which burns too fast or gets kicked over, sets fire to the shack and kills six children.

As of this writing the best all-around heating device I know of is a refined-gas burner built into the outside wall of the area to be heated. The vent being outdoors, it requires no chimney. It is cleaner than anything except electricity. Its installation cost per room is about a fifth that of central heating. Its heat can be turned on or off exactly as you need heat in that room. There is no lag time. It has to have a blower, which is noisy if you think so. Most people either don't notice it, or console themselves with the thought that the air being blown their way is nice and fresh.

The other important decision is whether to begin with radiant or convected heat. The gas burner spoken of is entirely a convector. Radiation is without question more comfortable than convection, but also without question more expensive to install. Electricity is best suited to radiant heat, that is, to the building of large, slightly warmed solid bodies around us. Gas works best warming air. We need to examine the cost of available fuels before making a final decision.

As of this writing, in most areas electricity will be more expensive than gas. It is also more convenient, more flexible, more pleasant to live with. Given more time for equipment development and lowered distribution cost, electricity may very well knock out every other means of heating a house. It's coming, but slowly.

For now, and for most of us, I will have to recommend gas-fired, convected, area heating. It isn't the best and it isn't the worst, but it may be the happiest four-way compromise between installation economy, operating economy, flexibility, and comfort.

48. Notes on light

In Section 2 I said that orientation to the sun is the most important of all decisions to be made in building your house. Nothing has come up since to change my mind.

In Section 9 I talked about arranging a house for maximum sun use. I'll stand pat on that one too.

In Section 47 I discussed heat. I had to admit that the subject is complicated, because in the case of heat several different things are going on at the same time. You can't conduct a sensible conversation about heat without knowing a little something of what you're talking about.

Light is simpler. Light, though itself heat, is easier for you and me to understand because it is visible heat. We can see it. We can make funny shadows with it. We can turn it on and off quickly. Therefore I don't need to discuss the technology of light.

Furthermore, I will not discuss light as an instrument either of mood or of decoration. Candles on the dining table may not let us see whether we're eating steak or cake, but with everyone looking so beautiful in the darkness, who cares? Similarly, if you want to buy two big lamp bases, set them on end tables, then cover the lamps with shades so dense no light can get out, this may be your idea of decoration but not my idea of illumination.

I will discuss light only as a thing to see by. Therefore, we will talk about the human eye, an instrument of enormous range. It can accept and use great brilliance, yet can receive limited information in the next thing to total darkness. Its cone of sharp vision is narrow, but it has almost a complete hemisphere of awareness vision.

Within this great range, both of brilliance and of area, the eye dislikes sudden changes. It hates to be moved quickly from light to dark, and hates even more to be moved from dark to light. Though a flat field of constant illumination would defeat the human eye entirely, excessive contrast within the hemisphere of awareness is also undesirable.

The eye sees best and with the least fatigue under conditions of moderate though adequate brilliance, and with illumination sufficiently general and diffuse to produce adequate but moderate contrast.

The eye does not enjoy looking directly at the source of light, or even close to it, if the light is strong enough to be usable at all. For seeing things, a light source directly ahead is the worst, directly behind next awful, and directly overhead only slightly less bad. The eye prefers two sources, both a little above eye level, one fairly bright and the other less so, one coming in from the right and the other from the left. Under these circumstances the shape of things can best be seen.

Here I have sketched a top view of a sort of seeing box, showing the top of my head as I look to see what that thing is sitting in the middle.

The thing may be a chair or a post or a pretty girl. In any case, I recognize it by its shape. Skipping the pretty girl for the moment, here is what a round post would look like under various conditions of lighting:

Number one shows all light from dead ahead, number two from straight behind me, and number three from directly above. In none of these is shape discernible. The thing could be square or round, and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

Numbers four and five are variations between some light from each side, in number four, and all light from one side, in five. In either case the thing will be visibly round. Number four permits the best vision. Number five is excessively contrasty, and leaves the shape of the dark side in doubt. The most pleasing as well as the most useful illumination provides much light from one side, with a little less from the other.

If in addition to looking, I am doing work with my hands, and am right-handed, I will prefer the major light source to be at my left and the minor source at my right. If I am left-handed, I will of course reverse the sources.

So far all of this is quite obvious to anyone with eyes in his head and the willingness to look. There is one important point in optical psychology which is not so obvious. A window, in addition to admitting light and letting you see out, also serves to rest your eyes. The eye in a state of rest is focused on distance. In order to focus on anything closer than let's say a hundred feet, the eye muscles have to work. They do this without being told. You can't keep them from working. The only way to rest your eyes from close work is to look at something far away.

The race has perversely worried its way into many bad habits about using light. The roller window shade which pulls down from the top is a striking example. First we build and pay for a window, then we buy a piece of opaque cloth on a roller and pull it down to cover the top half of the glass. If any part of the glass has to be covered, this is the wrong half. Light to see by should come from slightly above us, not slightly below. If the purpose of the roller shade is to achieve privacy, it should pull up from the bottom, keeping plenty of light, letting us see out when we want to, but keeping the other fellow from seeing in. I didn't invent this. Old-fashioned offices used to mount their roller shades this way.

The so-called glass curtain, a piece of translucent cloth which covers the entire window and keeps out three-quarters of the light, may be another attempt at privacy. You can stand in your bathrobe, pull the glass curtain aside, and peek out. I admit that such light as gets through a glass curtain has been pleasantly diffused, but there are more economical ways of achieving diffusion, without cutting off most of the light in the process.

Opaque curtains are important in both heat and light control. To be effective such curtains must be installed so that they can cover the window completely, or be pulled clear of it completely. A common error is not to allow enough wall space to permit the curtains to be drawn back, so that you have paid for window, and paid for curtain, with the two overlapping. An extreme case concerns a woman I know who lives in a house which is all glass on the south side. She keeps the curtains closed all day long because she is afraid the sun will fade her furniture. It fades the curtains instead.

With sunlight from one side of the room only, we still can't see the shape of anything without reflected light, which provides our second or minor source. Much of our interior decoration seems designed to kill off light rather than spread it around. The best illumination is found where most, but not all, of the surface areas are fairly light in color and fairly well textured. That is to say, dark accents against light backgrounds produce good vision; light accents against dark backgrounds do not. Shiny, mirror-like surfaces work against seeing well, and textured surfaces improve it.

Another of our bad habits is to arrange a work area, whether it be writing desk, carpenter's bench, kitchen counter or sewing table, with the major light source coming from the wrong direction. To repeat the obvious rule; if you are right-handed and are doing work with your hands, keep the stronger light at your left. Simple indeed, yet I have seen whole factories which were laid out exactly wrong in this respect.

The last bad habit, and a very common one, is to arrange a work area so that you are staring into a wall. Your eyes are not allowed to rest by seeking out some distant object from time to time. A good arrangement is to have a window which your eyes can find by lifting or turning slightly. Best of all is one like this:

Here you are working with your back to the wall, facing across the room, and preferably looking toward a window on the other side. This way, night or day, your eyes will have plenty of chance to rest themselves as you go along.

