The downturn has accomplished what a generation of designers and planners could not: it has turned back the tide of suburban sprawl. In the wake of the foreclosure crisis many new subdivisions are left half built and more established suburbs face abandonment. Cul-de-sac neighborhoods once filled with the sound of backyard barbecues and playing children are falling silent. Communities like Elk Grove, Calif., and Windy Ridge, N.C., are slowly turning into ghost towns with overgrown lawns, vacant strip malls and squatters camping in empty homes. In Cleveland alone, one of every 13 houses is now vacant, according to an article published Sunday in The New York Times magazine.
The demand for suburban homes may never recover, given the long-term prospects of energy costs for commuting and heating, and the prohibitive inefficiencies of low-density construction. The whole suburban idea was founded on disposable spending and the promise of cheap gas. Without them, it may wither. A study by the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech predicts that by 2025 there will be as many as 22 million unwanted large-lot homes in suburban areas.
The suburb has been a costly experiment. Thirty-five percent of the nation's wealth has been invested in building a drivable suburban landscape, according to Christopher Leinberger, an urban planning professor at the University of Michigan and visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. James Howard Kunstler, author of "The Geography of Nowhere," has been saying for years that we can no longer afford suburbs. "If Americans think they've been grifted by Goldman Sachs and Bernie Madoff, wait until they find out what a swindle the so-called 'American Dream' of suburban life turns out to be," he wrote on his blog this week.
So what's to become of all those leafy subdivisions with their Palladian detailing and tasteful signage? Already low or middle-income families priced out of cities and better neighborhoods are moving into McMansions divided for multi-family use. Alison Arieff, who blogs for The New York Times, visited one such tract mansion that was split into four units, or "quartets," each with its own entrance, which is not unlike what happened to many stately homes in the 1930s. The difference, of course, is that the 1930s homes held up because they were made with solid materials, and today's spec homes are all hollow doors, plastic columns and faux stone facades.
There is also speculation that subdivision homes could be dismantled and sold for scrap now that a mini-industry for repurposed lumber and other materials has evolved over the last few years. Around the periphery of these discussions is the specter of the suburb as a ghost town patrolled by squatters and looters, as if Mad Max had come to the cul-de-sac.
If the suburb is a big loser in mortgage crisis episode, then who is the winner? Not surprisingly, the New Urbanists, a group of planners, developers and architects devoted to building walkable towns based on traditional designs, have interpreted the downturn as vindication of their plans for mixed-use communities where people can stroll from their homes to schools and restaurants.
Richard Florida, a Toronto business professor and author of "Who's Your City?: How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life," argues that dense and diverse cities with "accelerated rates of urban metabolism" are the communities most likely to innovate their way through economic crisis. In an article published in this month's issue of The Atlantic, he posits that New York is at a relative advantage, despite losing a chunk of its financial engine, because the jostling proximity of architects, fashion designers, software writers and other creative types will reenergize its economy.
Adam Kalkin isn't the only architect to make homes out of shipping containers. A handful of architects, including Jennifer Siegal and Lot-Ek, began using them ten years ago as a gritty reaction against the tidy white surfaces of modernism. But nobody has employed shipping containers more inventively than Kalkin, a New Jersey architect and artist who has used them to design luxurious homes, museum additions, and refugee housing.
In architectural circles, Kalkin is regarded as something of an oddball. He began his talk at the Urban Center in New York Tuesday night by playing the first five minutes of a Jerry Lewis movie, followed by the actor's acceptance speech at the Academy Awards last month. His website includes lessons on hitting a tennis forehand and a selection of songs to sing after taking antidepressants. Years ago Kalkin shaved while delivering a lecture at the Whitney Museum.
His talk this week was tied to the publication of Quik Build: Adam Kalkin's ABC of Container Architecture ($49.95), which shows 32 of his projects in all their odd ingenuity, including Bunny Lane, a home he built for himself with a 19th century clapboard cottage inside an industrial hanger, and the Push Button House, a furnished room that unfolds from a container with hydraulic walls.
"Adam continues to be subversive, and subvert what architecture is supposed to be," design historian Alastair Gordon said by way of introduction in the panel discussion that followed Kalkin's presentation.
