99% Invisible - 501- 99% Vernacular: Volume 2

Episode Date: July 27, 2022

Only a small percentage of architecture is actually designed by architects. And while a famous architect-designed tower in a skyline might be the best way to identify a city at a distance, up close it’s the subtle cues and vernacular design that make the city what it is. This week, 99pi producers and friends of the show share more stories about architecture we love from our hometowns and other places we've lived, but with an emphasis on examples that may be a bit shaggier, and have somewhat more functional origins. These may not be the first things people call beautiful, but they’re beautiful to us, and they are essential parts of the places they’re built.501- 99% Vernacular: Volume 2

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. I fell in love with architecture in Chicago, a city known for its pioneering stunning skyscrapers. Every good thing you hear about Chicago architecture is true, and whenever anyone I know takes a trip to Chicago, I tell them the one thing that you have to do is go on the Chicago Architecture Foundation Center boat tour. From the river, you can take in all these amazing buildings while a whipsmart passionate gocent tells you story after story of grand ambitions and visionary architects. But it's important to note that only a small percentage

of structures are designed by architects. And while an iconic building along the skyline might be the best way to identify a city at a distance, up close, it's the subtle cues and vernacular design that make the city what it is. If someone were to blindfold me, spin me around, and drop me in one of Chicago's 1900 miles worth of alleyways, I would know what city I was in instantly. Not because I could see the Sears Tower, but because from almost any alley, you can see these hefty, robust wooden fire escapes climbing up the backs of two, three, and four-story brick apartment buildings.

To call it a fire scape is almost a misnomer. They usually have a substantial landing on each floor, so they serve as a de facto porch. A place to store things and hang out with a few friends, grittle up some stakes, and meet the neighbors down in the alley below. These wooden steps and porches started popping up in the early 1900s, bolted onto buildings as a means of emergency escape, because of Chicago's very justified fear of fire. They were utilitarian affairs that became so much more. It seemed to say that the vast majority of these were not designed by architects, and one of the back of my apartment building in Logan Square was so structurally unsound,

I don't think it was designed at all. This week 99% invisible producers and friends of the show will be sharing more stories about vernacular architecture we love from our hometowns. But with an emphasis on examples that may be a bit chaggier and have somewhat more functional origins. They may not be the first things people call beautiful, but they're beautiful to us, and

they are essential parts of the places they're built. A verse is producer Emmett Fitzgerald. I grew up in Central Vermont, and in old house on a hill, it was built in the 1840s, a little farmhouse from a time when most people were farmers. Over the years, the house grew as my parents tacked on a room here and a room there, but in the kitchen you can still see the original spruce beams, with tiny curly-cute tunnels carved by 19th century bugs. There are a lot of old farmhouses like mine along the dirt roads of Vermont.

Most of them were not designed by architects, but local carpenters who followed a few different traditional styles. And like mine, most of these houses have grown and changed over the centuries, adapting to the needs of new generations. As a result, the farmhouses of Vermont don't have a single consistent look,

but there is one bizarre architectural feature that you will find on lots of them, windows that have been turned 45 degrees. They're just like regular windows, but coccyde, tilted, so that they run on a diagonal parallel with the roof line, rather than straight up and down. Growing up, I would see these windows all the time. Usually, it's spot them on an old looking farmhouse

that might have an even older looking barn lilting in the field out back. They always looked kind of otherworldly to me, like little glitches in the matrix. But to be honest, I didn't think that much about them. They were all over Vermont. And I kind of assumed that they were all over other places, too. It did not feel strange to me at all.

My friend Alice actually had one of these windows in her bedroom growing up. And on a recent visit home from Chicago, she posted a few pictures of her childhood house to Instagram. Like, everybody here, to a tea, was commenting thing, like that window was crazy, that's a crazy window. And I was like, is it? Like in my mind, I was like, oh, I grew up with this window.

Like I didn't realize it was crazy. It turns out that these crooked windows are found almost entirely in Vermont. They go by a few different names, but are probably most commonly referred to as witch windows. Legend has it, the windows were tilted on a diagonal in order to prevent witches from flying into the house on their broomsticks. A sort of architectural defense strategy. And I grew up thinking it's called a witch window because witches can't fly in it.

So I was saved from witches. Why exactly a competent witch would be thwarted by a diagonal window is never quite explained. Because they can only fly straight, I guess. But there you go. Did that bring you a piece of my- Um, honestly, yes. I grew up a very fearful child of paranormal things and the like surroundings of my house are kind of spooky too.

