The only real problem she identifies is "noise". (I'm not sure what the "bad externalities for the environment" you point to are). You trade the inconvenience of noise (noise when you don't want it) for the convenience of noise (ability to hear/see/be involved with what's going on outside of the kitchen). That's
one unintended consequence (or was it intended?)
>She draws attention to the richer people escaping to their man caves and sculleries, they wouldn't need to do that if their house wasn't a cacophony of noise and smell to begin with.
I don't buy this. All homes have private spaces. Man caves would not go away if we all just closed off our kitchens. It implies that the "man cave" only exists because of the open concept, but for that to be true, it would have to mean that it's replacing the living room, which I think you can hardly conclude from the available evidence. When was an "enclosed" living room a paragon of privacy?
It seems so utterly bizarre to go from "combine kitchen and dining and living room" to "complete and total loss of privacy". Again, we still have private bedrooms and offices, those with more space in their homes have still more separate spaces.
There are implications here that we had to build bigger houses to replace the lost 'private' space, but I hardly see the evidence. The closed-off houses of yore, with their formal dining rooms and walled-off kitchens, were hardly tiny.
>The open floor plan coincides with the decline of cooking and the replacement of hosting with entertaining. Kitchens are fake anyway. Of the families who I know who actually cook meals, who host their friends and relatives as if they were honored guest to be waited upon, none of those prefer an open kitchen.
Again, thin. Plenty of folks have chimed in here who prefer an open concept, and plenty of folks who prefer a closed-off one. Like my own household, we cook every single night, and prefer the open space.
>It's a value shift in what it means to prepare meals, she prefers the old fashioned values, most people no longer do.
This is an unsupported conclusion. Again, it's a quasi-pejorative that making your own meals means you prefer a closed off kitchen. That's just not the case. Different people have different preferences, but this condescending attitude that real people who really cook hate all this new fangled nonsense is just not based in fact.