Century Bungalow Redux

Repair never really ends when a house is over 100, but in 2013 it looks renewed

I launched Century Bungalow in late 2012 as a way of celebrating a wooden house making it through its first century of use intact. I intended it as a record of the house and its designers, Hubert and Alys Savage, that would capture some of its original context that isn't obvious to the eye. The posts are rather speculative in nature, there being so little pictorial evidence of the Savages’ occupancy there - the artifact is really all there is to work from, the house in its landscape setting. No photographs of home or owners that I'm aware of. No images indicating the social life of the house. 

No turned wood displayed

Century Bungalow also looks at broader issues of stewardship that arise with custody of an older building whose character one wishes to respect and that has significance for the community. It considers the challenges and choices of restoration, and the difficulty and necessity of finding appropriate skills for the interventions needed to return the building to a state of sound repair. Heritage stewardship inevitably involves some enrichment of our understanding of the structure – what it is, inherently, and the tradition of which it is part.Without that understanding, it's hard to guide the hands doing the work towards the best choices.

Tall piers: sense of entry

The Savage house is a bungalow, making it part of a larger phenomenon of its time – the first fully modern house type to be supplied in market quantities, offered to city dwellers wanting to reside in attractive homes with all mod cons. A type that spread quickly in cities across North America, and far beyond. A home that was affordable to people who'd never owned one before, because the economics of land and materials made them fantastically cheap for a time. An amount of land that was lavish relative to current building lots, and that would have taken work to keep from looking unkempt. A quality of design that was often architectural, even when bungalows were supplied in subdivision quantities. The Savage bungalow however is also one of a kind, an eclectic blend of British, North American and regional arts-and-crafts influences. And I believe we can even discern Gustav Stickley's influence in its layout and details.

The local bungalow adapted to colonial needs

The bungalow itself enjoys a rich history as a building form (originally a house on one floor, like a cottage, with all the principal rooms under a single massive roof form) travelling far from its origins in Bengal after many regional reworkings as housing stock for imperial administrators; in turn, it was widely dispersed throughout the Commonwealth, further romanticized and evolved, before being recast into the forms we recognize today, in the busy workshop called Los Angeles. LA is where it was minted as America’s first 'dream' home and supplied in subdivision quantities on spec to the masses - for the first time anywhere in history. The Savage bungalow has a lot of California influence in it, but its roots are more mixed than many. For example, the tapered rock pillars supporting the entry verandah are California-style, the enclosed soffits are regional arts-and-crafts, while the fusing of building with landscape reflects British arts-and-crafts thinking. It is a very eclectic house, even for a bungalow!

Bungalow with enclosed soffits: regional feature

One thing I didn’t do is place this house conclusively in relation to the North American phenomenon of the bungalow, which went through phases as camp, park and recreational housing before evolving into a subdivision type supplied in larger quantities in planned developments. That’s partly due to its complexity, which makes it part of the phenomenon, yet exotic. It may be correct to say that its type is actually transitional, and that it offers a glimpse of the bungalow form migrating from rural-recreational housing to something more suburban, yet still retaining a strong rustic feeling. This house was built as an outlier when no other homes were nearby. It draws on both rural and urban bungalow forms and incorporates regional design touches and local materials, yet the product did not exert a design influence on the trends in housing types being supplied on the LA model. As elsewhere, in Victoria the bungalow came finally to be supplied cheek by jowl, gable ends typically facing the road, on streets that came with sidewalks. For a time the stone or brick piers and timbers holding up an emphatically presented verandah roof continued to define a vital look, lending variety to the closely packed structures. And then, all that went the way of the dodo beginning in the great depression.

St. Francis Court, by Sylvanus Marston: note emblematic stone piers

The Savage bungalow would have made an unlikely prototype for subdivision housing on this new model: set cross-wise on its lot, built over a low crawl space (thus lacking a basement), making extensive use of timbering, wood panelling, decoratively styled built-ins, and many other artistic touches. Clearly it is part of the artistic small-house movement, a progressive-era direction favouring quality and detailing of space over volume and extent.  Ultimately it represents one couple’s vision of an arts-and-crafts dwelling, set apart by the fact that one of them actually trained to design just such buildings. The outcome was sufficiently compelling that the couple occupied it happily for a lifetime.

What follows is commentary on the nine posts that comprise Century Bungalow. It aims to convey some of the things learned from researching and writing the blog, and points to issues that have evolved or changed over the course of the centennial year.

1. An arts-and-crafts bungalow at the century mark

Century Bungalow begins in late 2012 with a post commenting on the improbability of wooden houses making it intact through a hundred years today. Chief among the many threats to survival of smaller buildings especially is our own desire to replace the old with the new, to remove the hand of the past and the marks of time and start with a clean slate.

Excavator and a dumpster: house be gone

Today the development potential – read as buildable square footage – of even a modest lot is so great that any older home, depreciated in monetary ‘value’ due to  longevity, is a sitting duck for the wrecking ball. Or put less hyperbolically, for the excavator, because that’s the machine being deployed today to get the job done. A day and a half at most, several large waste bins hauled to the landfill, maybe $5,000 out of pocket – and presto, as heritage advocate Michael Kluckner puts it, the clock is reset to zero.

