Custom Residential
Christmas Lights for Architects
Christmas lights are far too much work to take seriously. Here are some thoughts on how to blow apart convention and have a great time with crazy Christmas lights on your house or apartment building.
November 29, 2011
I know we all can't believe it, but it is that time of year again. Crazy amounts of turkey? Not really. Black Friday Shopping? Close, but not quite.
Enough Christmas lights to cause an auxiliary nuclear reactor to kick on like in "Christmas Vacation"?
Well, duh!
I'm a complete sucker for Christmas. I love pretty much everything about it and one of the things that I was most excited about when I got my first house was to put up some lights because I never got to as a child. What started off small has become a bit of a crazy obsession. While we took a break this past year because of a zillion other things going on, we're hoping to be back at it this year. We all need more of this in our life.
It got me thinking, though, about architects and Christmas lights. I think that a lot of architects tend to be pretty ordered and controlled and in many ways I think that Christmas lights are the antithesis of this. In searching online for pictures of modern homes with Christmas lights I found very few examples. I've seen very ordered and linear layouts on older homes but not really much at all on modern homes. And then today I saw three trucks driving around with big "we hang up Christmas lights" signs on the side of their truck. It has become another commodity in America and one where it really is about appearances. Architects like things to look good and a bunch of stapled up lights on the side of your beautifully tailored modern home isn't really a 'get ready for the magazine cover' kind of look, is it?
Probably not.
So you know what? Screw 'em.
I've said it before a bunch of times, Architecture and the places we live are supposed to be fun, beautiful, and joyous spaces. If Christmas lights do anything for you (and for some people they don't and that's cool), then get out there and find your creativity! It doesn't matter what kind of house you have or if you have three strands of lights or 300 (or, cough, more than that and a weird menagerie of robotic animals with Christmas lights tired around their metal skeleton that were grabbed at deep discount after Christmas in a North Seattle Target, I'm just saying). I remember one year when we were leaving the house to walk the dogs. We were standing in the front walkway after a rare Seattle snow and the crowd of people taking photos of our house (it happens) asked us to stand out of the way. Of our own house. It may have been the year that the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog called us the best lights on Capitol Hill and then produced a crappy picture of our house (which actually made the honor even better).
You know what? Awesome. We gave some people a bit of joy and after we joked that we lived there we chatted for quite some time and made some new neighborly friends. Our crazy assortment of multi-colored lights and animals may not get me on the cover of any serious magazine but brought some joy to some people that random night.
I want to see more yards like this in my life:
That one was found on this blog: Best House Gallery.
And crazy stuff like this:
And this...
So get out there and enjoy your property whether it is the window of your apartment or the front yard of your beautiful modern masterpiece./p>
And in the meantime, here are two ridiculous photos of the dogs in my life. Just because.
And here's Helo when he was sad we didn't put up lights. Or probably just really sad we made him wear something so stupid.
Naw, I bet it was the lights.
