Fake shutters make me angry (2018)
thecraftsmanblog.com
thecraftsmanblog.com
But my personal aesthetic compass swings back and still chafes at the "non-functional" functional part. More than any other analogy, it reminds me of fake scoops or vents on some sport cars or sport image cars, which are actually completely non-permeable and definitely don't lead anywhere or do anything. They're aesthetic trim yes, but they're also a... Dunno, pretense? It reveals a slightly "wannabe" attitude.
Though it's possible I'm reading too much into the whole thing - non functional spoilers / wings don't bother me nearly as much on cars. Maybe fake shutters just look cheesier?
So I guess that fake brick feels like non functional spoilers. Fake shutters feel like non functional scoops.
I was hoping for more detailed reasoning beyond “it’s fake and not a great imitation” - but so are many other vestigial fashion items. Ties don’t work well as bibs anymore, after all.
To go back to my car analogy comfort zone ;), I don't like 22" rims personally (16" tires are so much cheaper:); but they don't bother me. There's no pretense at functionality, some people just think it looks cool, awesome. Some people think ties look cool, awesome. It's not a "fake" 22" rim, it's not a "fake" tie.
But a non-functional hood scoop, and non-functional shutter, strike me as "fake" in way that other fashion/aesthetic items do not. A hood scoop hugely implies that it's shunting air somewhere important. A shutter hugely implies that you can open or close it, brighten or darken the room. They have not yet transformed far enough from their functional origins. Whereas a modern tie doesn't hugely imply anything functional that I or anybody few generations around me have any cognizance of. Heck, I'm from Croatia, and I have to Google every time what Kravat was actually used for - I honest to gawd cannot even think right now what Tie could have been functionally used for.
Maybe a hundred years from now, when hydrogen and electric cars are all anybody ever remembers, hood scoops will be seen as purely an aesthetic choice; and maybe to people from different climates shutters already seem a purely aesthetic choice. To me, today here now, fixed, wrongly-proportioned ones don't evoke either "pretty" or "ugly", they evoke "cheap ridiculous fake".
My 100 Croatian Lipa :->
Please think of a Greek temple, something that probably evokes feelings of monumental, functional beauty to last the ages. But their structures are largely non-functional, and stone is ill-suited to their construction - consider their long, horizontal roof beams. This is widely considered to be a result of faking wood structures with their light frames, and the classical columns we all know were likely meant to imitate bundles of wooden poles that originally served this role. This theory is known as petrification.[1] Modern neoclassicist buildings are fakery all the way down. They usually have steel frames at their hearts and zero need for stone veneers, columns, and arches, but we still enjoy the traditional, trustworthy feel they evoke.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_architecture#Petrifi...
It does shift my outlook, but not enough. Let’s say that the Greek structures were the “fake spoilers” of their day and we mistakenly took it as the pinnacle of engineering and craft. That doesn’t change the fact that marble lasts longer than wood, or that certain designs can objectively hold more weight from a heavy roof, or that some designs keep rain and snow out better than others.
From that perspective, I argue that “fake shutters” are less like Greek columns and more like a fisher-price hammer (especially when a nail needs to be hammered).
This probably varies by the viewer
I agree wholeheartedly and find the idea of dressing up a specific way for anything but practical/safety reasons or costume parties to be silly. Most non-safety dress codes only exist to artificially segment the population.
(Of course, if that become standard fake PPE would begin to become common).
A closer analogy to dressing up for the opera would be artisanal hand-carved decorative (but functional) shutters basic plain shutters. They both have the same utility but one has nicer aesthetic.
A more obvious parallel would be in useless decorative zippers on "cool" clothes, where "cool" is the interpretation of a clueless mom of what their teenager kid will like.
My problem is not really that they are not functional. It’s that they do not even try. It’s like they insult my intelligence by being ostensibly worse than useless. These 20 cm wide things are a joke, they’re not even trying. They could have least have the right shape, size, and an overall plausible appearance.
It’s also really ugly. Part of the appeal of the real thing is the harmonious shapes and proportions with the windows they are supposed to protect. Thin bands on either sides of a large window just looks absolutely terrible.
And there's where it all falls apart. Your (and the author's) personal aesthetic is not the be-all, end-all of design. You may not like how they look, but others do. And that's fine.
(I happen to agree with you; I grew up in houses with fake shutters and thought they were a silly design choice. But I'm not the final word on design, and I suspect the author is not either.)
The new building has a significantly different aspect ratio than the surrounding buildings (tall and thin, versus low and wide). It's 3 stories, unlike the 1 or 2 story buildings around it. It also has a roof line completely unlike anything close by. It really sticks out visually.
It's got bricked-up windows, though.
His problem is not that they're window trim, it is that they don't seem to even be trying to make them aesthetically accurate to the real ones.
