Steamed up over a kettle

Last weekend we bought a new electric kettle. Not of great interest to your day/ week /month and not to mine either except for the fact that its predecessor practically welded itself to its base making it unsafe/unusable.

The new kettle, similar in format to its predecessor, is a cord free type on a powered base: elegant, simple and efficient. And it is a whistling kettle: when the water boils it whistles. Cool. You're saying to yourself there's a 'but' coming.

Right! I was intrigued enough to find out how it worked. The actual cycle is as follows:
1 fill kettle and switch to boil.
2 the kettle switches off when the water is boiling
3 the 'whistle' slowly rises and falls in amplitude over about 10 seconds.

How?

Clearly there is a sensor that triggers the 'whistle' when the power shuts off.
The whistle is actually in the base and is electronic with a speaker, not a device on the spout as in days of old. Very cool,again. Or maybe not.

The whistling spout on an old kettle acted simply as a vent before the water boiled. On boiling the steam pressure generated would build up in the spout and literally drive the whistle. It was an actual whistle, powered by steam pressure. It would begin to sound as the water neared boiling point and reach a crescendo at boiling point, remaining until the kettle was removed from the stove. The audible warning gave you a clue to the imminent boiling of the water and the cue to remove it from the stove before it boiled dry.

Its electronic equivalent fails in several ways:
1 it 'whistles' only after the water has boiled and has begun to cool down
2 it does not indicate that the kettle needs to be switched off because it will already have done so itself
3 If you want boiling water you will have to switch the kettle back on and catch it as soon as the whistle starts.

So we now have a complicated, by comparison, fake whistling kettle that has nothing of the engineering simplicity of its original counterpart. It does not give the auditory clues and cues of the original and pretends to be cool.

The link between steam pressure and utility is lost. For me, it simply reinforces the elegance of the original concept. For my children, this realisation is lost and it's OK for electronics to step into a 'magical' role. This perpetuates the disconnect between function and design.

...I'm off to make a cup of coffee!

The other side of the mountain

Its nearly a year since our epic expedition in Tanzania but it's still fresh in my memory, reinforced every time I 'don some kili kit: boots, rucksack, buff (yes, it's brilliant for cold weather on a bike). But time to think of other things and hopefully, take you along with me. This may be stretching your loyalties to this blog a bit far but I'm proposing that it metamorphoses into a debate on 'Beauty in architecture'. This transition is not a revelation incubated in the thin air of Kilimanjaro but more of a growing awareness that we present many of our new buildings in much the same way that the two swindlers 'presented' the concept of the King's new clothes; 'if you can't see it then you must be stupid'. Am I being an old fogey or do I have a point? I recently started one of our office Au (Architect's united but also, cunningly, the chemical symbol for gold!) meetings with an image of a building taken form a recent Building Design magazine (and I should point out that being published in BD is not the ultimate accolade in architecture). This was a new retail and commercial building in a provincial high street where the response by the architect to a very straightforward brief was to be well mannered at ground and first floor levels but to introduced curious splays in the plan at successive floor levels. This has nothing to do with rights of light or the 'planning envelope' and everything to do with giving some excitement and 'interest' into a design that clearly the architect feels embarrassed about. Thankfully my peers concurred and concluded that there may be point here. And I got to thinking, where does beauty come into the argument? Should architecture be mere utility and we should be grateful if the result looks half decent or should we insist in a level of design quality, indeed even beauty? In the several thousand years that we have been building I'm not the first to consider beauty but it does seem time for reappraisal. Is there anything intrinsic in design that might confer beauty or is it entirely subjective? How does proportion, scale, rhythm, symmetry affect beauty? Please let me know your views. Perhaps you can point to a beauty or a horror. You may identify a period that is more likely to have created beautiful buildings but I hope not. Contemporary architecture can deliver both utility and be beautiful but then should we really care? Yours, with my feet firmly on the ground but maybe my head still in the clouds, PaulNick.