STUCCO: NOT SO SLAPDASH

The late Malvina Reynolds best expressed the modern image of stucco when she sang about “little boxes made of ticky-tacky”.  In the years since World War II, the mention of stucco has usually prompted snickers, its image cheapened by dreary G.I.  housing and monotonous design made infamous by tracts such as Levittown, New York and Daly City, California--the real-life inspiration for Reynolds’s lyrics.

Little boxes made of ticky tacky?
Actually, stucco is much more durable than wood.

But stucco’s history is long and dignified. The ancient Greeks applied it over rough stone to get a smooth surface that could be decorated, and the Romans mixed it with marble chips to obtain a brilliant interior finish.  The magnificent frescoes of the Renaissance were painted onto a form of wet stucco. It’s still the finish of choice in Mediterranean lands.                 

Stucco is still unmatched for beauty and versatility.  It’s far more durable and fireproof than wood. It can be formed in limitless ways, and the final or “skim” coat can be colored to almost any shade, and will never fade, peel, or need repainting.  

America’s golden age of stucco began with the California Bungalows of the 1920s.  These squat little homes, which were eventually  built from coast to coast, quickly demonstrated the material’s economy and design potential. Contractors found that, unlike siding and shingles, stucco went up quickly and would conform to any shape.  Better yet, stucco could make a humble house look substantial:  By applying it over a hollow wooden framework, for example, a porch column could be given Herculean proportions.  

Not bad for a stucco house, eh? The famed
Hearst Castle at San Simeon, California,
(designed by architect Julia Morgan and
in 1919) made brilliant use of stucco.

The Mediterranean style homes of the thirties also put stucco to good use for mock adobe walls and arches. Its ability to form compound curves made it perfect for the bulging shapes this style demanded.

After World War II, the pressing need to house tens of thousands of returning GIs made home styles turn strictly utilitarian.  Stucco was used because it was cheap, but little attempt was made at creativity.  The dreary legacy of postwar tract housing gave stucco its undeserved reputation as a slapdash, built-on-the-cheap material.

The inspired stucco design of the Bungalow era isn’t lost, however—it’s just dormant.  Here are some ways to capitalize on stucco:

•  Take advantage of its plasticity, or ability to be modeled into any shape.  Stucco can easily form arches, vaults, and even compound curves.  All that’s required is a rough wooden framework that approximates the final shape.  Turrets, serpentine walls, and bulging forms are just a few of the possibilities.

But stucco was just as adaptable to more modest homes,
such as this 1920s-era California Bungalow.
It's still a great choice today.

•  Use stucco to suggest mass and solidity.  Handle it like masonry, not like exterior wallpaper.  Make design features such as columns stout enough to look structural, using the same proportions that stone might require.  The Bungalow builders excelled at making inexpensive wood-framed homes look very massive, and using stucco three-dimensionally was the key to this trick.

•  Use stucco’s many available textures.  If you’re adding onto a home with an unusual stucco texture, find a contractor who’s willing to match it. If you’re building a new house, take a drive through some prewar stucco neighborhoods.  You’ll find a huge variety of textures, each the “signature” of its creator.  You’ll also find a lot of great design ideas. 

THEY DON'T BUILD 'EM LIKE THEY USED TO....THANK HEAVEN

When I hear people say, “They sure don’t build houses like they used to,.”  I think to myself, “Yeah, and it's a good thing, too.”

Granted, the quality of many items in new homes--doors, paint, hardware, and so on--can’t measure up to that of their vintage counterparts. But when it comes to actual structure and infrastructure, there’s no comparison.

This would never happen to a modern house, because
modern framing systems have shear walls.

Starting at the bottom of things--the foundation--modern houses are already way ahead. Prewar foundations had little or no reinforcing steel in them, which is why sticking doors and crooked floors are so common in vintage houses. Thanks to increasingly stringent codes for earthquake safety, modern foundations contain plenty of reinforcement., which has the added benefit of keeping them level and in one piece. 

Building codes also require today’s houses to be much more robustly framed than their predecessors, many of which had shockingly weak structures. Victorian houses, for instance, typically sat atop tottering “cripple walls” that made these already spindly and top-heavy structures even more susceptible to earthquakes, hurricanes, and flood damage. Today, the use of inexpensive metal framing connectors such as joist hangers and tie  straps produce far stronger houses at a very modest additional cost.