Heigh ho, to the landfill it goes

Evidently we like resetting the clock to zero. In the course of 2013 I joined a Facebook group called Vancouver Vanishes, which put me in touch with the excavators chewing their way relentlessly across Kitsilano and other historic city neighbourhoods. This site documents the steady disappearance of quality homes, and a quick tally showed at least 14 homes demolished in the first six weeks of 2014, none them dilapidated or really even run down.  Vancouver is passively overseeing the liquidation of its domestic past on a truly vast scale.

 

Context smashed to pieces

On average Vancouver sees 750 houses a year smashed up and dumped in the landfill, according to a 2011city report: “Considering the relative ease in obtaining a demolition permit and building new, it’s small wonder that so many Vancouver homeowners forgo the preservation of an existing house, even one that is in good shape.” By 2012, the number of annual demolitions had risen to 940! Vancouver is simply erasing its past willy nilly, and the same forces are beginning to chew away at Victoria.


Oddly, while my post canvassed the many factors limiting the lifespan of houses, I neglected to mention fire – a deadly enemy of wood frame buildings. This is a surprising oversight, given that I live in a wooden building on a treed site with heavy fuel loading. 

Fuel loading: an ongoing problem in Arcadia

It's doubly surprising inasmuch as I'm well aware of the history of places like San Francisco, hosting enclaves of bungalows in woody surroundings, where sudden fires have devastated whole swaths of historic buildings.

An early outcome of the Centennial Bungalow project was the fact the Saanich heritage committee took seriously my idea that a huge number of homes on the registry would turn one hundred in 2013. 1913 was the crescendo of a long building boom lasting nearly a quarter century. Ken Johnson and the committee members drew up a list of centenarian houses, and made plans to commemorate the occasion with specially cast heritage plaques for each of the century homes. Good job Saanich heritage! Another outcome was that my restoration project received a Hallmark Society award of merit for the quality of work undertaken. The recognition is much appreciated

Sharing our place with Saanich's Heritage Tour

and in my fifth post, Sourcing Craft Skills, I tried to share some of the credit with the skilled craftsmen who have worked on the building over the years. We responded to our award by agreeing to open the house for the annual heritage tour on a Sunday in September, when nearly sixty people arrived by bus for a guided walk-through.

   

2. Town and Country

This post challenged me to try to figure out what Hubert and Alys Savage were doing locating some five kilometres out of town on a lonely track near the edge of a cow pasture. The simple answer is that a new electric Interurban rail line opened the door to a novel way of occupying rural land. It enabled picturesque living far beyond civilization's pale by providing a convenient means of accessing services and work downtown. But that led me to further wonder what such expensive infrastructure was doing way out there in the boonies, and from there, what forces brought about its sudden demise so soon after its construction?

Electric railways brought suburbs to the country

These questions reached back to the automobile's first appearance and the particular way in which the habit of using it affected the shape of North American cities, which did not initially take the form of mass individual ownership, as one might think. When the car first appeared on city streets, the city of the day was still fully engaged in extending itself via suburban enclaves clustered along electric streetcar lines. 

Saanich Interurban line, Prospect Station

Interurban railways vastly amplified the dispersal of these suburban pods across whole regions, and had just come on stream when use of the automobile reached its first critical juncture. This took the shape of the jitney bus, which emerged as a business opportunity in private transport that allowed the enterprising to compete directly with urban railways for clientele. Jitneys became the common precursor to both the modern taxi and the bus. 

A jitney bus from the bungalow era

No one saw that particular development coming, least of all the backers of Interurban passenger railways. Its impact was devastating given the scale of investment needed to bring these advanced electric lines to life. To make economic sense at all, electric Interurbans needed rapidly expanding residential development based on use of their transit service, which would grow both passenger demand and domestic electrical consumption (which they were in the business of selling). What they got instead was cut-throat competition for new passengers, coupled with an utterly unforeseen bust in overall economic growth. And lacking regulations to restrict their appeal, jitneys could simply cruise Interurban station stops plucking passengers by offering cheap fares (a nickel, which is in US slang a jitney) and the advantage of delivery right to the doorstep (a first manifestation of the 'convenience' attributable to automobiles).

City grown out of countryside with streetcars

Even in a small city like Victoria, the appearance of jitneys, followed by the rise of private automobile use on an expanding scale, completely destabilized the economics of electric rail-based transit. It would take another thirty or so years before the trackage of town streetcars was torn out and the electric option fully purged. But beginning with the phenomenon of jitney cabs, the automobile began dominantly modifying urban form through its potential to open dispersed suburbs anywhere roads ran, wherever there was unbuilt land to be developed. 

