I Am the Uncool Hunter
Do “factory-like” subdivisions spell the end of the loft as a
meaningul cultural symbol?
By Karrie Jacobs
May 2004
In my fantasy life I am Cayce Pollard, the heroine of William
Gibson’s most recent novel, Pattern Recognition. She is a
cool hunter, hired by clients to research street culture in search of
the next trend. “She’s met the very Mexican who first wore his
baseball cap backward,” Gibson writes. “She’s that
good.” Cayce is also so sensitive to the invisible signals given
off by commercial culture that certain trademarks—the Michelin Man,
for example—make her sick.
In reality I am the uncool hunter. My talent is discovering the places
where hipness goes to die. I drive around the country and stumble on
phenomena that make me realize that something I once valued is about to
be eaten alive by mindless commerce. In my own way I’m as sensitive
as Cayce Pollard. When, for example, I hear Iggy Pop’s “Lust
for Life” used to advertise Carnival Cruise Lines, I too feel
queasy.
Several months ago I found myself in Frederick, Colorado, one of those
featureless expanses of dust that fills with tract houses simply
because—traffic permitting—it’s a 30-minute drive to
Denver. There I came face to face with the demise of the loft as a
meaningful cultural icon. Not that I was surprised. The
commercialization of the loft, the abandoned warehouses and factories
that afforded artists dirt-cheap square footage, perfect for the
painting of epic canvases—that happened a long time ago. Old
industrial buildings became prime real estate. Then developers in cities
without a large enough inventory of mills and plants ripe for
conversion—Houston, for example—began building
“loft” complexes from scratch, complete with exposed ducts and
heroic girders. But at least these industrially inspired buildings were
true to the urban nature of more authentic lofts.
Three years ago I started seeing lofts as the contemporary answer to the
ranch house. It seemed that the popularity of the ranch house in the
1950s and ‘60s suggested a nostalgia for a lost lifestyle, a
longing for the atavistic cowboy. The loft is also about nostalgia: it
is a monument to the disappearance of industry. As factories migrate to
Mexico or China, the factory worker becomes a romantic figure from a
bygone era just like the cowboy.
Around that same time I’d occasionally give Modernism pep talks to
gatherings of home builders and pose this question: What happens when
loft dwellers fall in love, get married, and have babies? Some families
with children do embrace the loft lifestyle, but others go out and try
to find a suburban house with space for the children that still exudes
their nontraditional values. What does the housing industry provide for
them?
I got my answer last summer, when I wound up in Frederick, drawn there
by an ad I saw in a glossy real estate advertising magazine called
Homes and Land of Boulder County. The developer, Cornerstone
Homes, had several pages promoting Ironworks Lofts, a community of
“stand-alone” loft homes, single-family subdivision houses
tricked out in industrial brick and steel with names like the Firehouse
and the Cannery.
I talked my friend Mark Sofield into going for a drive. Mark is the town
designer of Prospect, a New Urbanist subdivision in nearby Longmont that
features the bravest mix of modern and traditional housing
anywhere—including multifamily loft buildings and single-family
homes that could easily be marketed as stand-alone lofts. He felt an
obligation to see what the competition was doing, so we drove to
Frederick along relentlessly straight highways distinguished by an
unending string of billboards pointing the way to myriad model homes and
sales offices. Eventually we arrived in a grove of faux factories.
I was so bowled over by the strangeness of the place that all I could do
was gape. On one corner, surrounded by nothing, was the Steam Plant, a
low brick building dominated, as are so many subdivision houses, by a
twin garage (which, given the look of the building, appeared to be a
truck entrance). In the background were the more typical beige tract
houses that cover much of the greater Denver area. I looked inside
another one—maybe it was the Cannery—and took note of the
24-foot ceilings supported by steel trusses. Very weird. Then I told
myself that these buildings are exactly as industrial as a more typical
subdivision’s “Tuscan villas” are Italian. Maybe this
isn’t weird—maybe it’s exceptionally normal.
Recently I caught up with Dean Thedos, self-described “head of
crazy-idea development” for Cornerstone Homes. He’s the brains
behind Ironworks Lofts. He says the goal was to make a less
“exclusionary” version of the urban loft. The loft, he says,
“has been in locations that have been fairly inhospitable except to
a small segment of the population.” He’s talking about
cities.
“It’s hard to go shopping for groceries,” Thedos argues.
“It’s hard to have friends visit and park their cars. You make
a lot of trade-offs. Why can’t we evolve this into a form
that’s more accessible? Let’s morph it into something that
anybody who wants to can live in and not have to trade off their garage
and fenceable yard in a location where shopping is proximate and there
are multiple bedrooms for children.” Funny: what Thedos is
describing is the idea I was arguing for a few years ago. But now that
it’s real, it feels like parody.
Sofield has given a lot of thought to what housing types make sense in
Colorado. Initially he was as confused by the Ironworks Lofts as I was.
But recently he looked at the Web site of the architect, a company
called Terra Verde (“Design that Rocks”), and felt pangs of
sympathy: “Why not? There’s no frame of reference out
here.”
Thedos claims there is a frame of reference. “Interestingly
enough,” he says, “in turn-of-the-century Colorado some of
these mining towns—which is what Frederick used to be—were
filled with boxy brick structures. The forms were eerily similar.”
Actually there’s even more context. At the International
Builders’ Show in Las Vegas last January the official show home was
called “the Loft,” a freestanding 5,180-square-foot concrete
box featuring a combined kitchen and dining area, a media room with a
big screen and a pair of immense lounge chairs, a loft office, a wine
cellar, an outdoor tub, and—perhaps as a nod to loft
heritage—an art gallery. It seemed both an endorsement by the
conservative home-building industry of modern design and also an
acknowledgment that today’s home buyers—like the original loft
dwellers—have an insatiable appetite for square footage.
The lesson here is that when you argue for stylistic change and that
change eventually comes, it turns out that style is beside the point.
The New Urbanists, for example, used bungalow style to sell their
antisprawl principles. As a result the bungalow has become popular among
conventional developers, who somehow missed the part about principle.
Likewise, as commercial builders embrace a loft aesthetic, the fact that
lofts were a way of reviving disused urban neighborhoods falls by the
wayside. So here’s a tip from the Uncool Hunter’s Manual: the
point where style is pried loose from any semblance of meaning is a good
place to seek out the uncool. |
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A Colorado developer has created a subdivision of single-family homes
that resemble little factory buildings. |
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The subdivision's houses—each of which sports a name like the
“Cannery” (above) or the “Steam Plant”—come
complete with industrial-style details like these metal awnings (below). |
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Photos courtesy Beth Wald/Aurora |
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