Townsends
Published 29 Aug 20220:00 – Laying the Foundation
4:39 – The Walls Begin
8:22 – Prepping the Fireplace
9:52 – Finishing the Walls
15:58 – The Roof Design
17:04 – Adding the Purlins
20:29 – The Doorframe
21:32 – The Final Purlins
24:00 – Roofing Materials
25:47 – Adding the Bark Shingles
27:37 – Roof Wrap-Up
29:03 – Door Jams
29:47 – Opening the Fireplace
30:58 – Building the Fireplace
36:06 – Adding the Door
37:54 – The First Fire
39:02 – A Winter Safe Haven
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January 1, 2023
Full Cabin Build – 4K Full Length – Townsends Wilderness Homestead
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December 5, 2022
QotD: Open concept house designs
The shift from open concepts demanded by necessity to widespread construction of separate rooms to open concepts demanded by style is relatively recent. Before the 17th century, especially for the poor, “rooms did not have specialized functions”, explains architect Witold Rybczynski in Home: A Short History of an Idea. “Houses were full of people, much more so than today, and privacy was unknown.”
A single room could serve as a study in the morning, a dining room at noon, a living room in the evening, and a bedroom at night. Beds were couches, and couches were beds. Your house was your workspace, and your minimal furniture typically had no fixed arrangement, as it was constantly moved about to accommodate different uses of the only room available. (The French and Italian words for “furniture” still hint at this history: You can see the similarity to “mobile” in meubles and mobilia.)
These open concepts of old were not only motivated by different conceptions of privacy and the expense of building additional walls. They were also required for the lower classes by premodern heating technologies. A single open hearth, or, later, fireplace or stove, could warm one large room but could not do much for other, closed-off spaces. A lord or king could build a heating element into every room, but for the average family, winter warmth required most of life to happen in a single space.
As technology advanced, ideas about privacy changed, and standards of living improved over the last 500 years, ordinary people were increasingly able to move away from an open concept home, and they eagerly did so. “Rooms began to proliferate as wealthy householders discovered the satisfactions of having space to themselves,” notes Bill Bryson in At Home: A Short History of Private Life. Though the transition was slow — toilets long had “multiple seats, for ease of conversation” — rooms were increasingly devoted to particular uses, and those uses were separated from one another as much as resources permitted.
Bonnie Kristian, “Open concept homes are for peasants”, The Week, 2019-05-12.
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September 24, 2022
QotD: The evolution of the domestic corridor
But certain features of a 200 year old apartment remain constant. There are bedrooms. There is a privy (now a flushing toilet). There is a kitchen. There is a living room. And there is a corridor.
This apartment was built around 1820, for the builder of the tenement it’s part of: he was a relatively prosperous Regency working man and his family would have included servants as a matter of course in those days. And where one has servants, one perforce has corridors so that they may move about the dwelling out of sight of the owners. But it was not always so.
Rewind another 200 years and look around a surviving great house, such as Holyrood Palace, also in Edinburgh. Holyrood largely dates to the 16th and 17th century, and reflects the norms of that earlier era, and if you tour it one thing is noteworthy by its absence: corridors. The great houses of that period were laid out as a series of rooms of increasing grandeur, each leading to the next. Splendid wide main doors in the centre of each wall provided access for nobility and people of merit: much smaller, unadorned doors near the corners allowed servants to scuttle unobtrusively around the edges of the court. Staircases ascended through grand halls at the centre of such houses (accessible from doors leading to the main function rooms around the periphery): servants’ areas such as the kitchen, stores, and pantry might boast their own staircases, and the master apartments of a great house had their own stairs leading to privy or ground floor.
But the corridor in its modern, contemporary sense seems to have started out as a narrowing and humbling of the grand halls and assembly rooms of state, reduced in scope to a mere conduit for the workers who kept things running — before, of course, they later became commonplace.
Charles Stross, “Social architecture and the house of tomorrow”, Charlie’s Diary, 2019-04-29.
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August 13, 2022
Mysterious Home Features No Longer Used
Rhetty for History
Published 22 Apr 2022Home designs have changed a lot over the years and so have the features. In this video we will take a look at some of the mysterious features no longer used in new homes. You may run across these if you purchase an old home or you visit one.
