"It was the insubstantial character of American communities that struck
Alexis de Tocqueville.... Houses seemd to be mere square boxes, to be lived
in until luck, opportunity, or failure drove their footloose owners to move
on; people were too restless, it appeared to Tocqueville, to settle in
substantial houses of brick or stone."

Donald L. Miller, _City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making
of America_, in describing Chicago after the introduction / invention of the
balloon frame.

Seems that this problem of impermanence has been with us for some time.
Failure in this context is probably both financial and physical (as in
collapsing houses); perhaps the strain of constantly trying to improve the
nineteenth-century equivalent of vinyl was the cause of both.


-----Original Message-----
From: William B. Rose [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Friday, March 10, 2000 9:55 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: More pro-vinyl siding stuff..


>In the perfect world, there is the perfect vinyl job.  Despite some
>positive aspects of encapsulation, protection and buying time, an
>improper vinyl job may be worse than a bad paint job.

Here's what I dislike about vinyl.

It looks shabby after a while. Noble materials like brick, cedar, tile
roofing, etc. age well. Newer materials like vinyl, painted surfaces,
asphalt shingles get shabby with age. Though there is still some hope for
do-it-yourselfer building maintenance (witness the crowds at Home Depot on
Saturday), for most people moving is easier than maintenance. I believe
that sprawl is directly linked to materials that turn shabby with age, so
that when you're tired of how the house looks, and how the neighborhood
looks, then it is easier to do a spruce-up masking and answer the
seven-year itch with a move to the cul-de-sac. There's a gov't program
called PATH that seeks to address building durability. They are going about
it all wrong. I think they should rate how products look like shit well
before they fail. Vinyl siding is essentially unrepairabile and
unmaintainable. It is thick paint. When it goes bad the only real answer is
new vinyl or else sprawl.

A German colleague told me that Germany uses no vinyl products in building
construction anywhere. He said it had to do with the fact that it cannot be
manufactured without leaving undesirable environmental waste. Don't know.
I'd like to check on that.

I dislike the discourse that is used with residential cladding products.
Moisture gets "trapped". Buildings have to "breathe". This kind of
discourse in product literature reflects the proto-scientific nether world
of residential construction advisors. There are people who can describe
these effects in terms of physical and chemical equilibrium, but the spooky
paranoid stuff wins every time.