Artificial light, though more expensive and perhaps less pleasant than natural light, is easier to control because we can turn it on and off, increase it or decrease it, rearrange it to suit ourselves. Potentially good, it can be destructively bad if we don't pay attention to what we're doing.

The principles we have already discussed still apply. The source of light must not be directly visible. There must be at least two sources, preferably somewhat above eye level, and oriented at right angles to our most important field of vision.

Here is a list of bad habits in our use of artificial light.

1. A visible light source overhead and in the center of the room. This is absolutely wrong on all counts.

2. A single light source where two are required. Example: many "de luxe" hotels continue to put one light above the bathroom mirror. It makes me feel like stealing their towels and sneaking out the back way.

3. The expensive "light fixture" selected for the alleged good looks of the fixture itself, not its usefulness in dispensing light. My feeling is that the ideal "light fixture" would not be visible at all. I believe that in the sense of illumination, light is to be used, not to be looked at.

4. The tendency to economize on the use of light, in the belief that light is expensive. I speak, of course, of electric light, which is the biggest domestic bargain going. You would be surprised what a small part of your electric bill goes directly for lighting.

5. Light fixtures buried in the ceiling. This type of installation is wrong on all counts except mood. Not only is it directly overhead, but the light has no chance to strike anything which will diffuse it.

The correct way to use artificial light--to see by, that is, not for mood or decoration--is what most people call "indirect," or more properly, "diffuse."

To achieve diffuse lighting, you can spend a lot of money if you fall into the clutches of a fixture salesman. Let me show you how simple it is to build.

In the least expensive embodiment, we require one board, one strip of aluminum foil, two incandescent lamps with sockets, two wires and a switch.

The foil is stapled to the inside of the board, and the lamp sockets are mounted at each end. The board is then located between roof and wall, in such manner that no person at any reasonable spot in the room, sitting or standing, is forced to look directly at either of the light sources.

All the requirements have been met. The direct source can not be seen. The two lamps, separated by several feet, create the effect of a light source enlarged in area and thus lowered in brilliance per square inch. The usable light has been diffused from wall and roof, in such manner that the total source is slightly above eye level. The light source is roughly similar to daylight. Now put two of these on opposite sides of a room. Perfect. You did it all for about $3.75.

Naturally there are other arrangements that you can work out in terms of what you have and what you want. The principles remain the same. Many types of long tube lamps, either filament or gas-filled, will create the same effect. The gas lamps, as opposed to the incandescent or filament lamp, will give you more light for a dime, plus a choice of flattering colors as well. However, they all cost more to install and maintain.

The ultimate solution may be the glowing wall panel, which is being developed. When that is available, we will simply plug in the wall and get light. I don't yet know what the glowing panel will cost to install, run, and maintain.

I continue to lean toward the filament lamp, which is old-fashioned now and admittedly creates more heat and therefore less light than a fluorescent lamp for a dime's worth of electricity. But the filament lamp is cheap to install, easy to maintain, and can be bought anywhere.

The fluorescent lamp is next in usage. It is efficient, comes in a variety of colors, and has a low unit brilliance. The lower brilliance tempts some folks to expose the naked lamp, but I still won't budge. Rule number one is that we never expose the source of light. The lower fuel cost of the fluorescent lamp is also tempting, but many years of use are required to repay the greater installation cost. I'm not knocking the gas-filled lamp. I'm saying it's one of those things which, on a low building budget, you can get along without for now, then add later when you can afford it.

To summarize my ideas about achieving the best light: get yourself plenty of it, whether natural or artificial, but keep the sources multiple, spread out, and as low in area brilliance as possible. This is the best way I know of to keep those squint lines from forming between your eyebrows.

49. Notes on sound

Here is my favorite true story about noise.

In the process of adding a bedroom to Mrs. Nemo's house, I found that there was no economical way to avoid having the ceiling slope with the slope of the new roof, about an inch to the foot. Mrs. Nemo may have missed this on the plans, because when she saw the ceiling in place, she flew into a rage. In the hope of quieting her enough to get paid I pointed out first that the ceiling had to be that way, and second that it would make a wonderful improvement in the acoustics.

"Who," she cried, "ever heard of acoustics in a bedroom!"

In Section 11 I roughed out some acoustical principles. I said that when you are building from scratch, pleasant sound can be had for nothing--in fact, less than nothing. Most of the building methods which make for an irritatingly noisy house are expensive, while most of the methods which make for good acoustics are cheap. This represents the something for nothing bonanza of all time.

In order to understand why good sound comes cheap, we need first to throw out the idea of "acoustic treatment." This means a patch job on a building which was done wrong in the first place. Not only is acoustic treatment expensive, but it will probably result in only limited success.

Next I need to discuss the difference between absorbing noise and dissipating it. Absorption is the conversion of sound energy into heat. It takes place slowly within the air. To absorb sound energy quickly we have to use deeply yielding materials within which the energy can wander around and get lost. Sound energy which is either reflected by a surface or transmitted through it is not being absorbed.

Sound dissipation, however, is accomplished for nothing by the shape of the confined space. In Section 11 I discussed this principle. Most of the structural shapes and methods which have been suggested in this book are acoustically good. I feel so strongly about the importance of pleasant acoustics to physical and mental health, that if I knew a design to be acoustically bad, I would throw it out for that reason alone. Fortunately, noise reduction and pleasant aesthetics seem to go hand in hand.

We are assailed by many kinds of sound. I find it convenient to think of all this racket as being made up of speech, music, pleasant noise, and unpleasant noise. While the concert hall is designed for music and the lecture hall for speech, the home tries to deal with music, speech, and assorted noises all at once. Outdoors, barring an occasional echo, sound goes nowhere but away. Indoors, it keeps bouncing around. Some persistence is desirable, too much is not. How much is too much depends on the kind of sound, and whether it is pleasant or unpleasant.

Indoors, we can do two things with sound, absorb it or dissipate it. If sound is to be absorbed, we would need to devise a psychic-selective absorber capable of deciding which noises we thought pleasant and which unpleasant. Sound dissipation solves this problem for nothing. It creates an environment in which the desired sounds can be heard and understood, while the undesired sounds are made less irritating.

The ultimate acoustic horror is a square, plastered, hardwood-floored, flat-ceilinged room where someone has forgotten to turn off the radio, and within which twenty women are pretending to play bridge. Starting with this worst of all torture boxes, we can work upward toward acoustic comfort.

The intelligibility of speech is a function of its higher frequencies. If the highs are removed, speech can not be understood. At the other extreme, if the highs reverberate (bounce around the room) too long, conversation is not only cloudy and hard to understand but hard on the ulcers as well. If the highs don't linger at all, we have the padded cell effect of lifelessness.

The beauty, audibility, and clarity of the human voice and of music is a function of the range of frequencies which can be heard, plus a reverberation time which is neither too long nor too short, plus absence of reverberation patterns.

Short of noise at the level of actual pain, the irritating aspects of noise lie in the higher frequencies. The greater weight of noise lies in the low frequencies which because they are more difficult to absorb travel farther, reverberate longer, and penetrate physical barriers with less diminution.