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August 8, 2022
QotD: How houses have changed to fit the times
But today telephones have collapsed into our pocket magic mirrors, and TVs are going in two directions — flattening and expanding to fill entire walls of the living room, and simultaneously shrinking to mate with our phones. A not-uncommon aspect of modern luxury TV design is that they’re framed in wood or glass, made to look like a wall-hanging or a painting. The TV is becoming invisible: a visitor from the 1960s or 1970s might look around in bafflement for a while before realizing that the big print in middle of the living room wall is glowing and sometimes changes (when it’s in standby, running a screensaver). Meanwhile, microwave ovens and ready meals and fast food have reduced the need for the dining room and even the kitchen: to cook a family dinner and serve it in a formal dining room is an ostentatious display of temporal wealth, a signal that one has the leisure time (and the appliances, and the storage for ingredients) to practice and perfect the skills required. The middle classes still employ cooks: but we outsource them to timeshare facilities called restaurants. Similarly, without the daily battle to keep soot and dirt at bay, and equipped with tools like vacuum cleaners and detergents, the job of the housemaid has been shrunk to something that can be outsourced to a cleaning service or a couple of hours a day for the householder. So no more cramped servants’ bedrooms.
The very wealthy ostentatiously ape the behaviour of the even richer, who in turn continue the traditions they inherited from their ancestors: traditions rooted in the availability of cheap labour and the non-existence of labour-saving devices. Butlers, cooks, and live-in housemaids signal that one can afford the wage bill and the accommodations of the staff. But for those who can’t quite afford the servants, the watchword seems to be social insulation — like the dining room at the opposite end of the corridor from the kitchen.
The millionaire’s home cinema, in an auditorium of its own, is the middle class TV in the living room, bloated into an experience that insulates its owner from the necessity of rubbing shoulders with members of the public in the cinema. Likewise, the bedroom with en-suite bathroom insulates the occupants from the need to traipse down a corridor through their dwelling and possibly queue at the bathroom door in the middle of the night.
Types of domestic space come and go and sometimes change social and practical function.
The coal cellar is effectively dead in this era of decarbonization and clean energy, as is the chimney stack. Servants’ quarters are a fading memory to all but the 0.1% who focus on imitating the status-signaling behavior of royalty, although they may be repurposed as self-contained apartments for peripheral residents, granny flats or teenager basements. The dining room and the chef’s kitchen are becoming leisure pursuits — although, as humans are very attached to their eating habits, they may take far longer to fade or mutate than the telephone nook in the hallway or the out-house at the end of the back yard.
Likewise, outdoor climate change and indoor climate control are changing our relationship with the window. Windows used to be as large as possible, because daylight lighting was vastly superior to candlelight or oil-lamp. But windows as generally poor insulators, both of sound and heat, and indoor lighting has become vastly more energy efficient in recent years. Shrinking windows and improving insulation (while relying on designed-in ventilation and climate control) drive improvements in the energy efficiency of dwellings and seem to militate against the glass bay and big sash windows of yesteryear.
Charles Stross, “Social architecture and the house of tomorrow”, Charlie’s Diary, 2019-04-29.
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May 27, 2022
Minoru Yamasaki and the Pruitt–Igoe urban housing project
Joseph Kast recounts the story of a post-war government scheme to demolish slums, re-house the slum-dwellers in a massive public housing project and the architect whose career was forever blighted by the failure of the design:
An undated overview of some of the 33 buildings of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in St. Louis, Missouri. Designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki and built in the early 1950s. All had been demolished by 1976.
Uncredited photo from Wikimedia Commons.
Can society be designed? Can an expert engineer alleviate people’s pains and struggles with a good-enough central plan and blueprint?
Minoru Yamasaki thought so.
Yamasaki was one of America’s most well-respected architects in the 20th century and was a member of the school of thought that people’s human nature could be improved (whether those people needed or wanted improving) by a properly planned building surrounding them.