Ford motor plant, components ready for assembly

The loss of economic vitality was especially hard on little Victoria, coming with the advent of WW1 in 1914. The receding economic tide left Hubert and Alys marooned out in the boonies and, after 1924, without rail passenger service to downtown. Boom times wouldn't return on anything approaching the pre-war scale until the post-WW2 housing boom once again swelled settlement of the suburban city-region. By then Hubert was nearing the end of his time on Grange Road, but the couple had managed to stay put on their picturesque hillside for nearly their whole lifetime. Savage apparently suffered the loss of much of his architectural practice in the immediate post-war doldrums, having to work for some time outside his field. In the end too, they must have adopted the car in order to access their paradisical enclave conveniently, a minor relic of which is a letter from Hubert Savage complaining to Saanich Council that Grange Road was becoming impassable due to potholes (a byproduct of the car)!

3. Outside In: Designing With Nature

Profound sense of prospect from the verandah

I still recall seeing the Savage bungalow for the first time and being struck by the novelty of a house in such a distinctive landscape. Its 'curb appeal' lay in the fact that enough of its original wooded lot remained intact that it continued to appear as pictorial composition, which appealed to me exceptionally, as an admirer of landscapes and as a gardener. At the time I didn’t know anything about picturesque composition, or the arts-and-crafts approach of placing and shaping a building specifically to suit the setting – I only knew that this house seemed profoundly different from any place I’d ever seen in suburbia (confession: I grew up in Waterloo, Ontario, where I had watched the smear of modern suburbia crawl over former farms on the margins of town).

A sense of refuge as well

Outside In is about the conscious connecting of building to surroundings, and how a particular architect, by design, sought to unify structure and landscape in the form of his own residence. And how, by skillfully exploiting both prospect and aspect on his sloping site, he managed to capture sense of both that makes the building special to inhabit to this day. As a result, it feels both secure and removed up here, yet at the same time intimately linked to the surroundings. House and setting feel as one, giving rise to a distinctive sense of place.

Designed to admit light and frame views

Writing now, in February 2014, with spring hinted-at by the flowering of aconites and snowdrops, I continue to marvel at the way the changing daylight reaches into the core of this bungalow. Living here comes with certain constraints, such as a lack of adequate and convenient storage space, but one does inevitably find it uplifting while cozy due to the light brought in from outside, by design. I am well aware that the openness of this house to its immediate surroundings assumes a settled and peaceful society around it.

All mod cons in a romanticized setting

The threat of war may have been stalking the globe when this house was built in 1913, but even so, it wasn’t coming directly to North America, and certainly not to what was by then the staid and genteel small city of Victoria, with its rustic edges. Life in the mainstream was peaceful, and well on its way to becoming convenient. The entire kit of modern appliances, from toasters and telephones to stoves and hot water heaters had suddenly appeared and made for civilized living wherever a house was placed, given the readily available magic of electricity. I think the design and placing of this house out on a rural hillside reflects the era’s romantic optimism about a life where connections to nature are sufficiently mediated that people can enjoy them fully while controlling for any type of discomfort. One exception may have been heating system here in the coldest parts of winter, as the house once depended upon a couple of inefficient fireplaces in the central living rooms, supplemented by a small oil heater for the bedrooms and bathroom. Hubert Savage ultimately corrected that problem, however, by installing powerful Wesix electric space heaters in all of rooms in the early 1950s.

4. A Printed Frieze By Lawson Wood

This post is about an unusual ‘art’ frieze by English graphic artist Lawson Wood banding the living room of the house. It speculates about its meaning and placement. Since writing it, as intimated in the earlier post, I've actually found a conservator to repair several damaged areas of the original work.


Simone Vogel-Horridge was recommended to me by heritage consultant Stuart Stark. She has now done close analysis of the condition of the art work, and drawn some conclusions about its genesis. Likely it's a chromolithograph or a 'chromo' as they were known back in the day (therefore not a watercolour process, as I wrongly surmised when first writing about the frieze) so a paint-on-stone print. It's unusual insofar as bungalow friezes are often repeating patterns rather than scenic depictions containing people and animals. Lawson Wood’s signature block is also a printed device. Another blog reader with an art school background suggested that the frieze might have been made with a technique known as 'pochoir', a printing process using stencils. Further research is needed to tie down the exact process used to make the art object.

I hope that Simone will return soon to repair areas of the frieze that are damaged or have discoloured in reaction to daylight or because of acids leeching from an earlier wallpaper under the existing frieze.This intervention is intended to stabilize the artifact, not to attempt a restoration (which would involve expensive wet-cleaning to remove a layer of wood smoke and tobacco residues). Interestingly, Simone called a few weeks back to relay that she had come across a couple of similarly signed Lawson Wood prints at a local auction house – and that they were versions of the same details on the frieze in our living room, but ones coloured rather less vividly.

While I had no idea what I’d do with these quite bulky prints in a house with so little wallspace for any display (that was the designer's express intention I believe) I allowed myself to put in a low reserve bid at the last moment, and then was surprised to learn I’d acquired them for next to nothing. It appears there's not much traction for Lawson Wood in 2014 Victoria! But, it seems I do have a knack for complicating matters, and that I am a bit of a collector too. But perhaps these prints are better off with someone who appreciates them and has an understanding of how they came about?
  