The inexpensive way to solve the problem is to shorten reverberation time on the high frequencies and dissipate the low ones. Both can be done at no cost through proper room shape.

The worst possible acoustic shape for a room is a perfect cube. The shape improves from there as we depart from cube dimensions and, more important, as we decrease the number of major right-angled or parallel surfaces. Practically, the throwing of one or two of the six major room surfaces out of square or parallel is a big improvement.

There are also some dimension ratios which help. If a room has to be rectangular in all three planes, the best compromise shape makes its width slightly over one and a half times its height; its length slightly over one and a half times its width. For example:

The dimensions eight by fourteen by twenty-three represent a recommended proportion, not a recommended size, but it would still be a good place to hold a bridge party.

If, fortunately, the room need not be rectangular in all three planes, the desired proportions sketched here still hold good, but become less critical. It would seem that pleasant acoustic shape also fits with many of our aesthetic notions.

If you insist that your room look rectangular in all three planes, you can still do a lot of good by building a couple of its walls and corners out of exact parallel and exact square. Two or three degrees departure from ninety, less than anyone can notice, is a big help. A famous university, cramped as usual for money and space, built the study cubicles in its acoustics laboratory like this:

With shower-stall dimensions in exactly rectangular cubicles the students would have been frightened by the beating of their own hearts. One crooked wall quieted down two cubicles at once.

Back in Section 11 I observed that all irregularities, all departures from geometric precision, such as beams, arches, open doorways, angles, bookshelves, and unintentional structural deviations brought on by accident or time, contribute to noise reduction.

We now see why many people insist that an old house is more comfortable than a new one. They may not know it, but the comfort they refer to is largely acoustic comfort. The old house probably wasn't built square in the first place, and has become less so as time went by.

For about two generations master carpenters, convinced that houses should be built by the square instead of by eye, have been in all innocence committing acoustic atrocities. They pride themselves on the flatness of walls, the exact squareness of corners. Plasterers, using harder plaster than before, strive for dense, plane surfaces. More and more glass is used, and the people who haven't read this book still set it straight up and down. House areas have shrunk, and with prices tied to number of rooms rather than square footage, room areas have shrunk even more.

Since the old rules haven't changed, it is small wonder that in a bedroom ten by ten by eight with hardwood floor and geometrically perfect plastered walls and ceiling, the smallest belch, squeak, rumble or snore sounds like gunfire.

Hallways are a special acoustic atrocity, for different reasons, and deserve special attention. Draw two parallel lines:

whose length is several times that of the space between. You have drawn a hallway, you have drawn a tunnel, and with the same two lines you have drawn an organ pipe. Even with the ends open, our organ pipe (hallway) reverberates every sound therein. With the ends closed off square, it's worse.

Now imagine this hallway lined with bedrooms, as in some houses, all dormitories, and all hospitals. Or imagine it lined by offices filled with chattering typewriters and chatting executives, and traversed by pretty girls wearing high-heeled shoes. An organ pipe works fairly well no matter where the sound is begun, with the result that the entire hallway community shares, whether with glee, irritation, or embarrassment, the noises of every member.

The best solution is of course to arrange things so that no hallway exists. Short of that, there are many ways to mitigate the racket. On the next page are suggestions--an offset, a change in width, walls out of parallel, ends out of square, and a series of corners.

Once your choice of architecture has stuck you with a slick, straight, organ-pipe hallway it will do you little good to put curtains on the walls or carpeting on the floor. The shape has done more damage than a change of materials can correct. Repairing some part of this damage comes under "acoustic treatment," and is always expensive.

Having looked at some ways in which a conventional house goes acoustically wrong, let's turn with glee to look at some ways in which the engineered house is acoustically right, without anyone having done a thing about it.

In the long list of acoustic advantages, the most important are: Open plan, with partitions replaced by counters and storage walls. Beamed, sloping ceiling. Walls which have been angled to fit site. Wall surfaces broken by revealed structure and slanted windows. Avoidance of hard surfaces in favor of textures. Single level design which puts distance between noise sources, and which avoids sound transmission through floors which are necessarily stiff and thus noisy.

Outdoor Noise. Up to now these notes have worried only about indoor noise. Although the great outdoors is more tolerant of acoustical error, our penchant for architectural squareness and symmetry still can lead us into some annoying mistakes.

We have all had fun shouting at a barn, like this:

You say hello, and Little Sir Echo says hello right back to you, but not to me. I wouldn't deny you the fun of an occasional echo, if the echo remains occasional.

Now see what happens when you have two barns, or a barn and a house, sitting at right angles to each other.

The ninety-degree inside angle will send an echo back to any place in the yard, where we are all running around playing touch football. In such a situation, not only does everyone get his own echo all the time, he gets everyone else's too. This sort of continuous playback quickly ceases to be fun.

Applying the same inside corner principle, here is a good and often used way to annoy the arriving guest:

This is the first time I ever sketched a front door exactly centered between two ells, yet people build them that way all the time. When you open the door and say hello, he says hello, and in his own ears he hears himself saying hello-lo-lo-lo-lo-lo. This is a shattering experience, which wouldn't have happened had the door been located three feet off center.

Outdoors as well as in, the inside square corner is the acoustic menace to be shunned. Fortunately, it costs not one penny to avoid it. Even the city planners are beginning to realize that they can reduce urban noise by setting their towering skyscrapers a little bit off square. Geometric symmetry in structure is always noisy, especially inside square corners. There is noise enough without coming home to a room that has, not one square corner, but four.

Reproduced Sound. Canned sound in one form or another has become part of our lives. More of the noises we listen to come out of a box than out of people, and like it or not, the loudspeaker has become a member of the family. Since it is a constant presence, and a most vocal one at that, its location is worthy of at least as much architectural attention as where we sleep.

I have said that everything right about acoustics is inexpensive. This remains true for reproduced sound, whether we are discussing the housewife whose radio blats unheard commercials while she does the ironing, or the high fidelity buff who insists on religious calm while soaking himself in symphony.

Manufacturers of sound reproducers in the quality range like to encourage the idea that a noise box is also a piece of furniture. As a piece of furniture, it falls under the scrutiny of the housewife who decides how it should look and where it will be located.

Treatment of a noise box as a piece of furniture to be looked at rather than heard seems to me at least as silly as saying that a light fixture is to be looked at, rather than seen by. Ideally the light fixture shouldn't be seen at all and the noise equipment shouldn't be seen either. It should be built into the house as part of the machinery.

The situation is further complicated when the manufacturers, for their own reasons, locate the loudspeaker or speakers and the necessary amplifier and controls all in the same box. This is dead wrong and they know it, but they reason that it is easier to sell one piece of furniture than two.

In any given sound reproducer of any quality whatever the amplifier and control section is relatively small; the loudspeaker, to be of the same quality, is relatively large. Splendid developments have come along to reduce the size of loudspeakers of an equivalent quality, but the same designer will in any case produce a better speaker if he is given more room to work in. This is because air accepts sound reluctantly. The larger the area, the better.