> Reason #1 They Don’t Fit […] If your window is 6 feet wide and your shutter is only a foot wide, who do you think you are fooling? You may not think it’s a big deal, but proportions matter. Putting undersized fake shutters on your house is like driving a big rig with 18 donut spare tires.
Would it be that hard to have the shutters be the same area as the window for good proportionality?
It's like having (fake) columns and not making the effort to making sure the measurements are right:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_order
He wants people to make an effort to do things properly instead of in a slap-dash fashion. If someone wants a certain aesthetic look or feature, then actually try to re-create it. Otherwise why bother wasting people's time and money?
Considering one of the pics showed a window taking up 70% of the available space, I’d say the designer would tell you that having shutters with the same area as the window would be an impossibility.
It is. But I'm more on the author's side than not on this. I mean, fake shutters don't make me angry -- but I do notice them because they look so stupid. I feel similarly about most fake columns. Not so much about fake brick.
I think I react that way because they're so obviously fake -- that's what makes them stupid. If they were decorative but plausible, I'd react differently. I suspect that's why I don't mind the fake brick -- most fake brick looks realistic.
Same with my old patio. Instead of paying lots of money for large-format tiles, I had someone skim coat some colored concrete on top, using pin-striping tape to give the illusion of grout lines. (Tape is pulled up after concrete cures a bit, so there's actual grooves) Came out looking fantastic, and was much cheaper. But the guy who did it still had to pay attention to the details, like not having patterns magically cross the grout lines. Real tile would never do that, so my fake tile better not, either.
My issue with these shutters isn't that they're not "real", but that their attempt to mimic fails and basically sticks out as shoddy work.
Go ahead and fake it, but please put some effort into the illusion. Otherwise why bother with louvers that slant wrong, and shutters that have no hope of matching the adjacent window's proportion?
I needed a damaged tile floor repaired once. But the tile was not available. A local artist said "no problem" and with mortar and paint was able to very convincingly fake it.
Faux finishes and Trompe-l'œil are really incredible art in and of themselves, and are a lot of fun, too. I have a Trompe-l'œil mouse running along the baseboard in my house :-)
That's awesome. I had to look up "Trompe-l'œil" to see what you meant. That image search is neat.
And this mouse[0] would work perfectly in my hallway. There's already some cracking plaster in there. Might as well lean into it.
They suck.
If you had fake shutters that were wide enough that I could imagine them being able to cover the window if they were able to close, I personally wouldn't be bothered by them.
I suspect (not sure) that they aren't as strong as single piece shutters and here on the Gulf coast it might make a difference.
Noting here that I prefer typical shutters over rolldown protection. Hinged shutters are great to reduce light and the winds that rolldown are good for can lift off (gable strapped) roofs.
Those seem like valid things to complain about.
What fake shutters do is endlessly remind me how marvelously stupid it is that that I don't have actual shutters.
A turf grass lawn is incredibly practical. It aids with the control of bugs and rodents, it is easy to walk and run in without twisting an ankle because of a hidden hole, it great for sports like soccer, bad mitten, corn hole etc. You don't lose everything you drop, you can walk through it without getting ticks on yourself (try walking through a pasture in the NE during the summer). You can throw a towel down and sunbath. Infants can learn how to walk on one and play with minimal risks. They are great for water fights with your kids in the heat of the summer.
Turf lawns are incredibly useful.
Back to the original point - the problem with shutters today on most houses is not they exist, but they are such a low-quality effort. Superfluous items can have a place in design, but at least make an effort and show an ounce of care. Here is a video showing a minor detail that can make a big difference:
Exactly. To use the turf example: what if people started installing turf lawns that were lumpy, blotchy, brown, and uncomfortable to walk on just because the factory could pump that kind out faster?
Based on the comment threads here, guaranteed some percentage of people would argue that those lawns have benefits and should continue to be produced.
What you describe is not replacing turf grass with pasture, which is what the parent described that I responded to.
HOAs and city ordinances that measure the height of your grass to within a quarter of an inch are absurd, but letting your entire yard go wild isn't great either.
My house is surrounded by forest and wild grassy areas, but we still keep a buffer of short grass at least 25' on all sides (with some ornamental bushes and a few select trees) and I wouldn't give it up for anything.
I personally don't care about the function or lack-there-of, but many of your examples seem to embody the desolate nature of suburbia in the same way as awful cul-de-sacs, lawns, or Applebees; they're a bad compromise. If you don't need pillars, make something good using the framework you're operating in and add other decorations that aren't trying to be something they're not.
Fuck fake pillars. They're as gross as the stupid greyish peach tan colour the house is painted.
Rather than ranting about how terrible they are, it would be be helpful to offer some alternative dressing - I have 3 more huge windows without fake shutters that look quite plain...
