{"id":33555,"date":"2025-02-28T12:51:20","date_gmt":"2025-02-28T18:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=33555"},"modified":"2025-02-27T15:51:48","modified_gmt":"2025-02-27T21:51:48","slug":"book-report-minimalist-lofts-2002","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/28\/book-report-minimalist-lofts-2002\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: <i>Minimalist Lofts<\/i> (2002)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/minimalistlofts.jpg\" width=\"200\" alt=\"Book cover\" align=\"right\" hspace=\"4\">So for my first book after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge (and finishing the volume of <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/27\/book-report-a-tale-of-two-cities-a-christmas-carol-the-chimes-by-charles-dickens\/\" target=\"_new\">Dickens<\/a>, I picked up another of the books about lofts which I bought <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/13\/good-book-hunting-saturday-october-12-2024-friends-of-the-christian-county-library-sparta-branch\/\" target=\"_new\">last year in Sparta<\/a> (home of the Trojans).  This is the second of the three I bought that day that I&#8217;ve flipped through (<em><a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2024\/12\/07\/book-report-small-lofts-edited-by-paco-ascensio-2002\/\" target=\"_new\">Small Lofts<\/a><\/em> being the first).<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s basically the same thing.  New York and European lofts mostly done in white and minimalist style (I guess it&#8217;s right there in the title).  Each &#8220;loft&#8221; section has photos, a couple paragraphs, and a floorplan (which is tiny&#8211;I put my beautiful wife&#8217;s hot librarian reading glasses on to look at them sometimes).  But they&#8217;re really all of a piece, and I was very excited when I got a splash of wood on the walls or on the floor just for the cover of it.  Many of them looked like hotel rooms, and not the nice ones&#8211;more like the dorm ones like the recent &#8220;concept&#8221; hotels.  The lofts in this book were larger than in <em>Small Lofts<\/em> (which has &#8220;small&#8221; right in the title, so what did I expect?).  Although I got the sense some were but <em>pied-\u00e0-terre<\/em> (hence the hotel look), some were actual residences&#8211;1990s television critic Joel Siegel&#8217;s loft is in here, so I assume it was his home in New York, but he probably had a country home elsewhere, too.  They&#8217;re not short-term rentals&#8211;the book precedes AirBnB and the lot&#8211;but they&#8217;re pretty sterile looking.  On the other hand, although most of them are described as <em>diaphanous<\/em>, not many of them have spaces described as <em>liminal<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve mentioned that this is definitely not my style.  Perhaps the third of the books, <em>Loft Style<\/em> will match my preferred aesthetic.<\/p>\n<p>At any rate, I&#8217;m looking at the book, written around the turn of the century, and I&#8217;m wondering what the owners of these fine downtownish domiciles would think about how their cities have evolved over the intervening two decades.  You know, if you&#8217;re living in a loft downtown, you&#8217;re probably okay with how things have turned out or have been turning out.  Maybe I would have been, too.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So for my first book after the 2025 Winter Reading Challenge (and finishing the volume of Dickens, I picked up another of the books about lofts which I bought last year in Sparta (home of the Trojans). This is the second of the three I bought that day that I&#8217;ve flipped through (Small Lofts being [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33555","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33555","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33555"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33555\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33556,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33555\/revisions\/33556"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33555"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33555"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33555"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}