Like dark woods and you don't know what's in there. So like, yeah, really any sort of extra protection helps predict this or dig a list of things about now, but it's true. And like I said, these tilted windows, which you see all over Vermont, have a few different names. Did you ever hear them refer to as coffin windows? No, wait, why were they called coffin windows?

Okay, so this one makes even less sense in my opinion, but the story goes that they were called coffin windows because they enabled people to slide a coffin out of a second story window if someone happened to die upstairs. I don't really understand how that would work physically or why you would bring the coffin upstairs rather than just bringing the body downstairs, but the name has stuck around and added another layer of general spookiness to these windows. Now I had fully assumed that Alice's Witch Window or Coffin Window had been a part of the

house's original construction, or maybe some 19th century renovation. Their house was definitely old, from the same era as my parents, and people aren't exactly out there installing new Witch windows. At that's what I thought I actually asked my mom about it and she said that there used to be like a smaller window in there and then I was born and they wanted to have a window that a person could fit through just in case of emergencies so she wow, she had that put in. Which means that Alice's witch window was only a few decades old and was installed not

to prevent witches from entering the house or to get coffins out, but to give little Alice an emergency exit in case of a fire. Yeah, she put it in. That's so interesting. You have to be like, mom. Yeah, you probably should. I'm sorry, I'm not helpful at all.

Come or the mom. Yeah. And it? Hey, Nancy. Hi. How are you? I'm good. How are you?

This is Nancy, Mother of Alice. And as I learned in this conversation, the former architectural historian of the state of Vermont. So yeah, I probably should have just called her first. So Alice made a pledge that I put in that window. That's not original. Nancy confirmed that she wanted to install the window to give Alice an escape route out the bedroom. But there was a problem. There just wasn't enough room. Like a lot of old farmhouses in Vermont, the main part of the house is only one and a

half-stories tall. And then there's a back wing that's even shorter. And so Alice's second floor room was tucked under the slope of the Gable roof. And there just wasn't enough space for a regular vertical window. But Nancy, being an expert in the historical architecture of Vermont had an idea. I thought, well, I'll just use the old Vermont solution, which is to put in a window with an angle like that. I asked the carpenters to put it in. I thought I was a little bit crazy.

Nancy says that this is the real reason these crooked windows exist in the first place. It has nothing to do with witches or coffins. It was just a clever architectural workaround, a simple, cheap solution for how to get a window into a space where one doesn't naturally fit. You could build a dormer, but that's expensive. And so at some point, some clever carpenter and Vermont had the idea to just salvage a regular window and turn it on an angle. And then the idea just spread as a practical solution.

So, you know, it wasn't like it was a decorative feature of old houses. It was, I think, a very practical old Yankee solution to getting light and air into that room that otherwise doesn't have enough wall space to put a window to the outside. There's actually one more name that these windows sometimes go by. For Mont Windows. It might not sound as cool as which windows, but I think it's a pretty good name. For an architectural feature that emerged from the collective genius of a bunch of anonymous fermenters. For our multi-part 500 episode milestone vernacular spectacular, a lot of the staff have done stories that are focused on residential and personal architecture that's affected them.

But for the show and longtime contributor Katie Thornton is here to talk about the thing that she loves in her neighborhood in Minneapolis that is not residential at all. It is industrial. In fact, it is like aggressively. Yeah, aggressively industrial is the perfect description. And certainly it is the architectural feature that dominates my neighborhood, stretches above homes, above trees, and I'm talking about these huge, concrete towers that we know as grain silos. When I think a lot of people picture grain silos, they're like driving on a highway in the Midwest, and they see one in the distance in this lone tower,

but this is not what is going on in your neighborhood. This is something a little bit more massive. Right, yes, so I live in Minneapolis. And so if you can imagine like one of those towers, but they usually are sort of domed, if you see about in farm, chop off the dome and just bunch them all together, like rose and rose side by side. They're these sort of massive concrete compounds that just are used to store tons and

tons of grain and stretching for blocks and blocks and blocks. And you currently live under the shadow of one. What is that like? Yeah, I love it. I've lived here for a number of years now. It means that my garden is always a little bit pitiful. I'm robbed of some pretty precious hours of sunlight every day, but it is still very much worth it. And the silos, it's like, they're kind of funny. They're like, almost to apologize for, like, oh, sorry, your guard insects.