Galvanized water pipe was used
through the 1950s. This is what
most of it now looks like inside.

Modern building infrastructure such as plumbing, heating, and electrical systems are also leagues beyond their vintage counterparts. Take plumbing systems, for example--prewar homes typically used rust- and occlusion-prone galvanized steel water piping. Most modern plumbing systems, on the other hand, use durable, trouble-free copper. 

Likewise, houses predating 1940 or so employed knob-and-tube wiring systems with cloth-insulated wires that were embrittled by heat and attractive to rodents. Worse, these systems were protected by simple plug fuses that could be (and often were) circumvented by clueless owners--the infamous “penny in the fusebox” trick that led to many an electrical fire. 

Knob-and tube wiring like this was common from the
1900s until World War II. As you can see,
a lot of it is an accident waiting to happen.

Modern home electrical systems, on the other hand, use circuit breakers that can’t be tampered with. They also provide ample electrical capacity and plenty of outlets, doing away with the tangles of dangerous extension cords so ubiquitous in old houses. 

And speaking of fires, it’s no accident that fewer deadly fires occur in newer homes than in older ones. Rather, it’s because today’s building codes require interlinked smoke detectors, and many codes now also require fire sprinklers as well. Together, these improvements have dramatically reduced the incidence of fatal house fires.

These old furnaces were cool to look at, but
were dismally inefficient. They can't hold
a candle to today's modern forced air units.

Lastly, and perhaps most apparent to us in day to day life, new houses are far and away more comfortable and energy efficient than their old-time predecessors. Although we like to think of homes from the “good old days” as being warm and snug,  most lacked wall and attic insulation to conserve heat and instead relied on huge, wasteful gas furnaces to keep them warm. 

Thanks to modern energy efficiency standards, however, gone are the days of huge furnaces that lost over half of their heat energy up the chimney or by radiation from poorly-insulated ductwork. Today’s high-efficency furnaces, coupled with other features such as mandatory floor, wall, and ceiling insulation, mean modern houses are many times more energy-efficient than grandma’s cottage was.

Given all these improvements, next time you hear someone say, “They don’t build houses like they used to,” tell them they’re absolutely right.

PAINTING: No Yahoos Allowed

A friend of mine is an expert plaster and drywall finisher with almost fifty years in the trade. Not long ago, he knocked himself out on a very labor-intensive plastering job. Instead of kudos, though, he got a complaint from the owner, who said:

You can get away with cutting corners in some areas
of construction. Painting isn't one of them.

“Jimmy, they painted the walls, but I’m really unhappy with the way they came out.”

“Who did the painting?” asked my friend the plasterer.

“A couple of college students," replied the owner.

Tradespeople tell these kinds of horror stories all the time. Besides being entertaining, they can give remodelers an object lesson in the things that really matter: You can scrimp a little here and there, but don’t ever cut corners on the finishes that meet the eye—be they on the floor, the walls, the ceiling, or the roof. 

Yahoo paint work.

As it happens, my plasterer friend went back to see what the owner was complaining about, and his heart sank: The college kids--who probably had four hours of painting experience between them—had ruined all his painstaking plasterwork in one gloppy coat. Although my friend did manage to undo all this damage, it cost the owner a lot more than he’d “saved” by hiring cheapo painters. Next time, my friend advised him, he’d do better to hire a pro and not a couple of yahoos on summer break.

Sound advice, of course. The trouble is, for most remodelers, those final, all-important finish phases happen late in the job, at just about the same time their money is running out. This makes it excruciatingly tempting to hire low-bid, quick-and-dirty practitioners who’ll ruin all the hard work done before them. 

More yahoo paint work. Notice the paint on the knob trim
 It takes about two minutes to remove the lockset
 from a door,  and that's what these
clowns should have done.

Don’t fall into this trap. Instead, set aside an ironclad, untouchable reserve for the very best professional finish work you can reasonably afford. This is especially critical if you tend to be an impulsive buyer, and are always tempted to spend “just a little bit more” on unplanned extras along the way. It’s this kind of “feature creep” that exhausts budgets at just the time the finish work comes around. 

Your reserve for finishes should ensure that you can afford decent quality stucco, roofing, hardwood flooring, and carpet, but above all, it should provide for top-quality painting. Why? Because, of all the aforementioned trades, painting is the only one that homeowners wrongly assume any fool can do. Well, any fool can paint, all right, but the results will speak for themselves. 