Yamasaki got to test his theory by designing the public housing complex that promised to be a template for all public housing going forward. The complex, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, was made possible by post-war New Deal housing and urban development programs. And like many New Deal initiatives, Pruitt-Igoe was guided by the idea that good intentions, centralized planning, and strong government power would progress society more than protecting people’s rights or personal choices.
Pruitt-Igoe and Yamasaki’s designs were sold as the solution to poverty, crime, and housing in America’s major cities, but within just a few years, the complex would show the dangerous consequences when government planners take away people’s liberties and homes.
As with so many vast schemes to use the government’s power to reshape people’s lives, the hopes of the central planners quickly fell afoul of economic and social realities that the plan never took into account.
St. Louis quickly realized that Pruitt-Igoe was a problem. But it was unclear who, if anyone, could fix it. The federal government, the St. Louis Housing Authority, the state, and the City of St. Louis itself all shared responsibility for the complex. When a problem belongs to everyone, it belongs to no one.
Within five years of its launch, Yamasaki was regularly apologizing for his role in the project. Though the final design of the complex differed from his original vision, he came to question the core assumption behind the project: that people’s lives could be effectively engineered through urban design. He expressed regret for his “deplorable mistakes” with Pruitt-Igoe. By the late 1950s, he was giving eloquent speeches about the “tragedy of housing thousands in exactly look alike cells,” which “certainly does not foster our ideals of human dignity and individualism.”
To the Detroit Free Press, he put it more simply: “Social ills can’t be cured by nice buildings.”
By the early 1970s, the 33 concrete tombstones lining St. Louis’ skyline were a cautionary tale for utopian housing schemes. It was a den of crime and misery, rather than anything anyone could call home. When the decision came to demolish the complex, occupancy was only 10 percent.
The day the demolitions began at Pruitt-Igoe, architectural historian Charles Jencks declared the death of high modernist architecture and its grand assumptions: “It was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom.”
Three towers were demolished in 1972. The last tower finally came down in 1976, leaving nothing of Pruitt-Igoe behind.
The demolition of one of the Pruitt-Igoe buildings, which began in 1972 with the final building demolished in 1976.
Uncredited image from Wikimedia Commons.
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May 18, 2022
For the Canadian government, announcing new programs is far more important than implementing them
It often appears that the Liberal government in Ottawa operates almost exclusively on an “appearance only” basis: whatever the situation, it’s the “optics” that matter the most and actual delivery on announcements barely counts at all. It doesn’t help at all that the media generally has the same set of priorities, because they need things to talk about on news shows and the headlines don’t write themselves in the newspapers — and legacy media’s social media concerns are even more about flash and clickbait than their primary product.
Canada has been quick to announce new initiatives to help Ukrainian refugees, but true to form, very slow to actually make any of these initiatives happen, as Joti Heir discusses in The Line:
Justin Trudeau has always had a strong affinity for the symbolic gesture, especially when the media are around to record it.
It’s almost as though the Canadian federal government is working buttocks-backward when it comes to the Ukrainian refugee file. After Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, helping Ukrainian refugees get to a safe place fast was the biggest concern. However, now, close to three months later, the bigger concern is how to help the refugees that are in Canada or making their way here.
“We are seeing an increasing amount of frustration within our community about the pace with which programs and announcements are being implemented,” says Orest Zakydalsky, senior policy analyst with the Ukrainian Canadian Congress (UCC).
“For example, a month ago, the prime minister announced income support when he co-hosted the [StandWithUkraine] telethon with the European Council president, he announced there would be income support for people coming to Canada. A month later, they’re not available.”
The announcement on April 9 indicated that Ukrainian refugees would be able to access $500 per week for a period of up to six weeks. At the same time, it was also announced that housing support in the form of two-week hotel stays would be provided. Both programs do not appear to have been implemented.
“We appreciate this is a very difficult situation for governments, this is a crisis that emerged very suddenly,” says Zakydalsky.
“On the other side, the other problem is that the people that are in Europe, that have left Ukraine, that are looking to come to Canada, see these announcements and quite reasonably think that when a program is announced it is available.”