It's like, here, we spilled a bunch of grain all over the train tracks that are adjacent to the silos. So you have this, like, annoyingly idyllic surplus of bunnies and other little critters. And then, in turn, that means there's red-tailed hawks and falcons who live up in the crevices and the cracks of the silos, and they're just eating very well. You know, I think I picture you living near an abandoned silo for some reason, and there are tons of abandoned ones, but yours is full of grain.

That's actually really cool. So why are there so many grain silos in Minneapolis? Like, what was going on when their boom happened? I think that's really gets to like one of the reasons why I like the silos is that it's this big visual reminder of why the city grew in the first place. Um, the area has been home to indigenous people from Alineas since long before, long before white colonists settled here. But starting in the 1800s, this virginicity of Minneapolis was built on the Mississippi River, on the area where there's

the only sort of significant natural waterfall on the entirety of the Mississippi. And eventually, they were able to use the power of that waterfall to power flower mills, where they ground up wheat, which was grown in the area on your vibe. So, milling became the city's biggest industry really quickly. And as the railroads were built, more and more unprocessed grain could come in from farms from throughout the region and get processed by the mills in the city,

and then be stored in silos like the one near me, or shipped down the river, or shipped out by train. So there's this sort of interconnected man-made and natural systems that all sort of converge and coincide right here. And then you add to it that these crops are seasonal, so you get a whole bunch at once, and you have to deal with it.

So you have to find a way to store it somehow. Yeah, and so in order to sort of solve this problem storing grain, like farmers for a long, long time would just store it on their property. For the most part, since the 1800s, the buildings that held grain were wooden and square, Like many buildings that you may be aware are built. But there was sort of this problem, which is that like when they were filled, there would be these air pockets in the corners. They wouldn't just fill out, you know,

like a cat fills out every corner of a cardboard box, you know, it would just like not reach into the corners. And then this little bit of air would lead to all of this grain rot. And so that was sort of a problem for farmers. It was a problem for grain merchants. And also wooden silos were just super prone to catching on fire. So this grain merchant, Frank Peevy, sick of losing his grain to rot,

didn't want to pay these high fire insurance premiums. And so he wanted to figure out how to store the grain in a different way. And so he brought along this contractor named Charles Haglin, and they wanted to try something different. Well, what is flammable? Let's try concrete, which hadn't been done before. And also, you know, this whole square building thing, it isn't really working. The corners are the problem.

Let's just make it round. And so in the late 1800s, they decided to build up a prototype of a cylindrical, concrete grain silo to sort of prove that their idea could work. You know, the typology of a cylinder makes so much sense. It's almost surprising that they didn't come up with a sooner. Yeah. But I think you're right. It did surprise me.

It didn't come up sooner. And honestly, what surprised me even more is that like even when they came up with this idea at the tail end of the 1800s, everyone was like terrible idea. Going to be an absolute flop. What are you thinking? Like they started to build this structure. And before they could even finish the prototype, people had dubbed it PV's Folly, which is just like a very cruel thing to do.

It's not like it had failed. He just literally wasn't done. So people just were like, this is stupid ideas. This is never gonna work. And they thought that either this cement wouldn't be strong enough, like the sheer volume of the grain that was pushing out on the silo from the inside would just be enough to force it

to crack or burst. Which, you know, I guess valid concern, I would probably have similar concerns about wood. Also, they thought that while this airtight tower is gonna create a vacuum, and so when you open a door at the bottom and let the grain spill out, which is how you get the grain out,

it's just gonna implode, it's just gonna to implode, it's just going to collapse. People thought it was a terrible idea. Okay, so they build their prototype and people are skeptical what happens next. Well, as you can probably imagine, based on how grain silos look today, PV proved to them all wrong. There was a day set where they were going to fill their demonstration piece and hundreds of people gathered to watch this drama because this is the big news of the day. The silo is going to explode.