5. Sourcing Craft Skills for Heritage Restoration

Oldest building in North America: 1642

In June I wrote about the craft skills needed to undertake repair and restoration of buildings like ours. Reading Steven Semes’ The Future of the Past as part of my centennial project only reinforced the value of keeping historic buildings in good nick, rather than having to intervene radically in order to rescue them from neglect. Morris, following Ruskin, counseled that we should carefully tend our monuments, watching for signs of deterioration and moving promptly to fix them as they appear. If repair is executed with the skill and caring of traditional craft knowledge, even wooden buildings can live for a very long time. The Fairbanks house (right, above) was built in 1642 and is thought to be the oldest in North America - today just 28 years shy of four hundred years and still going strong. The de Gannes house in Nova Scotia (photo below) has been continuously inhabited and maintained since 1708.

One of Canada's oldest houses: 1708

But actually finding the person with the skills to do the work remains the principal challenge. My friend and ally Vern Krahn is now semi-retired from carpentry, and there really isn’t a viable replacement for him in sight. I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to talk Vern into one or two more projects here – recently he put a couple of hours into restringing the weights in one of my double-hung sash windows. Typically, he minimized the difficulty of the job, but in actual fact it’s incredibly finicky, and if you don’t know the tricks, your chances of getting it right are between slim and none. I’m left feeling that those of us who care about heritage need to do a lot more to cultivate and ensure the passing on of these old woodworking skills, else we risk a long period of unacceptable options. The picture below shows Vern and I with a gate that he's copied exactly, from a deteriorated original from the vegetable garden on the Savage property.

Vern Krahn and the replacement gate 

6.  A Shed of My Own

A friend who read this essay about the unusual genesis of my eye-catching shed wondered, over beer one day, if I may not have an obsessive-compulsive disorder, or some other form of mental illness. No one, he said very deliberately, goes that far just to create a very small amount of storage capacity. Clearly he found my interest in the details if not outright obsessive, then at least excessive and absolutely beside the point (which is spatial gain).

I accept that the exercise I involved myself in isn't a template for

Seen in between winter and spring

building an everyday garden shed, but I would insist that such an investment of time, money and engagement in design made for a fascinating learning opportunity, and that aesthetically, at least to my own eye, the juice was well worth the squeeze. I lamely offered to lend my friend my copy of Michael Pollan’s autobiographical A Place Of My Own, to inspire his own thinking about small buildings. But he just muttered darkly that renovations were the bane of the middle class, and allowed that he’d had enough of home improvement projects, and if anything absolutely had to be done, it would now be nothing more than the line of least resistance. After that the conversation quickly reverted to sports: how about those Canucks, anyway?

A cottage designed for the Halls

Hubert Savage took a lifelong interest in smaller houses, creating a number of them in the vicinity of his own home, both for the market and for close friends. Several of these remain intact in Strawberry Vale today. The one pictured at left, Stranton Lodge, is now a protected heritage structure within Knockan Hill park - it was saved by citizen initiative from demolition to make way for a parking lot, which was not itself wanted by actual park users (yet flowed from the definition of the park in Saanich's hierarchy). I was fortunate to play a minor role, as a fledgling Saanich Councilor, in helping to get it protected. A little gem of an English arts-and-crafts cottage - a trademark 'S' for Savage visible on its chimney - it's now well-tenanted and kept up. We were told, by the way, by parks staff that there was simply no precedent for keeping a residence within a park. But a little searching around BC soon turned up examples in North Vancouver of heritage houses being maintained in parks, in one case for use as park-keepers housing. Oops! 

 

 

7. Finishing Touches

Sanding a south wall before painting

Ambrose Bierce once amusingly characterized house painting as the art of protecting flat surfaces while exposing them to the insults of the critic. Paint choices often do elicit criticism beyond any statement we were consciously trying to make, perhaps never more so than when, as I did in the seventh post in Century Bungalow, you suggest there are better ways to make those choices when dealing with heritage. Some thought it more virtuous to repaint a house oneself as needed, rather than working through other, more expensive, hands. I respect DIY, am necessarily involved in loads of it, but this doesn't extend to exterior paint jobs. I no longer have the time, agility or inclination to tackle prep work perched on a ladder. It's a massive undertaking, often performed in precarious positions on ladders, and it needs to be done in dry times (here, that means during summer heat). Also, considerable skill goes into a job that's to last and look good for a more than one year. Skip or cheap out on the prep and your coat of paint will be splitting and blistering almost immediately. Most saving on the costs of building and maintaining today (including painting) comes at the expense of quality and longevity of finish, and with a heritage building I feel that's definitely the wrong path. The fact that people now move as often as they do perhaps means that cheap and nasty has fewer implications for the owner than is desirable. I am satisfied with

Caulking and undercoating with primer

having adopted a colour scheme that I think works for the design details of the house, subtly differentiating the main elements of exterior woodwork. To my eye at least, the results seem tasteful. I’m grateful for the advice that got me to this outcome, and for the skilled hands that turned it so deftly from concept to reality. The modern tendency is often to wind up painting an older house white, almost by default, perhaps thinking that white-painting is innocuous enough to sidestep the critics Bierce invokes. But white paint looks, to this eye at least, as though the building has only been undercoated and is perpetually awaiting delivery of its real colour scheme. Also, the details of wooden houses simply disappear when the building is painted neutral white, although paradoxically white objects compete aggressively for the eye's attention in scenery. The yellow-and-black colour scheme we opted for echoes a regional variant of Tudor colourations in the English past – thus is to some extent consistent with the Tudor design elements that I referenced in my next post, and with the Englishness of its designer. 

