If Kate Wagner had ever actually practiced architecture she'd know how much bullshit she shovels on the reg.

Let's look at two pictures, shall we? You can find them yourself. Do a google image search of "sweatshop." Ignore the people - I mean, don't ignore them but for purposes of aesthetic comparison, look past them - and focus on the floor. Focus on the windows. Focus on the ceiling.

Great. Got your head wrapped around that? Awesome. Now do a google image search of "trendy loft." Again, ignore the furniture, focus on the floor, the windows, the ceiling.

What do you see?

SoHo became a hip fashionable district because it's where Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground were able to squat thanks to the collapse of the Garment District. The same is true of any American city - everywhere that had tailors and made clothes ate shit between 1960 and 1980. So the space was cheap, the neighborhood was bohemian, and wealthy white boomers were able to colonize Jewish and Spanish enclaves. It was the It Thing and you can extend it to the Continent, too but we're talking Americans here.

Ahhh, but what if you don't have a loft? What if you're renovating a restaurant or a retail space or an office? Well guess what Junior if you strip out the shitty '70s carpet and busted-ass fiberboard drop ceiling you have the exact same fuckin' space. Lofts are what construction looks like before you make things livable. They're loud, they're drafty, they're uncomfortable. So if you've got your fancy-ass restaurant, but you want it to look bohemian, you get to spend an ass-ton of money on the furniture. You get to throw in gobs of exposed ductwork. Skin the walls in gyp so that you don't see the conduit? PERISH THE THOUGHT! buy the special polished conduit so it looks like we did it on purpose!

I used to get two or three of these calls a week - 'cuz, see, I actually practiced as an acoustician instead of just getting the degree. It would be whatever the It Thing restaurant was last month or the month before, noticing that their receipts were down a little and wringing their hands about how their reviews contained the word "loud." We'd go out, look around, and say "you know all that carpet and ceiling tile you ripped out? Put it back." And they wouldn't because that isn't The Look so now we all sit around shouting at each other because the corner coffee shop has the same acoustic profile as a grain silo.

That's why these places are always empty, too - the walls and ceiling are so busy that if you don't put in stark, basic furniture they look like the warehouses they are. And you have to walk around and speak in hushed tones because your every fart reverberates down the hall to the next 22' ceiling converted loft space. They're fundamentally unlivable - I know several people in LA attempting to make them work. But because they photograph quite nicely they shall be all the rage until someone hip sets up shop in an Orange County "mcmansion" at which point we'll all have to deal with Hunter Green and beige cut pile again.