Met History wrote:

> 2.          But my essential question is, is it really the case that
> Home Depot of 1770 was so much better than Home Depot of 2005?

I see the Architectural Digest vs. Home Depot more in line with crossing
out the Architectural Digest end of the spectrum and concentrating on
utility and aesthetics with Conscious Local Design vs. Home Depot. The
aesthetic of a "sense of place" as in someone walking into the house and
looking around, noting the orientation of the kitchen room, the
fenestration and the play of sunlight etc. and realizing that if a
window is in just such and such a location that it will provide a
particular view of a geographic feature of the outside, or that the
summer sunlight will play in the morning across a counter in such and
such a manner and/or possibly not going for the Persian teak but a piece
of Oregon pressboard with grease paper well placed -- and this in 1770
and in 2005 can be accomplished by a multi-purpose carpenter, but not
likely to be the carpenter that Home Depot sends out as the Home Depot
process starts with the fixtures, the materials to be sold, the
mass-produced cabinets and works outward from there, on their unit
placing 3-D component sorting software, without consideration in
particular to an orientation to the "sense of place." What Home Depot
will deliver on Damned Female Island is the same as what will be
delivered in the unHamptons or at the Center of the Universe. Is this
good or bad? I don't know if that is a question that can be easily
answered. What I do sense though is that if you were to pay a carpenter
(actually a cabinet maker considering that since 1770 there has been a
trend concurrent with industrialization towards specialization) to build
you a kitchen that though it may, or may not, be more to your liking
(with or without involving an architect) that there is a good chance
that more energy and natural resources will be used. When Home Depot
ships to DFI there is an economy of scale, even if the plane and pilot
is not sitting in wait.

Then again, when it comes to painstaking details I am often impressed at
how once people think that they have detail in their lives, even when
they may not, it suits them just fine and in time they forget and return
to an almost near pre-birth state of blindness to their surroundings. As
much as our surroundings have physical presence, bricks and mortar, they
are also at any time no more than what we perceive them to be.

As with my friend's kitchen, though, you know good design when you feel it.

][<

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