8. Allusive Architecture

Proportioning of materials mainly allowed to speak for themselves

In October I speculated about a turn-of-the-century direction in house design, involving the expressive use of natural materials coupled with detailing drawn from styles popular in other eras and places. Writing this piece led me to feel there’s more to be said about what sometimes termed ‘progressive’ design, as contrasted with Victorian design (which is busily eclectic) and modern design (where any ornament is considered a sin).

In broad terms, progressive design involved rejecting Victorian excess in favour of more elegant proportioning and greater emphasis on the inherent qualities of natural materials. This was also Gustav Stickley's (The Craftsman) 

A building extended harmoniously

approach to design - removing everything that wasn't essential, exploring the inherent qualities of the building materials themselves, exposing structure frankly for effect. Stickley distributed home plans in The Craftsman magazine that relied on expressed structure, refined proportions, and the texturing of space with natural materials. Mindful of the Ruskinian precept that one should  ornament construction, never construct ornament, Stickley's approach to making architectural sleight-of-hand work visually was by exposing the structure (real or apparent) of the building.

I’ve come to see the bungalow in the arts-and-crafts period as the high-point of progressive design, in effect constituting its halcyon days - one which could profitably be studied for insights as to how we might rescue house design from the barrenness of modernism, the caricatures of post-modernism, or the doodads of Victorian times. Expressive use of the materials of construction and fine proportioning of components is an endlessly fruitful direction that, sadly, is not much explored today. A look at the addition to the colonial bungalow pictured above shows how, by speaking the language of the original, a building can be extended without jarring results.

9. Shelter and Comfort

My last piece of 2014 ramped it up on the topic of water management and comfort, serving as a pretext to skewer starchitects Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier for modernist excesses and ego-maniacal lapses. Researching it enriched my understanding of how modernist thinking altered the way the basic units of suburbia have evolved, both good and bad.

 

Epic fail: carton on end, zero landscape

It also sharpened a sense of grievance over modernism’s arrogant refusal to insist on both function and beauty in its creations. Wright, it must be said, accepted both beauty and function as goals, even though he could miss the mark in both realms at times. But to ideologically reject beauty and then show complete indifference to functionality, as Le Corbusier regularly did, and to refuse to acknowledge the failure but instead just blow it off as creativity – that is monstrous and unforgiveable architectural ego-mania. Especially if you reject the idea that buildings should delight our sense of sight, functional worthiness is all that remains. Reject that and what is left is absolutely nothing at all. As pictured above, modernism is perhaps doing okay with function, but still a dead-end when it comes to form.

Keeping moisture out – of rooms, of walls – has been a primary functional objective since Adam’s first house roofed out the sky. Leaking roofs, damp walls, uncomfortable and unhealthy living environments are unacceptable and unnecessary byproducts of superficial design-arrogance.

Lo-maintenance plastic hedging

Perhaps certain egos are simply 
thumbing their noses at the common run of humans – Le Corbusier certainly did! Today the problems we face derive from modern materials used in such a way as to minimize costs to the builder – so long as that drives development economics, we’ll continue to see damp walls that spore moulds and damage our health. On the other hand, buildings like the one above (complete with lo-maintenance plastic - kid you not - hedging) continue to be chosen by a portion of the well-heeled middle class, indicating that the modernist preference for structures that look like cartons still has cachet. Perhaps you feel very 'now' if you have one?

10. What’s  Next?

Apart from this post, I haven't any more articles for Century Bungalow in planning. I've already focused an awful lot of attention on a small and ultimately obscure bungalow built out in what was once the deep boonies of Victoria. Certainly there are other topics – like House and Garden – that interest me and may yet evoke posts. But the centennial year has run its course and the rationale for celebrating it with a blog has to some extent too. It's been a full and rich year in the life of the house, and for me personally too, and the blog posts certainly contributed to that outcome too. Bottom line, I found it highly rewarding as a project and satisfying as the building's current steward to create a bit of a record. It certainly refined my own thinking about heritage, and it was a creative process in its own right. Maybe, in the end, that’s all that needs to be said.

 

Note: this blog post was edited and updated in February 2016. A further post - Homage To The Craftsman - was added to celebrate the life of my departed friend and master carpenter, Vern Krahn. An introduction to Pat Brown, a former owner of the Savage bungalow, and the ensuing correspondence between us led to a further post in 2016 entitled The Romance of Possibility. There have been other posts since.