Good loudspeakers are bulky contraptions, believed by non-speaker-lovers to be un-handsome. Many a music fan has had his sound apparatus banished from the front parlor because of its size. But hurray for our side. Now that a new house is being planned, hi-fi husband and furniture-polish wife can stay friendly, because the loudspeaker is going to be built in. (Stereo fans can read speakers for speaker, but that's a deep-dyed hi-fi argument that has nothing to do with architecture.)

Here are the simple rules for building in a speaker. The most efficient acoustic location for any speaker is in the extreme top or bottom of the corner of a room, with the upper corner being usually more convenient. The speaker should face diagonally across the area where you plan to do most of your attentive listening. The high frequencies should reach your favorite easy chair in a direct line. Remember that most speakers have a rather narrow cone of highs. Within this cone, you have "listening music." Outside of it, you have "dinner music."

For best results, the speaker corner should be acoustically "dead," with the opposite corner "live." Like this:

The idea behind this arrangement is to provide a short reverberation time on the highs, and a longer one on the low frequencies.

Mounting a cone speaker in the wall is an economical acoustic device that buys a lot of domestic harmony for nothing. Its variations are many. Here is a schematic diagram of how the trick works.

All you did was take a coaxial cone speaker and mount it in a hole in the wall. On the front side of the speaker you get listening music, and on the back, dinner or working music. Acoustically, the arrangement can be criticized, but still, keeping everyone happy with one noise box is quite a bargain.

If, by chance, you can arrange matters so that the air path from front to back of the speaker is between twenty and thirty feet, the bargain will be improved, because the speaker itself will have become almost twice as efficient as it was before.

Whether you choose my first suggestion, which approaches the ideal, or my second, which is bargain basement, satisfaction is guaranteed whether your favorite noise be speech, music, or advertising.

Happy listening.

50. Notes on materials

All other things being equal, the least expensive materials are those found in your own back yard. Contemporary architects discuss the use of "native" materials, an unfortunate phrase which seems to imply that the native stuff, though inferior, should be struggled along with somehow because it is aesthetically correct to do so. I suggest that "native" materials should be judged on their own merits. You may learn that they are as good or better than their brothers from a thousand miles away, and they are certainly cheaper.

It is a human failing to believe that "imported" is bound to be better than "local." Opera singers used to take Italian names, and everyone knows that the definition of an expert is another dumbbell but one who comes from out of town.

The range of materials multiplied by places where they are found is vast. You have to make your choices for yourself. I'll start off with an example. I happen to be sitting in New England, surrounded by northern white pine. In Colonial days, this wood was taken to England, where it was called the King's wood. Only master cabinet-makers were allowed to use it, because of its two great virtues, the first aesthetic, a lovely texture, and the second mechanical, its dimensional stability. Nothing has changed since. The wood is snapped up eagerly, but by non-New England buyers. Let a neighbor see what I am using for a dining table and he will say, "What's that made of? Oh! Just pine."

Therefore we find houses in Oregon sided with cypress from Florida, and houses in Florida sided with redwood from Oregon. We find houses in Mississippi floored with white pine from Maine, and houses in Maine floored with yellow pine from Mississippi.

Shipping lumber around is bad enough, but shipping rocks is worse. I have heard of marble from Italy which showed up in Vermont, and granite from Montpelier finding its way to Milan. All of which is not to deny that there are special things found in special places. My point is that once we get over the hump of regarding local, nearby, home-grown and provincial as derogatory words, the bulk of our building materials will be found close at hand.

We have discussed what various materials can do. Some materials are, shall we say, beneficent. They like to be used in a house. They are tolerant of our mistakes, doing some good no matter how badly we treat them. Other materials respond less gratefully. They fight back when maltreated.

Steel is strong, faithful, and he works cheap. The servant type, he looks after us to the limit of his strength, but prefers to remain below-stairs. His only serious fault is his excessive appetite for oxygen. He rusts.

Wood is the hero, the glamor boy of our little drama. He is everywhere, doing everything, both on and off stage. He accepts abuse quietly, but, like most glamor boys, is at his charming best when treated with respect and understanding.

Concrete is the heavy. He is the owner of the bank, firm, unyielding, without whom you could do little, but with whom it is advisable not to get too intimate. Assembled Masonry used to own the bank, but he is retired now, serving only as lobby sitter emeritus.

Aluminum is the maid-of-all-work who dashes in and out fluttering her skirts. Within her strength, she will do anything you ask, and you are never sorry to have her around.

Glass is the heroine, beautiful, weak, fragile, and hard to handle, but for whom no substitute has yet been devised. She has, by the way, some country cousins from the Plastics family, who will be very handy to have around when they grow up.

Waiting outside the door are several applicants who didn't get into my play at all. I feel sorry for the first one in line. They call him Brick, he's been around a long while, he's worked hard for everybody, but he never learned to do anything really well.

Also around for quite a while, though the police have been after him, is an ugly fellow called Tar Paper. This guy I would pay just to stay away. He does everything wrong. He attracts heat when I don't want it, and throws it away when I need it most. He works cheap, but badly. Mistress Aluminum does everything he can do, and does it right instead of wrong.

Pretending to ignore Tar Paper is another unemployed slicker called Plaster. He used to play butler parts back when people hired butlers. Plaster's a front man, all grin and no muscle, and he gives up when the going gets tough. Though - a pretty boy, for my money he's priced himself out of the market.

The name of that handsome fellow in the harlequin suit is Paint. He's a good lad in the right role and maybe we can find a place for him later. The rest of the crowd are bit players, no great shakes at the box office, but useful when we need them.

The ones who really make the show click are wood and concrete, the hero and the heavy. Let's see what it takes to make them perform at their best.

For simplicity, I have sketched only a few of the growth rings in this cross section of a tree. Here's what happens when the log is sawed.

The methods shown here are sketched with apologies to all sawyers for oversimplifying their procedures.

Our first problem is that wood is many times as strong in one direction as in the other. I could break board number three up there with my bare hands, like this:

No strain. I broke it through the center of the tree, where the sapling remains. To break board number one would have required a sharp blow, but try to break either of these boards in the other direction and you've got yourself a job.

The second and more complicated problem is that wood changes its dimensions with changes in its moisture content, and not equally in all directions at that. Lengthwise of the grain (up and down the tree) the change is very slight and we can ignore it. To look at what happens across the grain, here is a blown-up sketch of board number one:

The dark, narrow, hard lines in any wood's grain are the summer growth. The lighter, softer, wider space in between two dark bands is the spring growth, during which time the tree made its annual spurt. Unfortunately, the dimensional change between wet and dry is greatest looking around the tree, that is, along the circle of spring growth. The change is a good deal less looking directly across the growth ring.

Now let's say that our board was flat, as sketched, at a moisture content of around 15 per cent. Along comes a dry spell, and its moisture drops to 10 per cent. The board will look like this:

In geometric terms, the shrinkage was greater along any circumference than along any radius. The board had to go out of flat. It couldn't help itself.

