Okay but get this… Imagine an AU of Twilight where Edward is a young millionaire and Bella is a new college graduate. Imagine if someone published that and it got, like, extremely popular. And then flash forward a few years later hundreds of copies of it are rotting in every used bookstore and Goodwill in America indefinitely
Sounds like a crappy fanfic tbh. Sounds familiar though? Did someone write this?
Don’t worry, this never happened. Nobody would ever write a CEO!Edward Cullen sex fanfic and publish it. If you thought that happened then it was just a bad dream don’t worry
someone in the notes on that “stop fetishizing old houses” post commented that builders before the 1970s were too concerned with elegance and grandeur, and that was all really just wastefulness
and I think about my apartment, a duplex from 1912, surely built for a middle- or working-class family. spartan, really; quite basic and no-frills. not much to look at from the outside. just like a thousand buildings of similar provenance in the Boston area.
there are flowers molded in the chunky, cast-iron radiators
there’s a design of concentric circles in the carved door-lintels
many buildings of this type have a little stained-glass window somewhere
I think about ornate door hinges in the staff wing of a country estate from 1878. think of patterned wallpaper in a mansion’s kitchen, from 1797. I think about purely functional spaces someone looked at and said, “this needs beauty”
the past was certainly guilty of waste in many ways. but I cannot call making a house more than just a box to live in one of them
Minimalism is just propaganda to make people accept souless surroundings
you know what else is pretty amazing about those older houses from “before the 1970s?” No. Engineered. Lumber.
Gonna put my firefighting hat on and lecture for a minute here. Engineered Lumber is that shit made of wood chips that have been laminated together with glues and epoxies to make new boards out of waste material. That’s a good thing, right?
No. It really is not.
See, there’s other things that “waste material” could go to make or be used as, that do NOT include filling them with toxic chemicals that reduce the burn time of a piece of wood. Also, those pre 70’s boards were real, full, complete boards. So not only do they not off-gas massive quantities of toxic fumes when burning, it takes a lot longer than 2-4 minutes to burn through one. More like 15-20 minutes to burn through one. Also, yeah, there was waste in the way they built those old houses. It was called OVER-ENGINEERING. So when ONE of those boards burned through, you weren’t at risk of losing the entire roofing or flooring or ceiling SYSTEM because the materials to construct a structure have been pared down to the absolute minimum and even less in places.
Roof trusses were nailed together with NAILS, not “gusset plates”. Nails penetrate INCHES into the wood. Gusset plates? ¼ of an inch usually. Know how quick ¼ of an inch can char and cease holding onto the teeth of those gusset plates? I’ll give you a hint: it’s measured in a couple hundred seconds, rather than the tens of minutes a nailed truss gets.
TL;DR? Yeah, there was waste. They used thicker wood and a lot more of it, not even taking into account all the beautiful little embellishments like molded plaster reliefs and tin ceiling panels… But that thicker wood saved lives. It didn’t burn toxic, and it burned for a LOT LONGER before it became unsafe to be in.
Modern house like your typical McMansion? By the time we arrive on a typical structure fire, it’s already too dangerous to enter, because too many of the engineered lumber pieces will have been compromised, thus endangering entire building systems. We’re talking if it’s been burning for 5 minutes or so, 10 at the outside, we KNOW it’s not safe to enter. (If there’s someone in there, we will anyway - risk a lot to save a lot - but we also know to be a thousand times more careful about putting weight anywhere). That 1900 farmhouse that’s been burning for 30 minutes? It’s still plenty strong enough to go in and do what we gotta do. And we don’t have to be paranoid about breathing the smoke in outside, either.
Long story short, not only does minimalism kill the soul, it KILLS REAL PEOPLE’S LIVES.
I’ve covered many structure fires where a 80 year old building will burn for hours or rekindle repeatedly, while a house built in my life time is ashes and cinder in an hour.