Shelter and Comfort

A richly detailed bungalow with broad sheltering eaves repelling the Vancouver rains

 

“The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house. All that cold, cold, wet day.” Dr. Seuss

 

Rain was falling steadily when I began this post, marking Victoria’s autumn shift from drought to damp and serving as a reminder to ensure drainage systems are working properly so that comfort is ensured. Keeping moisture out of houses has been a running challenge since man first bent branches together to roof out a patch of the sky – especially in damper climates like ours. Recently it’s been resurgent, as newly engineered flaws in roof and wall designs let moisture invade cavities that can’t dry out due to plastic vapour barriers. Rot consumes its wooden host with startling speed when walls can't dry out, especially when second-growth timber is involved!

 

 

Rot moves quickly in a new house once wood becomes soaked

 

All building eras have their failings when it comes to managing water, as do some very famous modernist architects. All house types require ongoing attention to water management, adding to the bane of home ownership and affecting how much we have to be involved in order to dwell comfortably. I’m fortunate in that my house, the Hubert Savage bungalow, does a reasonable job of keeping rainfall and moisture out of walls and foundations. For a century-old home, the general conception is fairly sound, meaning that water is successfully managed from roof to ground and then dispersed.

 

A gable roof form is ideal for shedding rainfall and generous eaves protect the walls

 

The challenge for architecture begins with a roof that’s impervious, shedding water and sending it away from the building's foundations. One advantage of early bungalows is the way their roofs are pushed well out over their walls, protecting them from being directly rained upon. These sometimes exaggeratedly broad eaves create a distinctly sheltering look too, a hallmark of the early California style and a feature that’s central to its lasting appeal. A relatively flat, projecting roof defines the one-story building’s style.

 

 

A prairie house by F L Wright sheltered by a projecting roof form with deep eaves

 

For bungalow designers, exaggerating the roof’s form reinforced the impression of the house as a haven or refuge from inclement weather. Generous treatment of the roof imparts a sense of security and coziness, a form-play that Frank Lloyd Wright used to great effect on many of his massive Prairie-style houses. But a house can only provide a cosy haven if it actually delivers a dry interior!

 

A sheltering roof over a bungalow with massive buttresses

 

The umbrella effect of broad roof overhangs shields the walls beneath them from direct rainfall. Any rainfall that does reach the walls is then sealed out by siding that directs it downwards to a device known as a water table – a slab of angled wood that casts any moisture out beyond the foundation. This is a very useful feature, as many California-style bungalows sit close to or even directly upon the land.

 

Gutters, downspouts, water table: water removed

 

Of course, water collected by the roof still has to be removed or it cascades over the edge, splattering on the ground and splashing wet organic matter right back onto the building. This might be alright in drier parts of the country, but here in the Pacific Northwest it would guarantee mossy, damp walls and develop ideal conditions for rot. Here on our wet coast, gutters and downspouts are needed to complete the job of moving rainfall safely away.

 

Backsplash: water and organic matter splashed onto walls from nearby trees

 

The Savage bungalow is somewhat optimistic in the configuration of valleys and gutters used to carry water away from its substantial roof forms. Being cross-gabled, valleys happen where the roof planes intersect, causing heavier flows of water. These valleys discharge into small, narrow gutter runs that are accessed at very sharp angles, which then send water to ground via metal downspouts.

 

Valleys empty into narrow gutters, small diameter downspouts: a vulnerable conception

 

Because this bungalow was built in an oak meadow, there’s a lot of tree litter moving across the roof that tends to collect where valleys and gutters intersect. In a downpour, this debris moves suddenly into the gutter, where it tends to plug the downspouts and cause overflows that run back over the soffits or splash wet soil back against the building.

 

Water collected by valleys overruns even modern gutters in a downpour

 

There are simply no exceptions to the implacable laws of physics: water is either managed systematically downwards to ground and safely dispersed, or it invades crevices and dampens materials. So this system has to be thought out carefully and methodically as part of design in order to protect the integrity of the house and the dryness of the interior, a process many designers continue to struggle with.

 

 

Even stone buildings need joints and seams maintained in order to repel moisture

 

A fashion of the pre-WW1 era was to mate narrow-chanelled wooden gutters with small diameter downspouts, which looks just fine but tended to make plugging at the intake frequent. Periodically then, one finds oneself up on a ladder freeing the downspouts (which is awkward, given the lie of the land, especially if it's at two o'clock in the morning).

 

One bane of home ownership: regular cleaning of gutters

 

Another flaw I would be facing at home but for this building’s fortunate placement high on a rise, is the lack of infrastructure to conduct water away from the end of the downspouts. (Just as well, as perimeter tiles do tend to plug fairly quickly!) At our home on the ridge, much of the water collected at the front of the house is simply shed and left to drain down the slope, which it does quite handily.

Water removed by the slope and a path mimicking its movement

 

At the rear of the house the conception for dispersal is somewhat more sketchy. Here the building sits close to the ground above a minimal crawlspace, placed over a slight hollow that deepens towards its southeast corner. Here is where water wants to pool in a downpour during the rainy season. An effort has been made to drain the area with a pipe aimed down the slope, but unfortunately due to the configuration of bedrock it's set too high to really be effective. Roof water at the back of the house was originally sent into a set of narrow clay perimeter tiles, which of course then clogged quickly with roof debris (don’t they all!). Eventually these were decoupled and water was simply left to spread onto the ground a foot or so from the wall, ensuring some of it would drain back under the building. One of my early interventions was to have a wide-diameter drain (with a clean-out) installed to collect the roof runoff and carry it towards a rock drain where the land slopes away. This helped reduce the tendency of water to pool under the building substantially.

