Spirals Plugs
The Appalling Plug-in: Design’s Last Frontier
There’s nothing worse than looking at a 3 million dollar “architectural masterpiece” that has its electrical outlets in all the wrong places. Imagine you’re browsing the listings and taking a tour of a gorgeous-on-the-outside house you wish you could afford, but there are lamp cords hanging all over the sunken living room and wires snaking along the walls of the 15-seat home theatre. Now I don’t know about you, but when I spend 3 million dollars, I want a certain amount of style. I want good design. For that kind of money – I want art. And one of the best ways to discover whether or not your “architectural masterpiece” has been designed with love is to take inventory of the often forgotten details. Forget about the sweeping spiral staircase for a moment and take a look at the electrical outlets.
The aesthetics of any building are a complex equation, but when you’re buying a home with the intention of living in it everyday, beauty is often defined by how well the structure of the building fits your day-to-day life. From the tiniest cabin to the most elaborate estate, form should always follow function – regardless of how many in ground heated pools you can afford.
So when a multi-million dollar home comes on the market with one of the most basic details of daily life (power outlets) neglected in the design, it’s cause for pause. We’ve been living with electricity for long enough to know that outlets are a necessity, isn’t it about time we made them less ugly? Why oh why can we plug in our laptops, wide screen TVs, surround sound and talking coffemakers but can’t find a plug-in placed in a logical and aesthetically pleasing way? What’s the hold up?
Well, it could be that building codes are keeping designers and electricians from being overly creative when it comes to placing power outlets in a home. Electricity is volatile stuff, after all, and you don’t want to get zapped for a bit of home fashion. Building codes dictate a minimum number of outlets, how far they must be from the ground and where and how they can be installed. It’s like math. It’s all so technical and predictable in fact, that you can purchase software that will plot out the electrical systems of a house automatically. While this may be great if you’re a building inspector or contractor who wants to move to the next job, it’s not so great when you want to plug in your curling iron and end up with the cord unavoidably dangling in the sink.
Another reason we may not have the electrical outlets our hearts desire could be that most electricians are not designers. Though many will consider usability when planning the electrical systems of a house, their main concerns are safety, connectivity and compliance. Between the amps, kVs, junctions, loads, and miles of 16 gauge copper wire, there isn’t a lot of room to be concerned about whether or not a panoramic scan of the room will be marred by unsightly snaky cords a year down the road. Those concerns belong more appropriately in the realm of the architect. If we want to see more homes where the electrical systems are truly integrated with the needs of homeowners, we’re also going to have to see more architects taking the time to work through these problems with electricians. While this may still be too costly for most home building projects, at the very least we should see it happening in every single brand new multi-million dollar home on the market. Anything less is just cheap.
About the Author
For information on Auburn AL condos, contact Rozi Dover, your Auburn-Opelika real estate expert, at Auburn-OpelikaHomes.com
Tutorial: Installation and basic use of spiral plug-in in Illustrator CS4 (CS5)
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