DEAR BARRY: My neighbor has a storage shed that is built against the side of my garage. It encroaches onto my property and prevents me from painting the garage wall. I’d like him to remove it, but he refuses because it was there before I purchased the property two years ago. The city building department sent him a notice, but he won’t tear it down. What should I do? –George

DEAR GEORGE: The oppositional purposes of neighbors are chief sources of so many difficulties in life. But your concerns are practical, not philosophical, so let’s examine the circumstances and possible solutions.

Clearly, your neighbor is trespassing where he has no permission or reasonable rights. On the other hand, you purchased an existing problem, and the number of years it has existed could have a significant legal bearing on the case. For clarification in this regard, you should consult an attorney. The city building department, however, seems to have rendered an opinion in this regard, but there remains the question of whether the department will exert any degree of enforcement.

The best time to have addressed this situation was while you were purchasing the property. Had you considered the matter at that time, you might have specified removal of the shed as a condition of the sale. That would have obliged the sellers and their agent to negotiate a solution with the neighbor. But that was then.

A possible solution for today is to formally request that the building department enforce its order to remove the shed.

If that doesn’t work, here is a more creative approach: Begin by building a fence along the property line, and connect it to both sides of the shed. Next, install a door in the wall of your garage, providing direct entry into the shed. The neighbor cannot rightfully complain because it is your garage. If you choose to install a door in the wall of your garage, that is strictly your business.

Then, construct a partition wall inside the shed, on your side of the property line, of course. Now you have a private storage closet on the side of your garage. If you decide to remove the closet, the remaining portion of the neighbor’s shed will be attached to the fence, not to your garage. But don’t try this without first consulting an attorney.

DEAR BARRY: I have a simple question. Is a home inspection a legal requirement when a home is sold, or are home inspections optional for homebuyers? –Sandi

DEAR SANDI: No states have made home inspections a legal requirement. Professional property inspections are available to homebuyers at their own discretion, as an elective means of consumer protection and as a proactive way for buyers to beware.

(Although the Federal Housing Administration does not require home inspections, properties that do not meet FHA’s minimum health, safety and soundness conditions may be flagged by the appraiser for repair before the FHA will insure a loan).

When performed by a truly qualified inspector, a home inspection protects buyers from negative surprises after the sale. But a thorough inspection benefits the sellers and agents as well, by reducing the likelihood of conflicts after the sale. A state requirement to compel home inspections should not be necessary. Buyers should have the common sense and prudence to do this for themselves.

To write to Barry Stone, please visit him on the Web at www.housedetective.com.

   

Le Corbusier: a flawed brand of architecture

 

“Architecture,” pronounced the famed modern architect Le Corbusier, “is the learned game, correct and magnificent, of forms assembled in the light.”

And what a preposterous statement that is, even coming from this supremely dogmatic thinker. Astonishingly, Le Corbusier’s definition manages to overlook the single operative purpose of every proper work of architecture in history: that of enclosing interior volume, or in plain words, providing shelter.

The “learned game” Le Corbusier describes is much more akin to sculpture than to architecture, though no one seemed willing to call the great man’s bluff at the time.

If Le Corbusier’s bizarre definition managed to neglect architecture’s central purpose, we shouldn’t be too surprised. Of all the great modernists — and despite his many addled theoretical excursions, he was certainly that — his works have proven the most susceptible to the critical lens of retrospect.

He was perhaps the greatest modernist to view architecture as a social tonic, and the architect as a social engineer dispatched to change human behavior rather than to accommodate it.

“To create architecture is to put in order,” Le Corbusier further declared, betraying a notable nonchalance for the human variable. “Put what in order? Function and objects.”

Yet the Corbusian style, with its fastidious organization and near-supernatural purity of form, proved to be an aesthetic ideal whose underpinnings seldom held up under the messy rigor of real-life use.

The wealthy owners of his villas naturally deferred to his aesthetic no matter the cost, but the less heavily vested users of his buildings — the very bourgeoisie he hoped to educate and rescue from their traditional lifestyles — did not always react so favorably.

Time after time, Le Corbusier’s public works were famously subverted by their users. In 1925, he built his first large-scale project at Pessac in France, a pristine and flawlessly proportioned low-cost housing development, only to find the residents chafing under his efforts to put their “function and objects” in order.

Over the next 40 years, Pessac residents variously grafted on traditional pitched roofs, turned terraces into extra bedrooms, and hung planter boxes from windows, all in an effort to personalize the project’s pointed anonymity.

If Pessac’s shortcomings seem relatively innocuous, though, consider Le Corbusier’s contemporary Plan Voisin, in which he proposed to raze a good portion of Paris and replace it with a phalanx of identical concrete high-rises.

Nor did this brand of thinking change to any great extent later in his career. His Unite d’Habitation, completed at Marseilles in 1952, once again proffers the ideal of the gridded concrete tower, this time with a purported rooftop “garden” entirely paved over in concrete and relieved only by a number of abstract concrete sculptures.

And almost 30 years after Pessac, the architect was still exasperated to find residents outfitting his pristine interiors with wrought-iron chandeliers and Louis XIV furniture.

Also begun in 1952 was the crown jewel of Le Corbusier’s career, his complex of government buildings in Chandigarh, India. Here he once again utilized coarsely formed concrete buildings on a monstrous scale, seemingly oblivious to the physical and cultural context.

And here, once again, he had played his “learned game … of forms assembled in the light,” while neglecting the human beings for whom it was created.

Read Arrol Gellner’s blog at arrolgellner.blogspot.com, or follow him on Twitter: @ArrolGellner.

   

  

The financial world is gradually relaxing from immediate fears of Japan and the Middle East. As stocks recover some of their fright losses, bonds are as usual the reverse: the 10-year Treasury note is back up to 3.4 percent (from 3.55 percent pre-panic, and 3.15 percent in panic mode); mortgages didn’t move much and are still hanging in just below 5 percent.

The failure of these markets to snap all the way back is a reasonable reflection of new economic data. February orders for durable goods surprised on the far downside: Expected to rise 1.1 percent, they fell 0.9 percent, and there was no distortion by volatile sectors.

Housing data are numbing. Sales of existing homes were forecast to fall 4.5 percent in February, but dumped 9.6 percent, the median sales price down to the $156,100 last seen in 2002.

The guesstimate for sales of new homes was a rise of 1 percent, and instead they collapsed 16.9 percent from January, falling 15 percent year-over-year to an annual rate of 250,000 units, the lowest since records began.

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