 

A building set directly on the land complicates managing water removal

Another intervention saw replacement of the three worn-out roof layers (two asphalt on top of the original 1913 stained cedar shingles) with a new cedar-shingle roof. Despite their thinness, seasoned cedar shingles are superb rain shedders. And if they’re made of high-grade material and properly installed, they can last a fairly long time. Overall, this system of gabled cedar roofs with cedar gutters and metal downspouts has proven to be a fairly effective and durable method of keeping the house dry (with the help of the bevelled wooden siding, of course), and therefore comfortable to inhabit. On the anniversary of its first century of use, the Savage house shows no signs of any moisture ever having penetrated its ceilings or walls (touch wood!).

 

Houses have always afforded us shelter, but as historian Alan Gowans (The Comfortable House) points out, before 1890 they were rarely designed with creature comforts built-in. Delivering a truly comfortable dwelling became an explicit aim of development with the advent of early C-20 bungalow home. Invading dampness is comfort’s persistent enemy, and certain novel features incorporated into bungalow design did a good job of keeping it out.

 

 

Water tends to pool on flat roofs, affecting the life-span of the membrane

 

Friends of mine who live in a much newer dwelling have not, however, been quite so fortunate. They inhabit a flat-roofed modernist house whose rather drab exterior belies interesting, well-lit interior spaces. But that flat roof has caused no end of trouble, regularly needing emergency attention for unclogging, draining, patching or wholesale membrane-replacement.

 

We are often unaware of water pooling because a flat roof is only glimpsed from above

 

This is not a new problem of flat roofs – it has in fact plagued modernist houses from the outset. It turns out that the public's instinctive preference for gable roofs isn't after all – as the more militant modernists would have us believe - mere sentiment. Gabled (inverted v-shaped) roofs actually make really good engineering sense because their angles cause water to be shed effectively. However, on flat roofs, water is much more prone to hang around, ultimately degrading surfaces and damaging seams.

 


"Like a river down the gutter roars the rain..." Longfellow

 

FLW at the Guggenheim

Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous flat-roofed buildings often had problems with leaks, a fact he once dismissed cavalierly by saying “if the roof doesn’t leak, the architect hasn’t been creative enough”. Le Corbusier, whose first and most famous flat-roofed house was also plagued by leaks, responded with similar arrogance: “Of course it leaks. That's how you know it's a roof.” These two renowned architects worked at opposite ends of the modernist spectrum, Wright being an imaginative romantic who embraced nature (albeit at times rather abstractly), Le Corbusier a clinical minimalist who wanted buildings to be machine-like and ignore nature entirely.

 

It should be said that there are no inherent reasons for buildings to leak, only designs that don’t sufficiently respect the implacable laws of physics. Water invades, through multiple avenues, and its accesses have to be closed off definitively by design, and by careful sealing.

 

 

Fallingwater, placed above the falls, so as to fuse building and feature into a whole

 

Wright’s famous masterpiece, Fallingwater, though still revered architecturally, nonetheless had continuing moisture problems. This derived in part from the building’s eccentric placement directly over a waterfall, a choice Wright made in order to fuse physical feature and dwelling into an organic whole. Aesthetically this arrangement continues to inspire an interest that borders on obsession, attracting over 150,000 visitors annually (4.5-million-plus in total since being opened to the public).

 

 

Dramatic cantilevers project interior and exterior spaces from a solid stone core

 

Wright’s stepped structure is cantilevered out over the stream, capturing the sounds of the falls for its occupants in every room. Bringing the falls inside audibly is one thing. Less desirably, this placement invites them to enter the building as moisture, in the form of humidity and damp rising constantly from their action. This moisture invades the entire building, with unintended negative consequences.

 

Wright used stone, glass, wood and fabric to good effect in Fallingwater's interiors

 

Built for the wealthy Kaufman family of Pittsburgh as a recreational villa, Fallingwater suffered so much from dampness that Kaufman-senior nicknamed it (affectionately) “rising mildew”. The problem of damp invading structure was compounded by engineering flaws within the dramatic cantilevers of reinforced concrete and steel, which allowed Wright to step the building down the landform. The cantilevers break up the massing while gaining space for outdoor living, simultaneously functioning as roofs for the internal spaces beneath them. Unfortunately, there were problems with the load carried by the reinforced concrete, which meant some early sagging and worrisome cracks. These fissures expanded and contracted as humidity levels fluctuated, stressing flashings and opening avenues for moisture to work its way back inside. Kaufman’s son reports opening up areas only to discover sopping wet wood and soaked insulation, fuelling mould and rot.

