How HighAre high ceilings a sign of wretched architectural excess or just good taste?
Posted Wednesday, May 20, 2009, at 6:44 AM ET
Certain features are taken for granted in today's residential market: granite countertops, glass-walled showers, and, judging from this recent ad for a new Upper West Side condo, very tall ceilings. Not so long ago, 8-foot ceilings were the norm. What changed?
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StumbleUponCeilings in new suburban tract housing got taller more than a decade ago. Instead of 8 feet—a dimension that resulted from two 4-foot-wide drywall sheets laid horizontally—home builders built 9-foot ceilings. At first, taller ceilings were offered as extras, but soon 9 feet became standard, so much so that drywall manufacturers started producing 4½–foot-wide sheets. Not be outdone, the builders of custom homes went to 10 feet.
Something similar happened to office buildings. In 1965, the newest skyscraper in Manhattan was Eero Saarinen's CBS Building. The stylish interiors, by Florence Knoll Basset, were the best that corporate money could buy, modern art hung next to modern furniture (much of it designed by Saarinen and Bassett), and the ceilings were 8¾-feet high, slightly taller than the norm at that time. By the late 1970s, office ceilings were routinely 9 feet, and 25 years later, the ceilings of the Renzo Piano-designed New York Times Building were 11 feet, which is quickly becoming the standard for Class A office buildings. The new Comcast Center in Philadelphia, for example, has 11-foot ceilings—and 13-foot ceilings on the executive floors.
"Making ceilings taller doesn't add that much to the overall cost of a building," says Robert A.M. Stern, the architect of the Comcast Center, "but taller ceilings allow light to penetrate deeper into the building, which is important if you are optimizing daylighting." Another benefit of taller ceilings in office towers is that they make for higher buildings. At 975 feet, the 58-story Comcast tower is the tallest building in downtown Philadelphia; with 8¾-foot ceilings, it would have been more than 150 feet shorter.
Are taller ceilings yet another example of wretched architectural excess? Not necessarily. In fact, it is low ceilings that are the aberration. Throughout the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries, ceilings in middle-class homes, offices, and institutional buildings were 10-12 feet or more. They followed the architectural rule of thumb: "The larger the room, the taller the ceiling." During the postwar era, when buildings started to be mass-produced, builders and architects, considering tall ceilings wasteful and inefficient, saw no reason to make them taller than the legal minimum, which could be as little as 7 feet. Thus, the mailroom and the boardroom got the same low ceiling.
What caused the return of the tall ceiling? The historic preservation movement can take a lion's share of the credit, as well as the developers of all those converted industrial lofts (which usually had tall ceilings). Living and working in older buildings, people discovered that taller rooms simply felt—and looked—better. Builders were happy to oblige since tall ceilings didn't cost much more, as Stern points out—but you could charge more for them.
It's not just a matter of prestige—a tall room looks better proportioned. Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio devoted a chapter of his famous treatise, The Four Books on Architecture, to the subject and included rules to calculate ceiling heights: Add the length and breadth of a room and divide by two; or, more simply, make the room as high as it is broad. I once spent a week in his Villa Saraceno, not a particularly large house but with 19-foot ceilings. At first the tall rooms seemed a little overwhelming, but after a few days I got used to the feeling of generous spaciousness. At night, with candles on the table, the ceilings disappeared altogether, and it was like being outside.
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When you go to a party of a friend who lives in a McMansion, the first thing you notice as you enter the house is the huge foyer and the Great room with the 20 ft high ceilings. It's more hotel than home. The second thing you notice is most of the people are clustered in the kitchen where the ceiling is only 8ft high. I think we started out living in caves and we do not want to be in a room that makes us feel we are living in an open field.
Frank Lloyd Wright was famous for designing houses with open floor plans and ceilings that were very short but none of his houses felt claustrophobic. The open floor plans and the details made these houses comfortable to live in even though the ceilings in some instances were only 7ft tall. If you design a large room with 12 ft ceilings and small alcoves on the sides most people will gravitate towards the alcoves. They want to cluster in their caves and look out. It's the proportions in a room and the detail in the room that gives character and comfort to the room. A larger room with high ceilings but no detail creates a drywall desert.
The book "A Pattern Language" Oxford University Press by Christopher Alexander describes how to make a space comfortable. The most expensive and ineffective way is to make the space large and uniform with high ceilings
-- mlang46
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I was recently looking at a realty website in Sweden and the apartments all had taller ceilings and longer windows than those common in the US. The apartments looked so much brighter and airier than your typical US apartment. Probably a good thing in a country which gets little sunlight in winter. I think a lot of people feel better psychologically with larger windows and ceilings, though the two-storey height in McMansion entry foyers just feels like empty space. There's a point where added height becomes excessive.
I recently added a new living room to my small vacation house and put in 12 foot tray ceiling with skylights. My energy costs this winter were actually lower. The added sunlight heated much of the downstairs during the daytime. In summer, I intend to open the skylights and the windows to catch the breeze and use a ceiling fan when necessary. I don't have air conditioning.
-- Guylinder
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