Beyond yahoo. Two little screws, twenty seconds,
and they could have done the job right.

It’s perfectly reasonable to shop for bargains on materials such as lumber, pipe, electrical wire, and so on. You may even be able to cut costs by using salvaged material or providing sweat equity on framing, plumbing, or what have you. As long as these invisible portions of the job are safe and adequate, no one will ever know or care that you didn’t pay top dollar for them. 

Not so with finishes. Slapdash work will be right there, staring you in the face every morning. Save where you will, but don’t save on the surfaces that meet the eye. 

DATING YOUR HOUSE—BY ITS DOORS

Typical late-Victorian "Eastlake"
style door point to a
construction date around 1890

There’s a little parlor trick I like to pull when I’m doing architectural consulting at people’s homes. I ask them what year their house was built, and before they can answer, I quickly stop them with a raised hand. 

“No, don’t tell me,” I insist. After a brief show of Kreskin-like concentration, I give them my guess with a flourish. I seldom miss the construction date by more than five years. Often, I’m within two years, and occasionally I’m right on the money. The look of astonishment on the homeowners’ faces is always gratifying.

Like most parlor tricks, this one is easy to explain. It relies on a simple and rather prosaic yardstick found in every house: Its doors. Unless the place has gone through one of those ghastly home-improvement-emporium “renovations”—in which case the owners would not bother calling me in the first place—the doors are usually original to the house, offering a clear indication of when the place was built. 

Craftsman-era door,
suggesting a construction
date between 1900 and
1925 or so.

Right off the bat, a quick glance at the door panel arrangement will usually get you within ten or fifteen years of the construction date. For example, very tall doors with pairs of narrow vertical panels are a dead giveaway to Victorian era work, yielding a construction date between 1850 and 1900. This broad range can be further narrowed using another test: The more ornate the doors, the later in the nineteenth century the house was built. 

   Interior doors with a mortise lock
like this one (also seen in the
above two images) usually
indicate a house predating 1925 or so.

Doors with five stacked horizontal panels, on the other hand, indicate a Craftsman era pedigree--roughly 1900 to 1925. Those with a single large recessed panel indicate a vintage between 1925 and 1950 or so. Doors with no panels at all--so-called flush or slab doors--point to a modernist-era construction date between the early 1950s and 1980. Molded hardboard doors imitating various traditional panel arrangements point to a construction date between 1985 and the present.

The type of lockset that’s installed in a door furnishes other clues. If the door has a mortise lock (evidenced by a tall, skinny plate in the door edge and doorknobs fastened to a square shaft by setscrews), the house almost certainly predates 1925, although such locks were still used in basement rooms and garages for another decade or two.

"Cylindrical" locksets like this one
invariably postdate 1920,
the year they were introduced.
Knob styles vary widely, and offer
another clue to construction date.
This particular style was very popular
in the 1960s.

On the other hand, doors with just a small rectangular latch plate in the door edge invariably mean the house postdates 1920--the year when Walter Schlage invented the easier-to-install cylindrical lockset that quickly drove the mortise lock off the market. 

Doorknobs, too, have a tale to tell. Mortise locksets with ornate metal or glass knobs suggest late nineteenth century construction dates, while those with plain white, brown or black glass knobs are more typical of early twentieth century houses. Cylindrical locksets with knobs resembling giant glass jewels easily peg a home’s construction date between 1920 and 1935. 

Even hinges can provide clues. Ornate hinges with spiky ornamental pins typify Victorian-era houses. Hinges with plain leaves and ball-tipped pins hark from the Craftsman era, but remained popular through the Depression. Hinges with plain, flat-tipped pins indicate houses postdating World War II, while those with round-cornered plates are a hallmark of mass-produced prehung doors, putting a home’s construction date after 1970.

REMODELING MYTHS

After 30 years in architecture, I still hear the same tired old wives tales circulated about remodeling. It’s amazing how long it can take to stamp out a wrong-headed concept. Here are some of my un-favorites:

Replacement windows: As far as energy savings goes,
they're basically a waste of money.