It's going to collapse. It's going to, whatever. So they cordoned people off from this supposed blast zone. It was this whole to-do. The New York Times even sent a reporter out. And then what are you going to report on? It went off without a hitch. And then they began to crop up everywhere. Everywhere. So the silos near me were sort of built

shortly after this very first concrete cylindrical grain silo. And they were really built to last, like they were not built with any consideration for people's aesthetic desires necessarily, but they were definitely built to last, hence still living by them. But as you mentioned, milling is no longer the primary source of industrial income when it comes to Minneapolis. So what happens when you have this robust piece of industrial infrastructure that can last 110 years know, 110 years when there is no longer grain to be milled. So, you know, for those silos that are still operational, they're one of the rare pieces of industrial design that still operates as intended, like 100 plus years later, which is

pretty darn remarkable. But for those that aren't operational, they've proven really difficult to repurpose. I love to see the silos that have been repurposed across the country, some have been retrofitted as hotels. There are brewery facilities. There's some condos. There's even some condos here in Minneapolis. You don't even recognize it when you walk past.

It's like, I bike past this one building that was a retrofitted grain silo that is now condos for years and years of my childhood. And it took me until this year, this story, to be like, oh, that was a silo. Oh, wow. You know, I've heard it said on the show, good design is 99% invisible, and I could not agree more. But I just kind of happened to live at one of those junctures where it's just unavoidably visible. And it's sort of this like relay station

in this big urban design where like our infrastructure has to come up for air, it has to be seen. And personally, I kind of like to get a little look behind the scenes at what makes a city tick or even just what used to make a city tick. Well, thank you so much for talking with us and sharing your love of grain silos. Thanks, Roman.

Thanks for having me on. And congratulations on a 500 and 501st episode. Thank you. I'm amazed myself. Amazing. The global appetite for talking about grain silos and maintenance, whole cover, was stronger than I thought. Well, I'm honored to be a small part of it.

We're going to shout at the sky with Jason Dalyone after this. Here's producer Jason Dillion. A few weeks back, my dad texted me this video that he shot on his phone. Another 5 o'clock summer storm is ripping through the east side of Orlando, and my dad, well, he opened up a bottle of wine a bit early. I can hear it in his voice, to octaves up, yelling commands at the wind. I love when my dad sends me these weather updates, partly because they're incredible to watch, rain coming down like an open faucet, palm trees bending till they nearly break, but also partly because of where he is when he films these videos.

He's almost always out back on what most people might call the screened in porch, But down in Florida, we take the screened in porch to a whole new level. We have Lenise. Hi, Lenise, call your mom. I grew up around Lenise, bouncing from one to the next away some kids jump from backyard to backyard or basement to basement. That's because in Florida, especially in the newly developed areas, you can find Lennies everywhere. Fly into the Orlando International Airport, and as you descend, yes, you'll see some of the worst urban sprawl America has to offer, but also Lennies.

This space that's both inside and outside, where you can invite the element into your home or keep nature at bay. And maybe you've never come across when yourself, or only heard the word thrown around on an episode of Golden Girls. This door through your room, she's out on the lanae. I suppose you're wondering why a man like Sunny Ball. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, on the lanae. But to me, and apparently the blanche,

the Florida lani is quintessential to the whole Sunshine State experience. If you've never seen a Florida lani, you might think it sounds kind of fancy or exotic, but really the structure is simple. It's an outdoor living space that's typically box shaped and has this mesh screening closure separating the home from the yard.

On the outside, it sort of looks like a baseball batting cage. But on the inside, it gives off this vibe of a living room wearing boat shoes. Estetics aside, the lani is a solution to some common Florida problems. For instance, that screening closure, it's there to keep the mosquitoes off you. Not to mention all the other bugs and animals

you probably don't want around. Are medillos, lizards, snakes, and gators. In some of the newer constructions from the housing boom of the early 2000s, you'll see linoys with ingrown pools built inside the screen enclosure. This helps keep your pool from becoming just another floor to swamp.

And if you have a little bit more change in your pocket, you'll see Linai's that are fully souped up, equipped with outdoor kitchens and enough space to host gigantic dinner parties. So depending on your tax bracket, it can be a modest chair or two with a table in the back corner of your home or a Miami vice-style extravaganza. When I think of Lanai, I think of my parents Florida Lanai.

But for Dean Sakamoto who studied the history of the structure, he takes it back to its indigenous roots. The Lanai, as you saw, as you know, it's a native Hawaiian word. It's really a basic, a primal structure, like a four-posted structure, just with enough cover to keep the sun out. Dean co-authored a book about one of Hawaii's most renowned architects, Vladimir Asipov. He says Asipov helped modernize and popularize the LNI throughout the mid-20th century. Mr. Asipov, although he's Russian by birth, he grew up in Japan.