 

Intimate spaces: severity softened with wood, artifacts

 

And when it rained, things got way worse. Fallingwater actively leaked, even in Kaufman’s treasured study, a fact he informed Wright of with some impatience - who in turn suggested unhelpfully that he should move his chair and replace it with a bucket. Thereafter, Kaufman took to calling Fallingwater a “seven-bucket house”, in reference to the seven buckets needed to catch all the drips any time it rained. It’s said, in fact, that so much moisture collected in one of the hallways that a drain had to be installed just to get rid of it! Despite its flaws the Kaufmans remained deeply attached to their iconic home, able to enjoy the views and vistas through ample windows from its cozy interior while attempting to disregard its moisture challenges as best they could.



"And now the thickened sky like a dark ceiling stood; down rushed the rain impetuous" Milton

Le Corbusier, euro-modernist

With regard to Le Corbusier’s iconic modernist house, which predated Fallingwater by just a few years, things didn’t go nearly so well. Le Corbusier, who veered modernism towards extremism out of sheer contempt for prior building knowledge, systematically neglected water management at his infamous Villa Savoye, the first rendering of his belief that a house should be conceived as “a machine for living in.” Neither a gifted space planner nor concerned in any obvious way with human comfort, Le Corbusier achieved novelty in design by turning his back on the entire history of domestic architecture.

 

Despite a machine-like appearance and cold, sanitized décor that make it feel sealed off from the entire organic world, the flat-roofed Villa Savoye was an utter sieve from the day it was built. Set on stilts to remove it from the earth's dampness, this elevated structure failed to respect the laws of physics obliging one to design and seal all exposed joints properly in order to keep water from infiltrating a structure. In this regard, Villa Savoye was grossly deficient, indeed a total flop that would ultimately be abandoned by the couple it was originally built for! Like Fallingwater, Villa Savoye provided large outdoor spaces that simultaneously served as roofs for rooms beneath, with similar yet even more dire consequences.

 

Villa Savoye: a gigantic appliance or industrial air filtration unit, with strip windows

 

Indeed, so bad was Villa Savoye that its wealthy occupants complained bitterly to the architect about its failings from the outset: “It is raining in the hall, it’s raining on the ramp and the wall of the garage is absolutely soaked [….] it’s still raining in my bathroom, which floods in bad weather, as the water comes in through the skylight.”

 

The ideal bog: a machine for washing in that flooded during rainfalls

 

Le Corbusier felt houses should be isolated as much as possible from the organic ground plane (rather the opposite of arts and crafts thinking) so he set his villa on pipe-stilts that he called ‘pilotis’. Architecturally, this contributed markedly to the building’s ungainly looks, making it appear like some sort of weird armature or a modular appliance of unknown purpose.

 

Austere living spaces lacking natural materials with plate glass interior walls.

 

Shunning contact with the earth does not obviate the need to deal with weather effects – a truth le Corbusier simply chose to ignore (ignoring inconvenient realities seems a hallmark of both his urban planning and his architectural ventures). He introduced vast areas of plate glass, which certainly afforded loads of light inside, but which also (because they were unventilated) caused the house to overheat badly in summer and (because they were uninsulated) caused it to be impossible to heat in winter. Comfort was simply not on his radar.

 

No sense of entry attempted or needed in a machine for living in

 

Le Corbusier’s greatest failing however was his abject disregard of rain effects. It quickly became so uncomfortable living in the house that the owners sent him the following curt note: “After innumerable demands you have finally accepted that this house which you built in 1929 is uninhabitable…. Please render it inhabitable immediately.”

 

Abandoned by its owners, then commandeered by armies, then left to moulder

 

He ignored all of these requests (of course), and shortly thereafter the owners abandoned the building on the grounds that it was defective beyond repair (they were then fleeing the blitz-kreiging Nazis). During the war, it was commandeered for military use and emerged abused and in semi-ruin. Le Corbusier himself would eventually go to bat for his 'prize' dwelling, however, and did succeed in having it designated and restored as a monument to his personal greatness (or folly, depending on your point of view). Would-be modernists and sundry gawkers visit it now in droves every year.

 

The shroud signals a rotting exterior is being replaced

 

This indifference towards the invasive force of water continues in the minimalist camp of modernism to this very day. When contractors fabricate structures with poorly sealed stucco walls, metal framed windows lacking trim boards, roof membranes exposed to all weathers, and eaves that don’t project over walls in buildings whose walls contain vapour barriers that prevent them from drying out – the net result is buildings that develop moulds and begin to rot within a few years. We’ve seen a spate of this in condominiums and apartments over the past two decades here on our wet west coast (the phenomenon is euphemistically described as ‘premature building envelope failure’ or PBEF). We don’t know how many families endure living in mouldy environments as a result of PBEF, but it’s absolutely not a small number.

 

 

The idea of a gable roof is akin to that of an umbrella: a device for shedding water

The goal in all design and building is weather-tightness, though I would argue not air tightness, which bumps one right up against the ideology – oops, theory – of the modern vapour barrier. But that’s another matter for another occasion, perhaps. Fact is, at one hundred years of age, my bungalow remains dry and sound, sans flat roof, untrimmed windows, stucco walls or vapour barriers – and therefore it continues to serve us as a truly 'comfortable' house.

 

They may find dampness funny, but homeowners don't