First off, I really want to visit this house, mainly to see what sound like very original and clever ways to modulate the space with movable elements. Also, the use of these movable partitions to change the use of the space from business to private sounds intriguing. For architects (and for users who may not realize how it works), differentiating between private and public use of space has always been a fascinating aspect of both life and the architecture that contains it.
As much as I love the use of glass block, the main space looks to have no human scale at all - no attempt to enable the visitor to understand clearly the size of their environment with respect to themselves. The salon looks like a big spatial box - I am not impressed with that. From the article, it sounds like the architect used the surrounding spaces to give human scale, but to understand the full effect, one has to visit it.
On the principles of preservation trumpeted in the article, I disagree. As an architect, a hundred years from now I would love to have my buildings restored to their original design, complete with non-broken and unblemished floors, polished elements that were intended for polish, painted elements intended for paint. The point of architecture as an art form is not to show how old it is, but to immerse the visitor in a world that is both real and idealized.
While the "essential character" stuff sound like a thinly veiled attempt to show off that the building is old and therefore valuable, I can see a different argument against full restoration. Gentle signs of aging, as long as you don't erase them selectively, show how well the house is able to withstand age. If it quickly turns ugly without costly maintenance, it's a bad house.
I agree with you that a good house needs to withstand age, but "showing off" that your house withstands age while denying the full enjoyment of the aesthetic experience of the house seems like a foolish trade off to me. I argue that the experience inside the house is the top priority in this context, not the sub sub feature that it ages well.
There is no full enjoyment, just varying degrees of almost-full enjoyment. A house that somebody lives in will always look worse than a house that has been prepared to look its absolute swankest, with every dust particle removed and every pillow fluffed. It makes more sense to talk of "full enjoyment" as a range rather than a point. To me, things like dulled metal surfaces would not be out of that range, if the house is designed well. If minor things like that put it outside the range, then it's a bad house.
Maybe there is something to that "essential character" business after all. Worn things are pleasant, and I think there is a reason. They put you at ease because they tell you that they've been used, and it's OK to use them. Shiny things seem fragile and distant.
Well, occasionally it is. There are a few pioneers like Wright and van der Rohe whose fame is well-deserved, and then hoards of half-conscious imitators shouting "let's make Facebook for, uh... iguana owners!". But I suppose that makes it just like anything else in life.
"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity." -pg
As much as I love the use of glass block, the main space looks to have no human scale at all - no attempt to enable the visitor to understand clearly the size of their environment with respect to themselves. The salon looks like a big spatial box - I am not impressed with that. From the article, it sounds like the architect used the surrounding spaces to give human scale, but to understand the full effect, one has to visit it.
On the principles of preservation trumpeted in the article, I disagree. As an architect, a hundred years from now I would love to have my buildings restored to their original design, complete with non-broken and unblemished floors, polished elements that were intended for polish, painted elements intended for paint. The point of architecture as an art form is not to show how old it is, but to immerse the visitor in a world that is both real and idealized.