And so he grew up in a Japanese style home. And if you look at Japanese architecture, the domestic Japanese house, there's a space called the Engawa. The Engawa is a sort of precursor to the LNI. It's a narrow, covered hallway built in between the interior rooms of an old Japanese home and the garden. Left open, the Angawa allows for natural light in the air to circulate.

The space has this incentive to coexist with nature, not resisted. An idea Asapop used for hislinize on the islands. When he came to Hawaii, he realized that the Japanese house to perhaps more appropriate in Hawaii than Japan, because of climate. You know, Japan gets cold. Asapop designed hundreds of luxury homes in Hawaii. In almost all of them, the Lanai is the crown jewel of the house, his canvas to showcase

a new style of tropical modernism. Asapop made his imprint on Hawaiian architecture throughout the 1950s and 60s. During that time, Hawaii itself was changing, turning from an American territory with an economy based on agriculture to a state with a booming tourism industry. And with that tourism, came large-scale developments. Famously at a press conference, Asapov announced the quote, War on Ugliness, when he saw cheap cookie cutter-style housing creeping onto the shores of Honolulu. For locals trying to attract mainland travelers, the Lenai was a defining feature of the state's architectural identity.

It was unique, a space that embodied the virtues of island life. Around the same time of a wise transformation, mentions of a tropical room borrowed from Pacific Islanders appeared in newspapers around Florida. One article from 1964 raves about the lini. It says it's the most exciting concept and indoor outdoor living ever presented to the Central Florida new home buyer.

Another highlights it as a way to quote, plan for happy living. You can see how the idea is exciting and new, but you can also see how it differs from an Asapovlin eye. While Asapovlin eyes were highbrow, custom made and built to take into account the cooling trade winds and stormy Kona winds of Hawaii, the Floridalin eye was a completely different species, more rudimentary and undefined. Much like Hawaii, Florida was going through its own transformation with its own housing boom. In some of the floor plans from the 60s and 70s, you can feel the

developer's hand of excitement trying to see just where a Lanai can be squeezed in. Today, builders have taken it a step further, more or less standardizing the placement and look of a lani so that each one is nearly indistinguishable from the next. And the homes are packed together so tightly that the lani has become a way to effectively offer an outdoor space without giving the home an actual yard. If Ossipov's war on ugliness and cookie cutter housing started in Hawaii, it ended in defeat in Orlando. But still, I can't quite shake this fondness for this strange fluridian architectural creature. Objectively, the typical Florida lini is kind of bulky and ugly and bad in KG, but I have this fairy don't make fun of my ugly puppy feeling about them.

But I have this fairy don't make fun of my ugly puppy feeling about them. In Florida, a place where most people move to unabashedly have more, the lini feels like the most appropriate place to indulge in that excess. And in my family, there's a spirit to the space. It's where we gather at the end of a long day to collectively shake ourselves loose. It's where we sit around for hours on end playing dominoes for dollars. Listening to Bajata and Marengi while others sit around and tell stories about people long gone, drinking corona and mama hwana and to wear fresh out. Even now when I go home to visit, the long talks with my mom where I finally get to sit her down and ask her, hey, how are you? And tell my dad that I'm doing okay, that I'm figuring it out, that I'm excited about

this little life I'm starting. Those talks do not happen at the dinner table. They happen in the lini. And yes, even though I only get down a visit a few times a year, I still love to watch a storm roll in. To feel the temperature in the air drop as the rain hits the hot pavement, counting the time between the cracks of thunder and streaks of lightning, wondering if that last one touched the ground. And probably my favorite part

of all, it's still an eye where I get to sit and watch as the clouds clear and give way again to that beautiful, great fruit colored Florida sky. We have one more episode in this series celebrating 500 episodes next week. You can continue to spread the word and encourage people to listen to this or any episode of 99% Invisible, or write a review. That'd be so grateful. Thanks. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Emmett Fitzgerald, Jason Dillion, and Kurt Colestead, mix and tech production by Martin Gonzales, original music by our director of Sound Swan Rhyang,

with additional music from APM, fact checking by Graham Haysha. Delaney Hall is the executive producer, Thoreso Team, is Vivian Leigh, Christopher Johnson, Chris Baroube, Losh Madon, Sophia Klatsker, Joe Rosenberg, intern Sarah Baker, and me Roman Mars. We are part of a Stitcher and Serious XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building. And beautiful,

uptown, Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99PI.

There are 501 of them. And 99PI dot org. Do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do to do.