For all his artsy provocations, Kalkin's strategy makes some practical sense. After all, shipping containers are cheap, mobile and highly recyclable. The Kalkin project that puts these qualities to best use is the Quik House, a prefab home ($150 a square foot) made from six shipping containers that can be completed in three months. A smaller version, called the A Pod ($50,000), will be available later this year.
"Quik Build" arrives as modernist prefab has begun to lose its bargain appeal after years of hype. The most popular cost from $250 to $400 a square foot including installation, which is more than a thrifty consumer would pay for a home built by an architect and contractor. Last summer the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened Home Delivery, a show that celebrated prefab's design innovations but cast doubt on its current economics. Barry Bergdoll, curator of the show, suggested on Tuesday that Kalkin's containers could be used to provide low-cost housing in places like the Ninth Ward of New Orleans.
Can Kalkin provide a viable alternative to conventional housing? On Tuesday he said that he had never even considered himself a prefab architect until Bunny Lane showed up on the cover of a book about prefab. He's one of architecture's more unorthodox practitioners, but original thinking may be what's called for as architecture works its way through what Kalkin calls "a crisis of relevance."
Forty years ago today the supersonic Concorde took its first test flight, and a design paragon flashed across the skies over Toulouse. With its droop nose and delta wing, the Concorde was a high point of 20th< century engineering (it’s maiden flight came three months before the first moon landing) and the kind of cooperative effort that now seems beyond us. As we enter a period of infrastructure spending, it’s worth noting what kept the Concorde aloft for 27years.
"One reason for its longevity is that the Concorde's design is so idiosyncratic--and so tightly defined by function--that it is impossible to date, and would seem just as inspiring and surprising if it were unveiled today,” Alice Rawsthorn wrote last month in the International Herald Tribune.
For nearly three decades, the Concord delivered rock stars, models and other members of the limousine fraternity across the Atlantic for a round-trip price of $13,500. It was clubby: Madonna flew it. So did Tyler Brûlé, and Heidi Klum. It was not unusual for passengers to visit the cockpit with glasses of champagne.
Flying at an average speed of Mach 2.02 (1,330 mph), it cut the flight time from Europe to New York and Washington by more than half (it’s record time: 2 hours, 52 minutes).
For a certain kind of passenger it marked the high tide of high-tech travel luxury. For the rest of us, it was the first in a series of technologies that would shrink the world: for the first time it was possible to breakfast on croissants in the 16th arrondissements and catch lunch on Madison Avenue the same day (thanks in part to the time difference).
How could something concurrent with Creedence Clearwater Revival look so timelessly cool today? The delta wing, in the shape of a triangle, was developed in Germany before WWII, but it could pass for a 2009 design. It was much stronger than a conventional swept wing and made room for fuel and other storage. Most importantly, it stayed behind the supersonic shock wave precipitated by the long narrow aircraft nose, which hydraulically lowered itself, or "drooped," so that pilots could have an unobstructed view for landing and takeoff.
The Concorde’s fuselage flexed more than conventional jets, and as a result the pilots could see the floor bend as they looked back through the length of cabin. The cruising altitude of 60,000 feet exposed passengers to almost twice as much solar radiation as a normal flight, and for this reason the pilots had a radiometer. If they detected unusually high readings they descended below 47,000 feet.
The Concorde was the product of elaborate government cooperation. Aérospatiale and British AircraftCorporation needed heavy underwriting from their respective governments to build the fleet of 20. The project was the subject of a special treaty between the two countries, which didn’t stop them from quarreling over every detail--right down to the Gallic 'e' on the end of its name. Their collaboration was spurred by Cold War anxiety. A Soviet competitor, nicknamed the "Concorski" for its suspicious resemblance to the Concorde, may or may not have resulted from Soviet espionage. Boeing developed a supersonic jet with titanium wings and a cruising speed of 1,800 mph, but the U.S. government chose not to subsidize it, and the project died.
On July 25th 2000, a Concorde crashed in suburban Paris, killing 113 people. The crash, combined with 9/11 and the travel slump that followed, spelled the end. The Concorde made its last flight in 2003 with a passenger list that included Joan Collins, Christie Brinkley and David Frost.