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May 4, 2022
Good intentions to rectify problems caused by earlier good intentions in Charleston, South Carolina
Everyone seems to agree that affordable housing is a major need across North America … it certainly is in the Toronto area! In South Carolina, local politicians are doing what they can to make legal changes to encourage more affordable residences to come to market … even when the problem is at least partly caused by earlier attempts to encourage more affordable housing to come to market:
“A converted carriage house, Tradd Street, Charleston, SC” by Spencer Means is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
The City of Charleston is considering new legislation that would deregulate accessory dwelling units in hopes of increasing the supply of affordable housing in the city. Also known as carriage houses or mother-in-law suites, accessory dwelling units are small structures that are built in the backyards of homes, and they can be a great source of affordable housing for those in need.
The initiative, which was proposed by Councilmember Ross Appel two weeks ago, would remove red tape that is currently presenting a significant barrier for building this kind of housing. The ironic part is that the regulation which is primarily to blame for stopping the creation of these units was passed specifically to make these units more accessible.
“The city is looking at taking away a rule that requires these buildings to be affordable for 30 years,” WCSC reports, “which, Appel says, has been an obstacle for developers and homeowners.”
“We don’t want people to be artificially limited in terms of what they can charge,” Appel said. “The affordability requirement was a good-intended measure, but actually, that’s been currently in effect for the past year and a half, and we haven’t had a single accessory dwelling unit permitted since that time.”
Put simply, the affordability requirement backfired big time. Its goal was to make new accessory dwelling units more affordable, but by restricting the price people could charge it actually made them so unprofitable that people just stopped building them altogether. For all practical purposes, new accessory dwelling units might as well have been banned.
The implications are not hard to tease out. With no new accessory dwelling units to live in, people have been forced to bid up other kinds of housing, which has no doubt contributed to soaring housing prices. This is why Appel is eager to repeal this rule. He knows that building more supply is the key to bringing prices down, and he knows that regulations like this have been getting in the way of that process.
There’s a maxim in economics that this story highlights: the solution to high prices is high prices. The reasoning goes as follows. When a good like housing becomes scarce, prices naturally rise. But as prices rise, producers see an opportunity for profit and begin expanding the supply. Then, as additional supply comes to market, prices begin to fall.
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April 24, 2022
Let us bid an unfond farewell to all the “cool city” initiatives
Elizabeth Nickson on a few of the ways that governments’ and pan-national organizations’ love for urban intensification looks to be finally fading away:
“Hong Kong night Panorama” by Andos_pics is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
A decade ago cool cities were all the rage and tax money was pouring into cultural events and buildings to “attract” and densify people because “climate change”. Richard Florida, drawing upon a dubious book about cultural creatives had started his ferocious PR drive towards the mega-city as the apex of modernist civilization, a mixed-race cauldron of creativity and more, an economic engine that would power the world and leave the countryside to the bees and trees. Smart Growth was insinuated into every regulatory structure in order to, just like Captain Picard, make it so.
There were a few oppositional voices. There was me, a very minor chord along with Randal O’Toole, Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin who detailed the risks. But mostly it was all rah rah rah. If we build it they will come. Masses of public money poured in to attract “them”. Country infrastructure was starved, and if broken, left to rust.
And did they come. To all the glamorous cities came the genius thieves of the modern age, oligarchs creating bolt holes for their money and mistresses, looters from Communist regimes, ditto for Africans stealing aid money. Every crime syndicate facing looser immigration rules started branch-plants, laundering money, and seducing the marginal into lives of misery.
Increased levels of crime was one of our objections, but hell on wheels, the devastation in LA, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and Vancouver sure wasn’t foreseen.
Housing affordability would collapse said Wendell Cox, and was he right. In Vancouver, which has been taken over by Chinese mega-crime-syndicates, is the third most expensive city in the world. People whose families founded the city, can’t afford a studio apartment.
Politicians did nothing but take the laundered cash earned by ruining the lives of their citizens, and used it to build casinos so laundering drug money from all over North America would be easier. We Canadians are so helpful. And nice. To everyone, Even child traffickers. Yeah, come here, the scenery is grand and we can take care of all the people you broke with our “free” health care.