Here is a blow-up of board number five:

During the same dry spell, the greatest proportional shrinkage in this board was its thickness, but because it wasn't very thick in the first place, you didn't notice it. A proportionately lesser change occurred in its width. Since the board, being quarter-sawed, wasn't wide to begin with, you may not have noticed that either. Though the board shrank, it did not go out of flat, because there was no growth ring entering and leaving from the same side, therefore no string being pulled around a corner and no force exerted.

The phenomenon of going out of flat is known as "cupping." No slash-sawed board can avoid it. Cupping is not the same as "warp." A warped board was defective, usually because of internal stresses from a crooked tree. The warped board went out of straight, or twisted out of plane, or split itself down its own grain.

The only way to avoid normal cupping is quarter-sawing. Aesthetics now must be considered. When nine out of ten people talk about a beautiful wood grain, they refer to slash sawing, that is, board number one, which cups. Board number five, quarter-sawed, doesn't cup, but though it retains a flat surface, it has no grain beauty worth mentioning.

A partial solution to this dilemma is to use narrow boards, which may cup or not, but since they're narrow, it doesn't matter. Aesthetics gets into the argument again, with at least eighty out of a hundred people regarding a wide board as prettier than a narrow one.

Back we go to geometry. Different woods vary in the amount of their dimensional change. The cupping effect we have observed is greater, by and large, with hardwoods than with softwoods. A piece of maple cups several times as much as pine of the same width. Therefore we find hardwoods used in narrow strips, nailed side by side in a floor or glued together in a table. If we want wide boards to look at, they will almost inevitably be softwood.

Wood, the glamor boy of our materials group, requires understanding. Here are ways in which he is frequently misunderstood.

Trouble arises in the use of the words "wet" and "dry." After sawing, wood must be dried in the sense that, with time, most of the sap comes out. The rule-of-thumb time required used to be called one year per inch of thickness. Commercial haste has reduced this figure to three months, without specifying whether the three months be July through September or January through March. At any rate, this kind of "drying" proceeds rapidly on the first day after sawing, then slower on each succeeding day thereafter, until some time within the first "year per inch of thickness," when the wood is as dry, or free of sap, as it is ever going to get.

From then on the word "dry" refers to moisture content, which varies up and down with the weather and with ventilation. The most widespread and persistent fallacy concerning wood is the belief that the older it gets the drier it gets. This is not only wrong, but leads by implication into another fallacy, the idea that dry-ness is somehow a measure of quality.

A wood salesman, who should have known better, assured me that he had some "fine old boards, sawed thirty years ago and dry as a bone." The lumber turned out to be stacked in a tight pile on the floor at the north side of his cow barn. You could make the stuff squirt water by squeezing it.

A curious variation on this "old therefore dry therefore good" fallacy is the notion that "kiln drying" produces dryer therefore better wood. There are several reasons for kiln drying, all economic, such as the weight of loaded freight cars and the interest charges on operating capital. As far as the wood itself goes, the best you can hope for is that kiln drying, done carefully, does no damage.

Under no circumstances can kiln drying make the wood any better than it was when it was placed in the oven. One week after leaving the kiln, or somewhere around Kansas City in a shipment from Seattle to Baltimore, the wood isn't any drier, either. To repeat, the moisture content of a piece of wood depends on the weather and on ventilation, not time.

Still another variation on this fallacy is the notion that the moisture change problem can be eliminated by the use of wood finishes such as paint or varnish. It isn't so, but more on that subject in the next section. The chances are that by painting you will have rendered the wood less able to keep pace with moisture changes, therefore most of the time it will be undesirably wetter than its environment.

Which brings us to the circumstances under which wood rots. A piece of wood completely immersed in water does not rot. Neither does one completely surrounded by air. If ventilated, and allowed to dry out thoroughly after every wetting, a piece of wood of almost any kind will retain its strength over a period which, compared to my lifetime, amounts to forever.

Wood rots under conditions of wetting followed by imperfect drying. A good example is the stake which you drove into the loam of your garden and forgot to remove last fall. Pull it out, and you will find that it began to rot precisely at the surface of the ground. That part of the stake which was deeper in the ground has not yet begun to rot. Down there it got wet and stayed wet.

For the same reason, wood in direct contact with masonry will rot, because masonry is hydroscopic. It stays wet. The situation is different only in degree from driving a stake into loam. Absolutely the nastiest thing you can do to a wooden post is to set it in concrete. Yet people keep on doing it, and when the post breaks off exactly at the surface of the concrete they feel the post must have been defective. Question: then what should the posts be set in? Answer: coarse gravel, which drains and ventilates.

In order for the hero and the heavy to get along with each other, wood in direct contact with masonry must be chemically protected. There are many effective chemicals available. I recommend their use at all places where wood cannot be ventilated. I ask you to remember that rot-inhibiting chemicals are not to be confused with finishes.

With all this attention being paid to his foibles, it might seem that wood is a capricious beast. Not at all. We study wood in detail because it is the most versatile of all domestic building materials. Chief among wood's virtues is the ability to save us a lot of money if we learn to use it skillfully.

Here are some important notes on how to use wood right. Starting with a stack of "log run" lumber, you will find that most of your boards are slash sawed, looking like board number one or number two in the first sketch. With both sides equally ventilated, each and every one of these boards will cup away from the heart side, as shown in the next sketch. That is, the bulge will invariably occur toward what was the center of the tree. If one side is wetter than the other, the bulge will be toward the wet side.

From these facts comes a very important rule for using lumber. "Heart side up, heart side out!" Wherever a board may be used, its showing or working face should be the heart side of the tree, as sketched on the next page.

For clarity, these curvatures are shown in exaggerated fashion. I think you can see the point to the heart side out rule. To explain all the reasons would take a long while. They include continuity of surfaces, proportion of heartwood, correct ventilation to avoid excessive cupping, and security and size of knots. Footnote: Much to my surprise I find that many carpenters pay no attention to the heart side rule. Insist that your carpenters do.

The subject of knots reminds us that a knot structurally is a defect, no matter how much press agentry may be expended on selling knotty boards. The price of lumber depends on its freedom from knots. Few of us could afford to build a house of wood which was entirely "clear." There is a lot of money to be saved by learning to use wood which is knotty and therefore cheap.

In the language of our structural engineering course, a knot is a defect when placed in tension, but not when placed in compression. A knot is only a minor defect, structurally, when it occurs in or near the center of a board or timber, but a major defect, both structurally and aesthetically, when it reaches the edge of a board or timber.

Starting with the assumption that we want to use knotty wood because it is cheap, here are some ways to use it wrong.

This beam was put up by an alleged carpenter who should be in some other line of work. The beam was junk to begin with, but if he had turned it over, putting the knot on the compression side, no harm would have been done.

No. 1 shows a timber which should never have been used as a load-carrying post at all. A bad knot cuts it half in two at the point of greatest buckling stress.

No. 2 is a timber with knots in the center, which makes a fine post. The buckling stress goes down the outside, where there are no knots. Sketch 3 is board number three from our first sketch of a sawed log. At worst, this board is firewood. At best, it can be used on the roof, but keep it out of sight.