1. Bathrooms should be planned back to back to save cost. Rubbish. This chestnut goes way back, and probably stems from the practice of placing apartment house bathrooms back to back. You’re not building apartments, however, so the meager savings in plumbing cost--something on the order of a few hundred dollars--doesn’t justify straitjacketing your floor plan with a bathroom arrangement you don’t like.

2.  The best way to improve your home’s energy efficiency is by installing new double-glazed windows. Poppycock. In most houses, windows represent a very small fraction of the total heat loss. By far the most heat is lost through ceilings, so attic insulation is the best place to put your energy-efficiency dollars. Once that’s done, consider installing a higher-efficiency furnace and ductwork. Replacing your windows is far down the list of cost-effective energy improvements.

This year's fad: Grey.
Chasing the "latest" color trends is a great way
 to make your house look dated.

3. Remodeling is the perfect chance to choose finishes in the latest colors. Balderdash. Unless you’re aiming for a remodel that’ll be painfully outdated in five years or so, avoid “current” colors like the plague. Choose colors because you like them, not because you read about them in some trendoid home magazine.

4. Skylights are the best way to get daylight into your house. Malarkey. Skylights are a good last resort to improve daylighting, but adding windows should always be your first choice. Why? Because

Skylight: They're beautiful, but
they can't do what a window can.

they’re passive solar devices naturally attuned to the seasons, letting in more low-angle sunlight in winter when you want it, and excluding it in summer when you don’t. Skylights do just the reverse. They also look out of place on many styles of homes, particularly those built before World War II.

5. Point-of-use (“tankless”) water heaters are the most efficient way to heat water. Maybe, maybe not. Tankless units can be just the thing for certain applications, such as bathrooms that are remote from the water heater. But their efficiency is typically oversold, with efficiency ratings based on rarified laboratory conditions that are seldom reflected in actual installations. They’re also complex and subject to erratic response under low flow conditions. What’s more, if saving space isn’t your primary concern, there are a number of conventional storage water heaters available with efficiencies in the mid-nineties, some at surprisingly reasonable cost. 

Recessed can lights:
Beware the Swiss Cheese ceiling.

6. Recessed “can” lights are the best way to modernize a home’s lighting. Piffle. Recessed lighting is useful for very specific purposes--highlighting permanent objects or architectural features, for example--but they do a lousy job of general illumination. This is because cans are inherently directional, creating a pool of light beneath them, rather than diffusing light throughout the room. They’re also terribly overused, leading to the notorious “swiss cheese ceiling” effect seen in so many remodeled houses. Be sparing in your use of recessed cans--and if you have a house predating World War II, think twice about using them at all. They’re literally a glaring anachronism in most older homes.

CHINA'S ENVIRONMENTALISM: Who's Being Sarcastic?

The Chinese are environmental cretins, right? It’s a common perception, one that our own moribund leaders are only too happy to encourage. After all, the worse China’s environmental policies look, the better ours look. 

 Compact fluorescent
bulbs were already
common in China
when I first visited
in 1994.

The only problem is, this stereotype is baloney. As inconceivable as it seems to Americans, our government’s dawdling on environmental issues and its susceptibility to industry lobbies has in fact put China’s environmental efforts on track to surpass our own.

I first visited China in 1994, when the nation was already booming, but well before it seemed a likely rival for the omnipotent United States. Yet even at that time, the Chinese were taking the first steps toward saving energy, if not sustainable development. All commercial buildings and most homes were already illuminated by compact fluorescent bulbs, while many new apartment complexes boasted conspicuous arrays of solar hot water boosters on their roofs. 

Rooftop solar panels on a relatively
clear day in China.

As an ancient mercantile culture, the Chinese rationale behind embracing these innovations was not so much philosophical as characteristically pragmatic: If you could heat water with sunlight instead of expensive electricity, or triple your light output using a more efficient bulb, what was not to like?

Every visit I’ve made to China since then has brought an increased awareness in the importance of sustainable growth, both from the leaders and the ordinary Zhou on the street. And rather than just lots of feel-good talk, there is action. China’s status as the world’s workshop uniquely positions it to adopt the cutting-edge products it makes for others. Hence, for example, China’s highways, urban streets, and traffic signals are already lit by state-of-the-art light emitting diode technology, which is only now slowly making its way into America’s budget-strained infrastructure. 