I objected to the potential noise being noise sensitive. Also viruses. That was a big one. Courtesy of my ex-husband’s trips to Asia, I picked up a couple viruses which my immune system couldn’t suppress, since I had no built immunity. The indiscriminate mixing, flooding of people overwhelming resources would create health catastrophes I thought, and lo and behold, it looks like WHO is planning for world-wide pandemics as far as the eye can see.
So, like all the other bad ideas of the age, cool cities failed leaving massive massive debt. Everyone with a scrap of money and initiative is plotting to leave the mega cities for the distinctly uncool country these days. Out here we are bracing ourselves for your bad ideas, but we are also ready. We know what you are like. You are as dumb as rocks, and you would destroy the country just like you ruined the cities. You have zero humility. You are a nightmare coming to join the other nightmare visited on our home places, the mass confiscation of our land. The land that feeds you idiots.
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April 18, 2022
Jen Gerson raises the banner of revolution against the Boomergeoisie
In the free-to-read portion of last week’s weekend post from The Line, Jen Gerson channels the anger and frustration of the Millennial sans-culottes (or should that be the sans-maisons?) who are being systematically locked out of the housing market in Canada to protect the paper investments of the Boomer generation:
“Green suburbs” by Pierre Metivier is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0
It’s come to the attention of several of the editors at The Line that some of you Boomers are mad at us. Or, more specifically, you’re mad at co-founder Jen Gerson who popped up a particularly scathing screed about the housing market earlier this week.
To wit:
Our Boomer got his and that’s what matters. We have an entire government apparatus set up to protect that guy. The guy with the money and the guy who votes. The rich-on-paper people are happy, and as long as everybody gets a seat somewhere on this pyramid, then everybody else should be happy too.
We will admit that Gerson didn’t intend this column to come across as an anti-Boomer harangue. She intended it as an anti-government-housing-policy-that-favours-boomers-over-young-people rant, but we can understand why some of our more mature readers took umbrage. We would say we were sorry but … we’re mostly not. A few points:
Firstly, when we talk about macroeconomics and intergenerational equity issues, we are emphatically not talking about individuals. Nobody born between the years 1946 and 1964 is personally, individually morally culpable for the state of the housing market, or the economy, or climate change or any other tragedy of the commons.
[Otherwise, we’d be adopting the tactics of the CRT movement and talking about “Boomer Fragility” and other similar kafkatraps where denial is proof of guilt.]
If you bought a $40,000 house in the ’80s, you couldn’t possibly have known that that purchase would eventually lead to a six-figure real estate portfolio by 2020: you took a risk on the economy as it existed at the time, even struggling through a rough patch of high interest rates, and that risk paid off. No Millennial would have done any differently had we been in your position.
But, let’s be honest, if you are a Canadian Boomer, you were probably born in a country that hadn’t been bombed to the ground just before an historic economic boom so grand that it allowed unprecedented investment in your health, education, development and well being.
That doesn’t mean you didn’t also work hard, and suffer setbacks, as all humans must do over the course of a lifetime. Some of you made bad decisions, and some of you were unlucky, certainly. The bell curve tolls for us all. But you did get to play the game of life during a particularly fortuitous period of history. That period is now ending and the currents of history aren’t going to be as kind to your kids as they were to you (although let’s not kid ourselves. Canadian Millennials and Zers don’t have it so bad in the greater scheme of things, either.) Recognizing this — let’s call it Boomer privilege — doesn’t cost you anything. It doesn’t hurt you. It’s not a personal attack.
What we do find fascinating is the Boomers among our readership who take discussions about intergenerational equity and demographic advantage very, very personally. Forgive us for playing pop psychologist, but it almost feels like some of you park so much of your worth as human beings into your ability to earn wealth that to have someone point out that this wealth accumulation was helped by macroeconomic factors over which you had no control — luck, essentially — seems to be read as an attack on your sense of self, purpose, and identity. (Is this why so many of you struggle to retire? Is there a frisson of guilty conscience at play?)