Honestly, this is probably the part that irks me the most about fake shutters (and that says a lot). If you’re not going to make the illusion convincing, then why not make something genuinely aesthetically pleasing that’s not shutters at all?
Something based on picture frames, or some type of CNC-cut pattern, or even just wider vertical sections painted the same colour as the rest of the trim.
We’ve been making interesting accents around rectangles for hundreds of years. The well is deep and full of beauty!
That's the key to this entire thing -- I'm having trouble believing people don't understand that this: discussion on the functionality is fine, but at the end of the day the "fake shutters" are decoration.
If you want decorative rectangles to the sides of your windows, great, go for it! What's the specific value add of designing those decorative rectangles to look like spectacularly useless shutters, instead of any other decorative design that's not trying to look like something functional in a way that contradicts that suggested functionality?
Alternatively, if you want your decorations to look like shutters because you like the aesthetic of shutters, why would you choose for them to look like useless nonfunctional shutters instead of designing them to actually look like a usable shutter?
What's the reasoning behind someone who sits down to design a house and concludes "I want this to look like shutters, but I really want it to look like bad, useless shutters that could never work."?
Either make it look like a shutter, or don't, but it's baffling to me that so many people decide to hang out in the uncanny valley between those two options.
But I agree on the principle because the most common window trim today: muntins (Glazing bars) is almost invariably “fake” today, in that it doesn’t have the original function of breaking up the glass in smaller and cheaper pieces. Today it’s purely a trim. Seen that way, I guess there is nothing wrong with having shutters for the same reason.
I do agree with the author on one thing though: if one does put fixed shutters on a house then at least make them plausible. Just get shutters that are half the window size. Choosing shutters 1/3 the window width makes little sense.
These shutters are visibly non-functional.
I agree! And so do my inflatable biceps!
This is like complaining about how bad JavaScript is as a language on a thread about React, or something. It's nearly irrelevant
Which demographic wants fake shutters that are visibly useless?
Looking at the diagram on that page (which matches my childhood memories of a similar window shutter design), the "outside shutter" turns 180° when open, so the visible slats would be facing the opposite direction. It's the "inside shutter" which turns 360° and thus would have the visible slats facing the same direction, but when fully open it's hidden by the "outside shutter".
If more houses had real shutters, we could close the shutters during tornado warnings and hurricane warnings instead of running to the store, buying ugly particle board and nailing it over our windows. Duh.
This is a plague upon the American landscape or our movies would show people closing the shutters because a storm is coming instead of showing them boarding up perfectly good windows on houses currently in use.
I approve this rant. More power to him.
I think fake shutters are pretty dump but if you're going to have them - please install them so the water gets deflected away from the siding instead of in towards the siding. It's only for appearances anyways so would you rather have lichen spots around your fake shutters or just have a nice clean surface?
—Modernism’s rallying cry, beginning with Adolf Loos in 1910.
Are we still doing this debate a century later? I think for the most part, not. It’s fine to like ornament. It’s fine to prefer form that follows function.
But getting angry about ornament? This can’t be good for anybody’s blood pressure.
Why not, instead of slapping two slabs of flimsy plastic next to your window as an afterthought, have ornamentation that looks good?
I will say this is only one of many dozen things that are very fake and chintzy about most architecture, and once you start to see them you can't unsee them. The truth is that people like cheap, tacky stuff, and "knowing better" just makes one miserable, so I would say if you want to be happy then don't learn about architecture. Even more so, don't learn about urbanism and urban design -- just so painful.
(Caveat, this is mostly only true in places built after 1950 or so. Older places are often delightful for the architecture / urbanism inclined.)
My house has fake shutters and I actually took one off to see what it looked like - I put it back on as it just didn’t look right.
https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/WMGRPM_Looking_Back_to_S...
Arguing against them is like arguing against painting your house different colors, seems silly. Also, real shutters aren't as practical as curtains or internal blinds.
If your reaction to his complaint is "ha ha, who cares about fake shutters, it doesn't make a difference" then think about what arguments about code or branching style mean to people who don't think about working in a repository every day.
"Well, that's totally different, because..."
When it was time to paint our house, we picked a soft, light green to blend in with the surrounding grassy hills. The painter was simply gobsmacked that we wanted him to paint the walls and all the window trim the same color. But to us it just made sense not to call attention to some ugly trim.
Sure enough, it turned out great. Within six months, a bunch of other houses in the neighborhood had been painted similarly.
Driving by there recently after having moved away a few years later, a quarter or a third of the houses have given up the “Dame Edna” look in favor of minimal or no differentiation in window trim color. The whole neighborhood looks much calmer.
I live in a neighborhood where all the (stucco) houses were built in the 50s. They almost all have fake shutters, and the ones that don't, look stupid.