No. 4 is what the saw may have found a couple of boards away. With knots running into the edge, it may be used for roof, but with caution. Knots in the edge of a board don't behave well, whether the board be stress-loaded or not. No. 5 sketch is a board you can use anywhere, without fear of structural failure. It is both aesthetically pleasing and structurally sound, which is not surprising, because much of our aesthetic sense is based on good structure. This board is worth many times as much as the horrible examples, yet if we bought unselected or "log run" lumber, we got all three for the same price, or less than half the price of "selected" lumber.

Because all three boards came out of the same tree, once more we see why wood is a glamor boy, who does many things well but insists on being treated right. In the sense that wood is a natural, ever-varying material, it demands the services of a good carpenter who will think even as he acts. Out of one tree such a carpenter can get posts, beams, roof, floor, walls, trim, and furniture.

Our ancestors did it that way. We now find it convenient to use several different trees, but in the use of wood, the carpenter's thought processes remain the essential ingredient.

The second member of our domestic materials team is concrete. He is a solid soul, and though not as versatile as wood, is able to perform indispensable tasks when properly put to work. Concrete is a manufactured material, far simpler than wood. Its proper care and feeding can be described in much less time.

Concrete is a mixture of cement, sand, and some sort of aggregate or filler. Its strength is established by the bond between grains of sand and particles of cement. The cement particle is hundreds of times smaller in diameter than the grain of sand. When mixed together dry, each grain of sand becomes coated with thousands of particles of cement. With the addition of water, the cement undergoes a chemical change, gets sticky, and holds the whole mass together in whatever shape we have pushed, poured, smoothed, formed or sprayed it in the meantime.

Properly mixed, then allowed to dry slowly and for a long while, concrete is astonishingly strong. Under the best of care, its weakness remains in tension. To concrete which is going to be stressed we always add reinforcement on at least the tension side, like this:

Because concrete can be formed around anything, we are allowed to locate tensile reinforcing steel where we want it. This is the best thing about concrete. We wish we could do the same with all building materials. All, without exception, are to some extent weaker in tension than in compression.

The tensile strength of concrete is greatest when it has been mixed very dry. All vendors of mixed concrete, when they are not being governed by engineered specifications, mix it much too wet. They do this in order to make the concrete mix quickly, pour easily, and go into the forms without much work. Given adequate tensile reinforcing, this is the most economical procedure, but it doesn't produce the best concrete.

Each grain of sand has been coated with thousands of grains of cement. Add a little bit of water, the correct figure being perhaps fifty pounds of water to a hundred pounds of cement, and the whole mass becomes sticky. Add a lot more water, and the cement particles wash off of the grains of sand. Under the action of puddling and finishing, many of the cement particles are driven to the top. The finished concrete now has its best tensile strength at the top, where it normally isn't necessary, its lowest strength at the bottom, where strength is most needed.

For the best result, concrete should not be "poured," it should be pushed. Where pushing involves excessive labor, some compromise is required. Insofar as concrete can be mixed and formed close to the proper dryness, less concrete is required for a given structure. The exact compromise depends on the situation, and each one is different. All I can do here is alert you to the fact that concrete is generally mixed too wet.

My second word of warning is that most builders, under pressure to get a job done quickly, load their concrete structures too soon. The strength of concrete increases strikingly during its first month of existence. Provide a month of curing time if you can arrange it.

My last warning is to remind you that concrete absorbs moisture. Polyethylene film is now available to minimize the difficulty. This wonderful plastic" enjoys the property of excluding moisture while admitting air. Crazy, but it works. Nurserymen wrap their plants in it for shipment. The plants can breathe, and still stay moist. All concrete in contact with the ground should have a polyethylene moisture barrier under it.

In summary, concrete, reinforced on the tension side, mixed dry, allowed to cure, and protected from moisture, is a magnificent building material.

The amount of space devoted in these notes to the basic domestic building materials, wood and concrete, is roughly in proportion to the amount of money you will spend for them. Other materials, though helpful, take smaller parts of your well-spent dollar.

In cutting up the dollar I include the array of materials which are manufactured from wood and from concrete. To list all of them would require as much space as this entire book. Take plywood, for instance, a family of products numerous and widely used. There may by now be people who have never seen a board.

Plywood is a fine and useful material, in its place. Cement and its family of aggregate building blocks is also a fine and useful material. Composite materials, with stiff skins of wood or metal bonded to insultative interiors, become constantly more numerous. There are so many kinds of manufactured materials that to review them with any honesty would keep us up all next year.

Boards and concrete, I repeat, remain the basic materials. The purpose of composite materials is to save labor. They themselves are more expensive per unit of strength. Boards and concrete, in the hands of the well-adjusted carpenter, will still give you the most structure for your money.

51. Notes on finishes

The word finish has many meanings. In a building, it means either to complete or to cover up. In making a machine, the word finish means degree of smoothness. In protecting a material, it means a chemical change or addition to that material's surface. In decorating a material, the word means to add a layer of some different material.

To reduce confusion, I will stick to building materials, dividing finishes into two classes, chemical and cosmetic. Cosmetic finishes generally have no ability to protect, except that they wear away and are renewed.

Steel rusts in the presence of oxygen. We paint it, and because the exclusion of oxygen is less than perfect, we paint it some more. The paint, . being an added surface which effected no chemical change in the steel, didn't stop the oxidizing process, it just slowed it down. Some metals, such as aluminum, can be oxide stabilized, which is a chemical resurfacing.

Wood, our hero from the previous chapter, can be treated chemically to slow down rot. Chemicals can also be distasteful to insects, who go somewhere else and chew up somebody else's wood.

In the building business, when most people talk about finishes, they are discussing paint. Mostly, they are talking about putting paint on wood. They have been led to believe that wood requires "preservation," and that paint will do it.

There is the customary grain of truth in all this nonsense. Paint does offer mechanical protection against erosion. In four or five hundred years the action of wind, rain, sleet and hail can erode an inch board to half its original thickness. Or so they tell me. If you keep painting a board, what erodes away is the paint, and then you put on some more paint.

I have no objection to paint, used for cosmetic purposes. I do object to paint salesmen who tell me that paint is a preservative for wood. It isn't. It is not a chemical treatment, it's a decoration. If you want a board to be white, paint it white. That is the only reason I know of for painting it at all.

Hold the paintbrush while I make one more point. Painting is like getting married; easier to do than undo. Once having painted, you and your progeny keep on painting forever. I have tried to make it clear that your house will not fall apart tomorrow if it isn't painted. Good enough. Now if you still want to paint, pick up your brush, and let's see how to do it right.

Essentially, paint is a mixture of oil and pigment. In the old days, linseed oil and white lead were the only ingredients, plus a little color if you didn't like white. Oil "wets" wood, so the mixture went on and stayed a while. A house painter, not being pressed to produce color in a twinkling, began with a first coat of plain oil, without pigment. His next coat included white lead and the whole thing stuck together. If you're going to paint at all, do a good job. The first coat should not include pigment.