That is … your issue. Being lucky isn’t an indictment of your character. We assume all of our Line subscribers are genuinely good people who knit little paw mittens for orphaned cats, okay? Otherwise, why else would you be here?
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February 26, 2022
QotD: Taste in decoration
It’s as if a Las Vegas wedding chapel designer had been abducted, brought to Indonesia, and forced, at gun-point, to lower his standards. One half-waits for the Elvis impersonator to come down the staircase.
Conrad, “The Long Weekend”, The Gweilo Diaries, 2004-09-28
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December 7, 2021
QotD: The decline of class distinctions in Britain
This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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November 21, 2021
QotD: Britain’s middle class after WW1
England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc., etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.
But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the Trade Unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real-wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.
George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.
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October 18, 2021
“If Extinction Rebellion had brains, they’d be blockading building sites rather than airports”
In The Critic, Andrew Hunt runs through the invisible environmental costs of the building industry and points out that despite the eye-opening amount of carbon emissions, the buildings we’re putting up everywhere are just not built to stand the test of time:
The Centre national de la danse in Pantin (Seine-Saint-Denis), designed in 1965 by Jacques Kalisz.
Photo by Cinerama14 via Wikimedia Commons.
In the run up to COP26, you can be sure we won’t be spared the preaching about windmills, electric cars and heat pumps, along with pious admonishments against any form of human pleasure, from taking holidays to eating a steak. As always, those in charge will ignore the elephant in the room. The world’s biggest polluter by far is the construction industry. According to the UN, it produces 38 per cent of global emissions. By comparison, airlines produce just 2 per cent. If Extinction Rebellion had brains, they’d be blockading building sites rather than airports.
Politicians seem equally blind. They fetishise house-building, but fail to notice that building even a two-bed house creates 80 tonnes of carbon and uses 150 tonnes of materials – the same amount of landfill as an average household creates over 300 years! By comparison, powering your house produces about 2 tonnes of CO2 per year. Even if you could build a truly net zero home tomorrow (which you can’t), it would take forty years to break even.
A big part of the problem is modern construction materials. Producing concrete (180kg of CO2/tonne) and steel (1.85 tonnes of CO2/tonne!) are two of the most ubiquitous and environmentally destructive industries on the planet. By contrast, sandstone has a carbon footprint of just 77kg/tonne, and wood can be CO2 negative as it locks in carbon. Those old materials last longer as well. There are stone buildings that have been knocking around for more than a millennium — Rome’s Pantheon is 1900 years old. If treated properly, wooden buildings can last almost as long. The world’s oldest inhabited house in the Faroe Islands is 900 years old and built from wood. China’s ornately carved Nanchang Temple has been welcoming Buddhists since the 8th century.
Pre-stressed concrete meanwhile has a lifespan of 50-100 years, meaning many of the first concrete structures have already crumbled into carcinogenic dust.
It’s not just the materials. For buildings to last, we must love them enough to preserve them.
In a little-known study, “Sustainable Build Heritage“, a group of Danish academics looked at why some buildings stand for centuries while others are demolished in as little as a generation. Their conclusion was that buildings that last are made of good materials, are functional and, above all, are beautiful. They acknowledged the timelessness of traditional notions of beauty: how some buildings give us the same gut reactions as they did our ancestors. Copenhagen is of course full of examples — not least her colourful townhouses that have been standing for over two centuries. They have had to be adapted, but they have always been popular places to live.
Closer to home, badly built eyesores are being torn down barely a generation after their construction: tower blocks from the 60s, council offices from the 70s and shopping centres from the 90s. That’s billions of tonnes of fossil fuels and mining degradation ending up as landfill.
Has anything been learnt? The Prime minister’s “Build Back Better” plan is in no way green. Construction can never be green. Is it possible to conceive of a crueller thing to do to future generations than a debt-fuelled frenzy of brutalist carbuncles that will be theirs to demolish? When Greta Thunberg described Build Back Better as “blah-blah-blah”, she was being generous. It’s an environmental catastrophe.
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October 7, 2021
Houses and Herms: Private Life in Classical Athens
Thersites the Historian
Published 6 Oct 2021In this video, I look private life in classical Athens with a focus on material culture.
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