(another draft come to fruition—this was pretty much composed and readied last October, and yet it has sat in my drafts for over a year...)

As I was sorting through photos from an autumn trip to Amsterdam, among photos of the canals and Dutch masterworks in the Rijksmuseum, I came across these photos and remembered the delightfully crooked buildings I saw all over Amsterdam. There is something so charming about these very obviously skewed canalhouses, where the windows become more parallelogram than rectangle, and where perpendicularity is for naught. The effect becomes even more severe coupled with the horizontality of the water level of the canals, and it makes me wonder whether these homeowners can even properly slide open their windows!

That these buildings still stand, in all their skiwampus* (*see below for an aside on the etymology of skiwampus, it's riveting!) glory, is illustrative, I think, of the vast disparity between many European and modern American cultural sentiments. I don't know that I've written all that extensively about it on this blog, but I often think and talk about how modern America has placed a premium on convenience at the expense of many other things. It's too much to elaborate now without derailing this architectural note entirely, so perhaps I will take it on as a future post/essay, but suffice it to say that many of the things we Yankees find so charming about old-world cities are those very things that we have innovated out of our modern lifestyles. 

In this photo, the effect is subtle, but the black façade with a gabled roof at mid-height of most of the neighboring buildings juts out precariously into the street-headspace.

SKIWAMPUS: askew, crooked, off-kilter

I'm not sure when this word devolved from catawampus to skiwampus, but the original catawampus is derived from the French, "The crooked sense may at least partly derive from the same source as the "cater" in cater-corner, which some would derive from Middle French catre (“four”)—in reference to four corners/square—from Old French quatre (“four”), from Latin quattuor. This is disputed by others, who suggest a possible Old Norse or other Scandinavian origin. See cater-corner and cater-corner for more." This also would explain the ubiquity of the phrase "kitty-corner," a version just a touch friendlier to American tongues.