LED street lighting is already
widespread in Chinese cities.
(These are made by ICAM
Industrial, China's largest
manufacturer of LEDs)

While American cities struggle just to make ends meet, Chinese city governments flush with cash are instead engaged in a race to see who can create the greenest new civic buildings. Architectural competitions for civic work now heavily stress sustainable design solutions, and it’s safe to say that, with the central government’s mandate for green building firmly in place, the commercial sector will soon follow.

Also ubiquitous on Chinese streets are electric bicycles and scooters, which remain virtually unknown in the United States. What’s more, on my last visit, I came across a local beat cop driving a new Chinese-built electric vehicle--another sign that the erstwhile Middle Kingdom takes electric cars much more seriously than Americans do. 

Nanjing's glittering Xinjiekou subway station. In the last decade,
China has been building state-of-the-art subway systems like mad.

Still, it’s perfectly obvious to the central government that China can never sustain American rates of car ownership (about eight cars for every ten people), no matter how prosperous its citizens may become. This makes the low Chinese rate of car ownership, which is currently about one-tenth that of the United States, no longer seems like a sign of lagging development but rather a blessing in disguise. In an effort to stem a future deluge of private cars, the Chinese have been busily building or upgrading public transit systems--and quickly: In my home-away-from-home in Suzhou, an entire subway system has been built from scratch in the span of three years. 

Ultimately, the success of our generation’s environmental policies will be judged not on their platitudes, but on their outcomes. And while America has been talking, China has been acting.

CHINA: A MATTER OF QUALITY

Having spent a fair amount of time in China over the past twenty years, and having witnessed its spectacular rise, I’ve always been puzzled that this remarkable nation still cares so little about the quality of the things it makes. Today, almost forty years after the Opening in 1978, China has yet to address this shortcoming: Everything from dime store trinkets to high rise buildings continue to show an astonishing indifference to detail. 

 The Chinese don't really sweat the details—
even when they're counterfeiting.

As a Westerner steeped in the Protestant work ethic, I’ve written thousands of words and done much hand-wringing about Chinese quality over the years, wondering when China would follow in Japan’s footsteps—when it would finally pull off a miraculous reversal in its attitude toward quality, as Japan did in the decades after World War II. It hasn’t happened, and from what I can see, it probably won’t.

All of which has gotten me to wondering if it’s my own Western concept of quality that’s become obsolete. Perhaps making things last has become pointless in a world that changes so quickly. 

It wouldn’t be the first time there’s been a fundamental shift in the prevailing idea of what constitutes quality: America’s own early history furnishes a parallel. For obvious reasons, the relatively crude buildings and manufactured goods of the young United States couldn’t compare to those of the Old World—one reason wealthy Americans in the early 18th century still insisted on importing their building materials, hardware, and dishes from Great Britain. 

The Brits were once like us—used to leading.
But by 1876, when this American-built
Corliss steam engine wowed the crowds
at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia
they suddenly realized that those
crude and clumsy Yanks were passing them by.

Naturally enough, the British remained more than a little condescending toward their renegade former colony, whose building and manufacturing efforts fell far below English standards. This was, after all, an England whose houses were built with cut stone and massive oak timbers, whose cabinets used fine hardwoods in places you couldn’t even see, and whose steam engines were routinely polished, painted, and pinstriped in gold.  

Yet by the time the Yanks showed off their latest products at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876, it began to dawn on the Brits that America’s mass produced products, as coarse as they appeared, were overtaking their own. This passing of the torch was symbolized by the towering Corliss steam engine that formed the fair’s iconic centerpiece, but it was apparent in all kinds of exhibits, from to stoves to clocks to furniture.   

From the British viewpoint, nothing had changed. They had scrupulously upheld their accustomed standards of quality, steadfastly insisting on the very finest workmanship even when--like those gilded steam engines--it had no conceivable purpose. The eventual result of this shift in perception was an end to Britain’s industrial preeminence, and the beginning of our own.

The Chinese-built Geely, now being
exported to the United States.
Will it even matter if it's a piece of junk?

It’s likewise possible that the world is once again changing, this time in a way that’s unfamiliar to our Western frame of reference. Perhaps China builds quickly, cheaply, and with indifferent quality because the pace of change no longer demands permanence. 

Then again, perhaps the point is moot. China comprises nearly one-fifth of the world’s population and serves, by our own admission, as “America’s workshop”. Its attitude to quality--like it or not--will inevitably affect our own.