Now, McMansion "pillars" -- those do make me crazy (irony intended).
I walked the dog tonight & actually looked at the windows on the houses. They are not mainly fake-shuttered, as I asserted. I'm sure that's a load off OP's mind. Even my house has wood borders that make no pretense of having a function.
Most houses have some kind of trim, presumably wood, painted in a contrasting color. Others just have the white vinyl borders that the windows were manufactured with. A fair number of fake shutters.
Decorative facades have always been a thing, it's just the form that changes.
Pilasters have been a design feature as far back as at least the Roman Empire…
At my folks' house, they've kept their fake shutters and also have these galvanized storm shutters which open and close from the top. They block out some sunlight but also keep the house cooler and make for less effort when securing windows in the event of hurricanes.
In the 90s you needed one to get into a nightclub, never mind the day job. They've completely disappeared since thank God.
As it was I forgot to bring it to the wedding so didn't wear it anyway. Next time will probably be at my funeral, when i'm dead in a casket and won't have a choice.
Which is the same backstory as collars (you're supposed to pop them to cover your neck!).
It was funny though - when I was a teenager I was a bit skint, like most. You needed to wear a suit and tie to get into most nightclubs at the time. Obviously a suit was a bit spendy, so you generally had 1 decent suit, so the only way to differentiate yourself each time was a new tie.
Must have bought hundreds of the bloody things, only to discard them after 2 or 3 uses.
Had a discussion about this a few weeks ago - is Tie Rack still a thing? They used to have shops everywhere in the UK, but maybe they're still around at airports or whatnot?
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.7722788,-77.219379,3a,75y,26...
I think you need some kind of trim on windows, but agree that obviously fake shutters are kind of dumb.
As a child I lived in a mobile home for years. There's nothing wrong with mobile homes. However, they are not concerned with good taste. (This is an advantage: many residents don't have time for complex yet relatively lower priorities like taste.) Neither is any other home with fake shutters.
I have no idea what to do with them. They're very nice looking but the house they fit is gone. I don't think there were standard size windows when these were made
Get Your House Right by Marianne Cusato (https://www.amazon.com/Get-Your-House-Right-Architectural/dp...) is a really good book that helps you appreciate some of the finer details of architecture in your own home.
Me, I can't believe that someone could be so bothered by "fake" shutters and not notice the ubiquitous tangle of above-ground power lines (in the US, less so in Europe and the UK). Yeah, a different problem, and maybe the author is also bothered by this, but there are only so many fucks to give in life.
These things: https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-a-pilaster-engaged-column-...
A lot of places would not need AC and would require less heating if it would have shutters and people would know when to close/open those
Is there any other thing in the world where the fakes happily outnumbered the reals?
Lots of things.
Nonavian dinosaurs. Pockets on formalwear. Grassroots activist groups. Mona Lisas. Bombs smuggled into airports. At one time, Saddam Husseins (come to think of it, that's possibly true now for much the same reason as nonavian dinosaurs.) Pieces of the true cross. ...
In between was the Protestant Reformation and centuries of incredibly bloody religious wars in which many of the belligerents were opposed to the idea of relics and vigorously sought to destroy them. The English Civil War is believed to have resulted in the destruction of 97% of religious art in the country[1], and England got off relatively lightly compared to much of Europe. The Thirty Years War killed a third of Germany's population.
Those wars between different Christian denominations would have destroyed many relics. Ottoman conquests and subsequent conversions to Islam would have taken care of more.
[1] https://hyperallergic.com/256802/how-a-rare-judas-painting-s...
I guess fake indignation generally outperforms the authentic version too.
I also know some designers who argue this very honesty.
For the latter case you know you’re in an irrational argument when someone passionately dislikes some subjective aesthetic, but shows no understanding the practice:
> “Why do they exist? I guess because real shutters look so great that a lot of other people wanted to jump on the shutter band wagon but couldn’t afford real shutters.”
It’s ok to ignore the argument.
Now that I think of it, this sort of faux functionalism bothers me in other domains as well. Fake pockets, decorative buttons that look as if they are functional but are not, and so forth and so on.
It taps into so many things I despise about suburban US architecture and design.
Having said that, it also taps into this kind of elitism about architecture and interior design that drives me crazy equally so. Let's say you buy that home because it's in a good location or whatever it is. Are you cursed unless you tear out everything and remodel? Is that functional? Will some of this stuff be looked at 100 years from now unironically as great design, in the same way we look back at art deco or early, pre-depression 1930s design?
Some of this stuff too is somewhat unfair. Drop ceiling tile, for example, is extremely functional in lower levels because it gives you access to pipes etc without having to patch drywall. Maybe this isn't aesthetically "clean" but it serves a purpose.