Sit Down and Shut Up

My mom has these little pictures in her dining room of houses in France. She thought they were extraordinary enough while visiting France that she photographed them, had them developed, framed them, and put them up in her dining room.

I find it absolutely amazing that she couldn't, or wouldn't, find a house within a 5-mile radius of her own home here in SACTOWN that she'd photograph, develop, frame, and post up in her dining room. Perhaps because there aren't any worthy of photographing.

Here's a house that I snapped just this morning on Broadway on my bike ride into work:

Note the poorly proportioned shutters that are non-functional and purely decorative. Poorly proportioned because they couldn't enclose the entire window if they did work. These "shutters" simply make an architectural abortion even more shitty. What's more, these fake shutters are presumably in the open position, but note how the louvers are facing -- they are in the closed position. If they really did close, they'd be backward. Rainwater would blow right through, negating most of their effectiveness. The damn builder couldn't even build fake shutters correctly!

Shutters had/have an important function in other climes, but here in SACTOWN they are pointless. They are louvered, raised panel, board and batten, faux wood, poly, vinyl, plantation, traditional, colonial, painted, unpainted, stained, unfinished...but all of them, ALL! are non-functional and always out of proportion.

The house in the photo in my mom's dining room from France, the shutters are functional, enclose the windows, contain the view, are proportional to the window box and window...they look correct and serve a real purpose.

Here in my Merika, we spend inordinate time embellishing utter pieces of architectural shit with doodads. That's because we long for real places and real buildings, but are unwilling to pay Merikans to build them and instead pay Mexican immigrants feudal wages to tack on fakery on the outside to give the illusion that we have culture, that we use housal equipment appropriate to the climate, that we know what we're doing when we build a home.

Indeed, building fake shutters only makes the places we live in worse. We might as well be living in Wonderland with all this pointless, disproportionate junk we've been fabricating. They make all our depressing buildings even more depressing.

I know we could build better. But I also know that this is Merika, where building better plays second fiddle to growth. Living better, in better environments, in better houses; this apparently isn't what the American dream is about. The American Dream is a raised ranch with no money down, with no charm, with no character, with no sense of community, with three motor vehicles in the driveway to service it. We're pretty good at providing that.