Stain, another cosmetic treatment, is not as versatile as paint. It can change brilliance in only one direction; darker. You can change your mind and scrape paint off if you want to work hard enough. Stain is there to stay. Depending on how you feel about it, this can be a virtue or a fault. Once you have painted something, repainting is just around the corner, but you don't have to keep re-staining.

The subject of cosmetic finishes becomes clearer if we distinguish between sub-surface finish and re-surface finish.

Every finish has to be based on some kind of liquid carrier. If we begin by using nothing but that carrier, so much the better. For simplicity, let's call the carrier "oil." In this sketch, every bit of the oil soaked in a little way, with virtually nothing remaining outside the original surface of the wood. Perhaps a second application will also soak in. It depends on what oil, and what wood.

The ability of any wood to accept any penetrant except water is limited. Somewhere around the third coat of oil part or most of it remains outside. If in the meantime we have begun to add pigment, with luck a little of that will penetrate along with the carrier. Most remains on the outside. As we move on toward a paint, which contains ground up solids, or a varnish, which is made of resins, we completely cover the original surface of the wood, establishing a new, or resurface.

The wood purist contends, and I agree, that it is a mistake to create any finish outside of the wood itself. He argues, and I'm with him, that the re-surface is likely to be more susceptible to mechanical, chemical, or thermal damage than the original wood.

To make his point, the purist seizes upon varnish as a horrible example, pointing to your dining room table which has been varnished "to protect the wood." The varnish protects the wood all right, in the sense that a scratch is now a scratch in the varnish, not in the wood, and when a hot coffee cup or a cold beer can leaves a ring, the ring is not in the wood, but in the varnish. Varnish is much more susceptible to thermal and mechanical damage than wood. When the varnish has been damaged, you either buy a new table or remove the varnish and start over.

This is the same idea as our layer of paint, which protects the wood from erosion by itself becoming the thing which erodes.

The clearest argument against adding a new surface to wood is "Why bother?" Why not just go ahead and wear out the wood? It started out in life with a more tolerant surface than anything you can put on it.

To many people wood finishing becomes a game, a hobby, an end in itself. From the pipe smoker who rubs pipe on nose in order to coat the pipe with nose oil, to the furniture buff who has his own formulae for how many coats in between what grades of garnet paper and when to switch from linseed to tung oil, each of the hobbyists derives his pleasure not so much from the results as from the work involved.

With the finish hobbyist I have no quarrel. There is a sensual pleasure in spreading paint, if you think so, or in sandpapering shellac, if you think so. Each hobbyists thinks his method is the best, and if he enjoys it, it is.

I seek only to ease the hobbyist's struggles by asking him to remember the difference between sub-surface, or penetrating finish, and re-surface, or coating finish. He will find life easier if he makes up his mind which he seeks. I ask him to be skeptical about any finish whose advertisers claim that it both penetrates and coats in one application. The chances are it doesn't do either particularly well.

I am, of course, a hobbyist myself. My hobby is not to spend money unnecessarily. On the subject of finishes, my hobby expresses itself in eliminating as many finishes as possible. I carry it right down to none at all. It could be that my no-finish-at-all hobby will wind up saving you more money than any other single idea in this book.

Happily, I have been able to cross off all wood finishes whose advertised purpose is to "preserve."

With no hesitation I cross off all finishes applied either to wood or metal for the purpose of increasing durability.

I am left with cosmetic finishes, simply making something a different color from what it was before, and therefore presumably more beautiful. This leaves us with purely aesthetic considerations, which are not debatable.

I have never been able to see anything wrong with the original color of maple, mahogany, walnut, pine, spruce, or oak. These colors, by the way, bear no resemblance to the stains for which their names have been borrowed by the finishing materials industry. It is my opinion that in every case where a wood's name has been borrowed to describe a color, the result has been not only different from, but less beautiful than the original.

All of these ill-named finishes prepared by the professional aestheticians have two things in common; they are all darker than their name-fathers, and they are all in some shade of brown; light brown, dark brown, yellow-brown, red-brown, gray-brown, or some-brown. In this respect the aestheticians are only imitating nature.

Wood does this all by itself. When left alone, any kind of wood goes toward a darker shade of brown, of some hue or another, depending on the kind of wood. Sunlight accelerates the process. Rain turns the color toward gray. A piece of wood left in alternating sunlight and rain will go through brown into gray, some kind of gray. The same piece exposed to sunlight but protected from rain will eventually turn a deep brown.

Here are three different house walls.

Sun and rain, gray. All sun, brown. A vertical board in the middle sketch would turn out like this--with brown at the top shading down to gray at the bottom. In the house sketch where the overhang has been moved out two feet farther, no rain to speak of falls on the siding. The resulting color is all brown, shading from light down to dark because of the difference in the amount of sun.

Inside the house, the same kind of coloring takes place, but in gentler fashion because there is less sun. My wife has cupboard doors which show the effect clearly. They are light tan at the top, shading smoothly to deeper tan at the bottom, that being the way the sun falls. The effect of this gradation is pleasing; I wouldn't know how to duplicate it with paint.

Aesthetically, inside or outside, I think natural coloration has a mellowness and a textured beauty which no applied finish can achieve. On sight, ten out of ten visitors agree, except that five out of ten ask for the secret formula, refusing to believe that such beautiful colors just happened. Anything that handsome, say the skeptics, couldn't possibly have been had for nothing.

There happens to be a catch. The catch is that although these wonderful colors came for nothing, they did not arrive overnight. It takes two or three years, during which time one or the other of you may have decided to go live with mother.

This is where compliance comes in. Con yourselves into becoming hobbyists too. Go intellectual. Remember that "patina" is a synonym for well-mixed dirt. Ignore the guy who defines patina as dirt well-mixed by someone who lived a hundred years ago.

Start yourselves off with a coffee table or a kitchen counter which has no finish whatever. Explain to the neighbors that you are conducting an experiment in patina production. For the first few months you won't be happy, but stick with it. I guarantee that a year later you will be proud of your patina. The experiment will have consisted of an oversupply of spilled milk, gravy, cheese crumbs, cigarette burns, pipe ashes, goose liver, cream and sugar, numerous swipes from a soapy sponge, and the well-greased fingerprints of presumably laughing little children.

52. Notes on people

Some people I know were attracted by a site, then managed to persuade their chosen architect, a man of good reputation, to approve its purchase. Why he did this I don't know, because, squeezed between the site, his clients' notions, and his own desire not to lose the business, he wound up with the following impossible arrangement:

In summer, the afternoon sun, its impact almost doubled by reflection from the river, turns the all-glassed, west-facing end of the house into a furnace. In winter, the wind, whooping unimpeded down-river, makes it an icebox. The driveway runs from sun into perpetual winter shade cast by garage and house. Snow melts in the sun then re-freezes in the shade, creating an impassable glacier.

