I wasn't offended by the article. It was a step up from what I was expecting--a lot of trend articles focus on really fleeting trends (like paint colors), and I regard those as completely ridiculous. Open floor plans and outdoor living spaces are decades-long trends, not "what's hot for 2011" (independent of whether you think that they are good or bad trends, or trends invented by builders to cut costs). Relative to the rooflines that I've seen on recent construction in nearby suburban areas(McMansions), I see roofline simplification as a good thing. Most of the the homes in my immediate urban area are older. There are lots of hipped roofs (lots and lots of hipped roofs), a lot of simple gables, maybe a dormer here or there. But for complicated roofs you have to go back to the Queen Annes. Regarding Palimpsest's post about the double-parlor enfillade--I'm not sure I'm entirely visualizing what you're describing, but I get what you mean about flexibility in use. My 1911 Edwardian has a pocket door on the opening between the living room and dining room (about a 6 foot opening) in the upper unit. We almost never closed it; only once in a while when we needed to control noise from the TV. But it was nice to be able to do so. Lacking a guest room, we also would sometimes put visitors out there on an air mattress, and it was nice to be able to close it off. I'm in the lower unit now, and there's a similar 6 foot opening between the LR and DR, but no pocket door. I kind of miss it.

I don't think people who are playing on their phones all the time have ocd--that would mean a vast proportion of our society does! Each successive generation has a shorter attention span that the last, but that being said, I imagine our grandparents would have had great fun playing with such toys as well. I really worry about the loss of interaction though. Last night my dd and I went to dinner and a family with two boys, maybe 10 and 7, sat next to us. The youngest had an ipad and the oldest a phone, (might have belonged to the parents,) and there was no conversation at all until the food was being decided upon and arrived. I see parents or sitters taking kids/babies for walks, chatting away on the phone constantly. Can no one stand silence without fiddling with something anymore? At a restaurant, I have to sometimes ask my dh to put his phone away--he's really gotten in the habit of constantly checking and is definitely not a person with even a hint of ocd.

This was in today's Crain's Chicago Business. I'm hoping it works to link to the video: You might have to login to read the article, but here's a link. If you can't see the article online, here are some points I found interesting: - A couple wished to built an environmentally friendly home on a budget, and had a modular home built out of state and shipped to Oak Park, IL (which as a side note has a large number of FLW homes) - The cost savings of going modularwere marginal, in part due to the need to ship the pieces 125 miles - Building tight and energy-efficient was easier to control in a factory setting than on a home site - One challenge is on inspections, and I found this interesting (Sommers, quoted below, is from a firm that has done 2 modular homes in Chicago but is not the firm that did the home featured in the article): "One key obstacle, Sommers said, is that municipalities want to inspect all construction along the way, which, while justifiable for health and safety reasons, makes building a house 125 miles from the village inspector's office a sore spot. He switched to designing for prefabrication of panels, or individual walls, instead of enclosed boxes, so that all inspections can be done on the home's site." - For the home in the article, 3rd party inspectors did the inspections while the modules were being built, and the village's inspectors took over once the home was assembled on the lot.

I don't think people live in the present anymore. Or privately. So many seem to live very public lives for show. This is one area where I disagree with Wagner's premise. She writes about the "more sinister change that occurred during the housing bubble leading up to the Great Recession: Average Americans began thinking of their homes as monetary objects to be bought, sold, invested in — consumed — rather than places to be experienced, places in which our complex lives as human beings unfold." I think the more sinister change is that view of the house as a monetary object in conjunction with the equally new concept of experiencing one's home for very public consumption and documenting every single moment of that experiencing. And then there are those who through blogs at first, then Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, etc. have monetized the concept of home as monetary object and as a place to be experienced (often with clickable links so you too can get the look). But I think a lot of people buy McMansions and that neo-Eclectic style of house regardless of their appearance, they don't care enough to think about whether it's ugly or not...and it looks like everything else in the neighborhood. I think many also don't know enough to think about whether it's ugly or not. There's no visual or historic training any more, consciously or unconsciously. Similar to what you wrote on the What Do You Think of the House in this Article? thread in the Building a Home forum, about Federal/Greek Revival and later Colonial Revival, "Architects and builders understood proportion and scale at that time--innately, it seems". And I agree with what others have written above, about so many houses, and the kitchens in the Kitchen forum, being built by checklist, with no understanding or sense that that house, or room, as a whole needs to be considered. I was looking through the book "Bunny Williams' Point of View" the other day (inspired by the recent BW thread), and was struck by the passage about the drawing lessons she began at age 15: "By the end of the summer, I had learned how to see. I began to see relationships between forms, to pay attention to proportions, and to view a whole as the sum of its part. To this day, I never look at a room, a piece of furniture, or a garden without mentally making a note of the relationship among the components." Thanks for posting the article, saypoint. And also writersblock; I've read that Airbnb aesthetic piece before and it's still current almost two years on. And I disagree with the comment that "It’s not like you’re at a Holiday Inn that’s the exact same everywhere" -- it's very much like that, and the similarities around the globe, the Airspace/Kinfolk aesthetic, are all the more striking because the consistency isn't mandated by any corporate HQ and yet there it is.