ArchiTakes weighs in on some new house rules inspired by the vehicle:
No product of design is more quintessentially American than a first generation Corvette. Much of its appeal lies in just how little it puts between its occupants and the road and open air. The Corvette’s reductiveness is arguable far more American than the prevailing national tendency toward bigness. Today’s ubiquitous SUVs falsely promise an off-road experience. They are parked outside equally pointless and oversized houses full of formal spaces and bedrooms that are never used, “empty guest chambers for empty guests,” as Thoreau observed over a century and a half ago in Walden.
I had the opportunity of an unexpected airport “reading day” yesterday, allowing me to read Shop Class as Soulcraft in its entirety, so perhaps I have reductiveness on my mind. Yet “American literature offers the introduction to the rules of its design” and this piece offers insights from Poe to Twain to Reyner Banham on our deepest domestic impulses and where we might go from here. Don’t miss it.