The moral of this story is not what you expect. Our protagonists just love their house. They have nothing but praise for the architect, who breathes a sigh of relief. When the living room gets too hot, well, what can you expect in summer so let's go out back for a breath of air. When it gets too cold, shucks, these modern houses do seem chilly but then everyone knows the winters are severe around here. As for the glaciated driveway, the garage is now happily converted to a playroom, and the family cars are parked down the road in a neighbor's barn.

There's nothing so wonderful as people. We can put up with anything. We can even put up with the consequences of our own folly, and in time come to believe that we intended things to be that way.

Man is the most adaptable creature on earth. He survives in swamp, jungle and mountain, tropic and arctic, desert, prairie and heath. He eats more different things than any other animal, and can keep going in greater extremes of temperature. He can live alone or with others. He can sleep or do without. Given a dinosaur to kill, he can kill it, and, given time enough, he can run down and capture a wild horse. Man, and this is not intended as a joke, can even survive on Madison Avenue.

The thing which makes man so adaptable is not his strength, which is puny, nor his digestive apparatus, which is defective, nor his physical armor, which is non-existent. His adaptability springs largely from his vast determination.

From the viewpoint of many technical disciplines, the vastness of this determination is unfortunate. To the architect, the unfortunate effect of determination is that it dulls awareness.

Place a dog and a man together on the side of a hill. The dog will know more than the man about how hot it is, where it would be cooler, whether the sun is shining, where the birds, bugs and field mice are and what they are doing, what branches are scraping together, where to find a drink of water, and which path leads toward home.

The dog's world teems with input data; sight, sound, odor and feeling. The man is much less aware of his immediate environment. While he enjoys a walk in the woods, his mind, larger than the dog's, is preoccupied with his larger world, which includes memories, hopes, predictions, and the constant need for decision.

What's the use, says the architect, in designing houses which are warm, dry, light, and quiet, if the people who are to live in them don't know the difference?

Man's ability to understand his environment depends largely upon five skills: he can see, hear, smell, feel, and think. Lack of skill in any one of these departments makes him less aware of environment. Some will say the heck with environment. Man would be happier not to know about it. I don't happen to agree.

Let's begin with our eyes, for most of us the greatest source of input data. We abuse our eyes by putting up with unnecessarily poor conditions. We give them too little light, or too much. We put up with glare. We arrange our work in shadow, then try to rest our eyes by looking into light.

The fellow I would like to help is the one who doesn't seem to be aware that his eyes are being maltreated. He has headaches, lines between his eyebrows, gets tired too quickly and can't do as much work as he would like. He thinks that a man's man should be able to put up with almost anything. He is determined to use the light he's got without making a fuss.

Next come our ears. Some of us are ear-skilled, receiving even more input data from ~ our ears than from our eyes. We have no "ear-lids," and there is no rest for the weary ear. I can't but wonder if people realize how much of their fatigue comes either from excessively loud or excessively irritating sounds.

I have stood in an echoing hallway, the din in my ears almost intolerable, and said to the man next to me, "We must do something about the noise in this place." "What noise?" he says. I know that his ears are as good as mine, but his determined mind refuses to pay attention. "Listen," I say, and snap my fingers. "Good heavens," he cries, his attention captured. "That's awful!" Suddenly he is aware of the noise and consciously disturbed by it.

Have I done him a favor or not? Was he happier in his determination, or will he be happier in his awareness? I prefer to believe the latter, because once aware, he can avoid fatigue by doing something about it.

The absence of irritating noise is more difficult to demonstrate. First you have to show your neighbor what it is he doesn't like, then you take him into a different environment and ask him to appreciate that what he didn't like isn't there any more. One problem of the acoustical engineer is that the absence of noise is more difficult to recognize than its presence.

The human sense of smell, at best imperfect and almost vestigial, supplies us with information about our environment which we interpret in an entirely subjective manner. Smell provides almost all of the information which we call taste. Taste is popularly supposed to warn us of food which is not good to eat. It doesn't do so at all. Taste is entirely a personal matter between us and what foods we have learned to enjoy.

Smell is also popularly supposed to warn us of dangerous breathing conditions. It doesn't do that either. Many lethal gases have, no odor, including the very dangerous carbon monoxide produced by your automobile. Some dangerous, odorless gases have an artificial scent added to warn people of their presence.

Apart from danger, good smells and bad smells are a matter of personal preference, whether we are discussing salt air drifting in over the clam flats, an ounce of brandy swirled in a snifter, a drop more or less of perfume behind my lady's ears, or the odor of burnt steak--depending of course on whether it got burnt indoors or outdoors.

Furthermore, smell is commonly supposed to warn us of inadequate ventilation. Though my nose may tell me if the man in the next seat had a slice of onion on his hamburger, it will not tell me the oxygen content of the air I am breathing. Above minimum requirements, ventilation is extremely subjective. Some like the wind blowing in their faces, others can't stand even an imagined draft. Many insist on sleeping with the window open, a practice which our grandparents firmly believed to be unhealthy.

Below minimum ventilation requirements, the nose gives no warning. All you do is get sleepy. This is not a reliable indicator. Many other things, such as having been out too late the night before, may also make you sleepy. Fortunately, most houses are pretty leaky and not until the crowd begins to gather do we need to be concerned.

Aside from lack of sleep, the most common cause of getting sleepy is to feel warm, but the sense of feeling is impossible to define. We feel local pain, indigestion, headache, hangnails, and sometimes we just don't feel good. Our fingertips can feel the difference between a dime and a nickel, and in a handshake my hand can feel whether your hand is wet or dry. Sometimes I don't feel like going out tonight, but if I go I feel that I ought to wear my new jacket.

Architecturally speaking, let us narrow this welter of assorted kinds of feeling down to feeling warm and feeling cold. I doubt that the working architect has any greater problem. Many people simply don't know whether they are warm or cold. Of a winter day I have seen two men on my sundeck, one stripped and sweating so hard he had to give up and look for protection from the heat. The other, wearing sweater, jacket, and overcoat, shivered and waited for the moment he would be allowed to go inside to breathe some warmed air. Which was right? I have to admit that both were right, and am forced to the reluctant conclusion that many people "feel" by the calendar and not by the nerve endings in their skin.

It has to do, I guess, with the mind, which is man's last but overriding sense. Unlike the dog and the cat, who know without being told which corner is warm and which is cold, man has a mind so determined that it can inhibit or distort his senses.

Though he controls his sources of light, he can remain determined to do without.

Knowing how to manipulate sound, he can allow himself to remain assailed by noise.

Possessed of the means for making and controlling heat, he can persuade himself to tolerate thermal discomfort.

Man's social habits have led him to accept his self-imposed discomforts. Many people think environment should not be mentioned in polite society. It is at home, where much of our time is spent, that we can freely admit whether we are comfortable or not.

Birds build nests in chosen places, with no two exactly alike. I wonder if they are not seeking for themselves and their children something a little better than the neighbors possess.

Our architecture is the attempt to express in stone, wood, and metal what we, the people, think we are. I am convinced that if we ourselves can once decide what we are, and what we want, the design of our houses will express these decisions.

What we are seeking is more than the perfect house. It is ourselves.

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