"Never has such a beautiful object been designed and built by man," Air France's chairman, Jean-Cyril Spinetta, said at the time of its grounding. "…It continues to live on in the human imagination."
Apparently not everyone is scrimping. Yesterday a collector paid more than $28 million for a leather armchair. The sale was about $25 million higher than the Christie's estimate and set a record for a work of 20th-century design at auction.
The sale came on the second day of Christie's three-day auction of the late Yves Saint Laurent's 733-piece collection, held at the Grand Palais in Paris. After spirited back and forth with an anonymous phone bidder, the winning bid came from Cheska Vallois, owner of the Paris gallery Vallois, which had originally sold the chair to Saint Laurent.
"We're absolutely amazed by what's happened, Edward Dolman, Christie's managing director, told Bloomberg. "There are still a lot of extremely wealthy people out there."
The chair was made in 1917, or slightly later, by Gray, an Irish architect and furniture designer, for her first commission as an interior decorator. With lacquered wooden armrests shaped like braided serpents, it shows her in transition from art nouveau to art deco.
It set a record in part because the body of collectors for 20th-century design has grown enormously over the last ten yeas as a new generation of collectors made modernism a fashionable subject of acquisition.
"My gut feeling is that this chair went as high as it did is because it's an Eileen Gray," said William L. Hamilton, who previewed the auction for Art in America. "She's always been a darling of design curators and collectors because she was a woman competing in a men's world, and because as a one-of-a kind object it would be perceived as art."
The Gray chair was not an isolated jackpot. The first two days of the auction brought in $391 million, surpassing Christie's expectations for the three-day event. A three foot wooden sculpture by Constantin Brancusi went for $36.7 million, almost $1 million more than the previous record for a Brancusi.
"Is there new confidence in the market? Who's to say?" Hamilton said. "I'm not sure it's indicative of anything.
It’s human nature to say one thing and do another. During the election, for example, pollsters speculated that some voters might voice support for Obama but reach for the McCain lever in the privacy of the booth.
A similar inconsistency is at play with home design. For the past ten years or so, Americans have responded to the picturesque charms of small homes in books and magazines, while in real life heading straight for five bedrooms and industrial-strength kitchens capable of feeding 40.
Still, however grand their McMansions may have been, homeowners have simultaneously entertained vivid daydreams of tiny spaces, and the stripped-down life they conjure.
Five years ago, Time Inc. launched Cottage Living after noticing that reader interest spiked whenever the word “cottage” appeared in its other magazines. The book industry has churned out an entire library of titles that romance cabins, rustic retreats and other wee spaces, most notably the The Not So Big House series by Sarah Susanka, which has become a bestselling franchise (her latest, Not So Big Remodeling, hits stores on March 10.)
Whether we like it or not, the small house may now become a reality. New homes shrank by 100 square feet last year, according to the Census Bureau, and a survey last month by the National Association of Home Builders reported that 88% of homebuilders are constructing smaller homes.
Here’s the critical question: is the downsizing merely a pause in the inevitable pursuit of more bulked-out McMansions, or a cultural shift that will lead Americans to value efficiency, as the Dutch so famously do?
There are signs the latter may be the case. Compact appliances like the slim Liebherr refrigerator have edged their way onto the renovation menu, and one of the more noticeable recent architecture trends has been the surge in popularity of modernist backyard sheds used as home offices and guest rooms.
Nobody expects America to fall out of love with the big and the brash anytime soon. So it may be up to designers to recalibrate the American dream so that "small" is a term of architectural endearment.
Editor's note: Michael Cannell is a former editor of the House & Home section of The New York Times and was until recently director of online content at dwell.com. He has written about design for The New Yorker, Newsweek, and other publications. His biography of architect I.M. Pei was published by Crown in 1995.
For a certain kind of passenger it marked the high tide of high-tech travel luxury. For the rest of us, it was the first in a series of technologies that would shrink the world: for the first time it was possible to breakfast on croissants in the 16th arrondissements and catch lunch on Madison Avenue the same day (thanks in part to the time difference).
Five years ago, Time Inc. launched Cottage Living after noticing that reader interest spiked whenever the word “cottage” appeared in its other magazines. The book industry has churned out an entire library of titles that romance cabins, rustic retreats and other wee spaces, most notably the 
